Indigenous Health
Dream of Wild Health Originally founded in 1998 as Peta Wakan Tipi, a garden program to recover and preserve the relationship between Native people and the land, Dream of Wild Health (DWH) is one of the longest continually operating Native American organizations in the Twin Cities. The organization has grown into a 30-acre regenerative farm, native fruit orchard, and pollinator meadow in Hugo, Minnesota. DWH has an office along the American Indian Cultural Corridor in Minneapolis and works with youth and families across the Twin Cities. Minneapolis is home to one of the largest concentrations of urban Native Americans in the U.S. The Corridor is along Franklin Avenue in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis and is the heart of this community. It is a place where Native Americans live, work, and access cultural-specific services. The mission of Dream of Wild Health is to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways. We do this by: creating culturally-based opportunities for youth employment, entrepreneurship and leadership; increasing access to indigenous foods through farm production, sales and distribution; and community organizing and outreach around reclaiming cultural traditions, healthy indigenous food, cooking skills, and policy and systems change. Our programs impact over
By Neely M. Snyder
16
Spring 2022
12,000 people annually from our youngest community members to our oldest. DWH is one of the leaders of a groundswell movement to reclaim Indigenous sovereignty through food. The Vision of DWH is a place for our relatives to gather and rebuild a relationship with the land. It is a place of learning, celebration, belonging, and community. The farm is a model of cultural recovery put into practice. The farm is a safe place for children where we cherish and protect the seeds of our ancestors and where we keep our values alive. Dream of Wild Health considers the estimated 60,000 Native American people living in the Twin Cities our direct community, but we also work regionally and nationally, across tribes and cultures. The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest urban Native American populations in the country and can be considered the center of our primary geographic area, including people representing tribes across the country with the majority from Minnesota’s two dominant tribes, Dakota and Ojibwe, living in the Twin Cities and surrounding areas.
At Dream of Wild Health, we often state that we “grow seeds and leaders.” At the core of our work is a commitment to educating our youth to rebuild an indigenous relationship with the land and our food. Dream of Wild Health Programs Include:
Native Youth Education and Leadership Program Our youth programs provide culturally-based lessons for youth, ages 8-18. The farm provides a safe and creative learning environment where they learn about regenerative gardening, healthy foods and nutrition, and Native traditions while gaining employment and leadership skills. Programs provide a spectrum of learning opportunities from introductory to leadership roles, where multi-year commitments to the program advances youth development and engagement. Our Youth Leaders program is a year-round leadership development program where youth lead advocacy, outreach, and training, through an Indigenous lens. One parent recently shared, “I can’t stress how important Dream of Wild Health was...DWH was what [their youth] needed to connect to
MetroDoctors
The Journal of the Twin Cities Medical Society
