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 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

friends, culture, and the earth. Their health was greatly improved by being outside with a supportive group of staff and peers.”

Farm & Food Access The food grown at the farm is distributed to the Native community through: an Indigenous Food Share CSA (a community supported agriculture model); at local farmers markets; wholesale to Native chefs, restaurants, and schools; to youth and families at programs and events; and donations to community partners. In response to the pandemic, we increased donations, added a delivery option, and delivered meals and fresh produce to youth and families in our community. Since 2020, the farm has produced 15.85 tons of vegetables, including over 12,000 pounds of food that was donated to partner organizations. Through our farm expansion efforts, we are strengthening our resilience in the face of future crises and developing a system that is not reliant on a global food chain vulnerable to disruption. By training more farmers we will increase the supply of food for the Indigenous Food Network and other markets serving Native community members.

Seed Stewardship Dream of Wild Health is home to a large number of Indigenous seeds with gifts of seeds pouring in from Native seed keepers, farmers, and community members across the country. Our seed team cares for and protects the seeds to reconnect this generation to an Indigenous diet, ensure they continue to nourish our future generations, and to re-matriate (or to return) seeds to their tribal homes, to ensure the sustainability of this work into the future. Seeds are treated as living relatives and are not to be sold. Increasingly, the seeds must be actively maintained and grown out more frequently in order to adapt the seeds to the changing climate.

Community Outreach, Events and Workshops Year-round our Outreach staff is building community, teaching about and advocating for food sovereignty, hosting workshops and large events, and supporting other organizations in our community. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Each year, we connect with over 12,500 people through our outreach programs, including 1,700 youth and a majority Native people. Our community outreach may include sampling Indigenous recipes from food grown at the farm, leading a foraging walk or bringing foraged foods into local high schools, teaching about saving Indigenous seeds or making hominy, or presenting on our model for food systems change through the Indigenous Food Network. In 2019 we hosted our 3rd annual Indigenous Food Tasting, drawing over 700 people and featuring five Indigenous chefs from around the Midwest. Our Youth Leaders participate in this work and gain leadership skills through outreach, public speaking, and hosting demonstrations.

Network Leadership Working with partners is vital to the success of Dream of Wild Health programs as we rely on the skills and expertise of other organizations to complement the work we do in our community. Our network building and coalition leadership work helps us influence long-term systems change in order to improve the overall health of the Native community. For example, Dream of Wild Health is the lead organizer for the Upper Midwest Indigenous Seed Keepers Network. We work with tribes and organizations to develop training on growing, protecting, preserving, and sharing our Indigenous seeds. DWH is the lead organizer of the Indigenous Food Network, whose mission is to rebuild sovereign food systems within the intertribal Native community through collaboration. The long-term goals of the network include increasing access to healthier and more culturally-relevant foods for the urban Native community, improving economic opportunity among Native food producers, chefs and restaurants, cultivating community connectedness, and changing the systems and policies that lead to continuing inequities. Our youth leaders have worked with local Indigenous chefs through our Chef Internship program where they gain food preparation skills, nutrition, and knowledge of Indigenous foods. The network has gained significant momentum and has expanded to the larger Native communities beyond the Twin Cities. To learn more about Dream of Wild Health, follow us on social media or visit dreamofwildhealth.org.

Neely M. Snyder (St. Croix Ojibwe), Executive Director. She can be reached at: 612-874-4200 (ext. 115), or neely@dreamofwildhealth.org.