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The Desert Rain Café's Pricky Pear Grilled Chicken Sandwich with chips and cholla de gallo salsa.Reznet photo by Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan

Indigenous Café Combats Diabetes

By Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan

SELLS, Ariz.—In the heart of the Tohono O'odham Nation, where its inhabitants have the highest rate of Type 2 Diabetes in the world, Loretta Oden and a team of Tohono O'odham cooks gather in the kitchen of the Desert Rain Café.

They are preparing meals from traditional Tohono O'odham foods that they hope will stop the rising number of diabetics in the community.

"I always thought diabetes was bad in Oklahoma until I came to the Tohono O'odham Reservation," Oden said.

Prior to the 1960s, the Tohono O'odham people did not suffer from Type 2 Diabetes. Today, more than 50 percent of all Tohono O'odham adults have adult-onset (Type 2) diabetes. Children as young as 6 years old have been known to suffer from the disease, according to Tohono O'odham Community Action.

TOCA, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a healthy, culturally vital and sustainable Tohono O'odham community, has teamed up with Oden to open the café.

Much More Than a Restaurant

Tristan Reader, co-founder and co-director of TOCA, said the organization wanted to get the healthy traditional foods out to the community and came up with the idea of having a café.

"We aren't opening a restaurant," Reader said. "We are promoting traditional foods."

The traditional foods of the Tohono O'odham people are squash, tepary beans, cholla buds, prickly pear cactus, saguaro fruit and corn. Readers said in the 1930s people were able to get 1.6 million pounds of tepary beans, but by 1999 people could get only 100 pounds.

This encouraged TOCA to start reproducing the traditional foods on farms and harvesting it in different communities, he said.

Re-establishing the Crops

"You can't eat what you can't get," Reader said. "We needed to re-grow and reproduce traditional foods to keep it alive."

When the time came to start working on the café, none of the TOCA staff members had any experience in the restaurant business. Reader said TOCA asked Loretta Oden to be the host chef because she has the experience of opening a restaurant and could train staff in the kitchen.

Oden, a 5-foot, blue-eyed Potawatomi woman with long snow-white hair and an Oklahoma accent, agreed and has worked closely with TOCA for six years. She has helped with projects and events such as the Celebration of Basketry and Native Foods Festival. She said when TOCA asked her to help she was unsure of the location but was optimistic.

"I thought to myself, a café in Sells, Ariz.," she said. "Who is going to come to a café in such an isolated place? But by golly, we've made it work."

Oden said the mission of the café has three parts. The first part is each dish has to contain at least one traditional food. The second part is the food is prepared as the Tohono O'odham people have prepared it for many generations, and sometimes in new ways. In either method, it is done with the utmost respect for the food that I'itoi, the Tohono O'odham creator, provided to sustain the people of the desert, Reader said.

"There isn't a deep fryer in the kitchen and everything is grilled, baked, roasted or sautéed," Oden said.

The third part is letting people know that traditional foods are healthy foods. Oden said the traditional foods help regulate blood sugar levels and control diabetes.

Bean Is a Super Sweetener

The tepary beans that are grown on the Tohono O'odham reservation are high in protein compared to other beans and yet people don't even know it, she said. The syrup from the agave is used as a sweetener which is four times sweeter than sugar but is very low on the glycemic level, she said. Oden also uses mesquite flour for baked goods and olive oil for cooking.

"When we say traditional food we mean food that's been around for a hundred years," Reader said. "Popovers (also known as frybread) don't count."

As of August 2008 diabetes on the Tohono O'odham Nation has risen from 19.5 percent to 19.8 percent, said Jennie Becenti, manager of Healthy O'odham People Promotion. However, the percentage does not reflect the entire nation but only 3,000 registered diabetics within the HOPP program.

"Even though it is rising, the percent of diabetics is at a steady line right now vs. before, when it was skyrocketing," Becenti said.

Film Project Opened Eyes to Indigenous Foods

HOPP is a program on the reservation designed to reiterate traditional foods and promote healthy living to all ages. Becenti said the resources are there and the Tohono O'odham people just need to utilize them. "The Nation is really fortunate to have the café," she said. "It is something we have waited so long for and now it is finally here."

Oden first became familiar with the Tohono O'odham traditional food when she was filming for the Native American Cultural and Culinary Adventure Seasoned with Spirit series called, "A Native Cook's Journey." For one of the episodes she stayed on the Tohono O'odham Reservation and learned how to harvest and make saguaro fruit syrup.

"It was great cooking and sleeping outside," she said. "I am now fascinated with saguaros and how much they resemble people."

Oden said she did not plan to be a cook and got into the restaurant business by accident. After divorcing her husband, Oden and her oldest son moved to Santa Fe, N.M., and decided to open a restaurant called The Corn Dance Café.

The Call to Cook Was Natural

"I had to make a living and thought to myself, what do I know how to do best? Cook," she said.

Oden said she strictly used foods indigenous to America such as wild rice, bison, quail, corn, beans and squash. She did not serve chicken or meat and 90 percent of the time she used very little dairy. The café ended up landing Oden on Barbara Pool Fenzl's PBS series, "Savor the Southwest," Food Network's "Cooking Live" and "Cooking Live-Primetime" with Sara Moulton as well as on "In Food Today." She also has had numerous feature articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler.

In 2003, after 10 years, Oden closed the Corn Dance Café and hit the road to educate as many people as she could about cooking healthy traditional foods. She said she is blessed to be part of the Desert Rain Café and learns something new every day.

"It is really fun and exciting to see what we can do with all these different foods," she said. "It even brings back memories from when I was young."

"We Needed a Change"

The food also brings back childhood memories for Beverly Harris, a Tohono O'odham social worker. She said the smell of the corn reminds her of when it was harvest time and her family would roast the corn.

"I think the café is wonderful," Harris said. "We (Tohono O'odham people) needed a change."

The café is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Bashas Plaza. The café focuses on breakfast, lunch and take-out, but plans to extend hours to include dinner. The café also plans to start running daily specials and putting nutritional information on the menu.

The café serves meals such as grilled chicken glazed in prickly pear and chile sauce, mesquite smoothie, sautéed squash enchiladas baked with green salsa and cheese and fire roasted ears of corn. Prices for drinks and meals range from $1.95 to $7.95.

More Than Just Frybread and Burritos

Anna Martinez, a Tohono O'odham, said the community in Sells needed something different from frybread and bean burritos. She plans to try everything on the menu once.

"I think the price for the food is reasonable, especially since you'd have to drive 50 miles to Tucson to get a good meal."

The café not only serves traditional food but also buys it from anyone who brings it into the café. She said TOCA has been buying cholla buds lately.

She said young people in their 20s and 30s are going and picking the traditional foods with their children, which she thinks is great.

Good for the Soul and Spirit to Get Dirty

"I grew up in a time when everyone had a garden," she said. "I think it is good for the soul and spirit to get your hands and feet dirty."

Marilyn Tiokasin works in the Sells area and said the café is a very nice establishment and that the servers are very polite. She said that before the opening of the café there was not a place to sit and have lunch. She would either have to eat in her car or office.

"I had no idea they would make these types of dishes," Tiokasin said. "If you want to eat healthy, go to the café."

Oden said she eventually wants to bid for the school lunch program on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. She said if she is able to promote healthy food to the youth then hopefully she can prevent youths from getting diabetes.

"Every little step my path seems to take me is fulfilling," Oden said. "It has been a grand adventure for the second half of my life."

Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan, Tohono O'odham, is studying journalism at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is a graduate of the Freedom Forum's 2008 American Indian Journalism Institute. Last summer, she interned as a reporter at The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M.

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