Indigenous Pathways

Arizona is home to over 280,000 Native Americans, the third highest concentration of Indigenous people in the United States. It also has the largest concentration of Native American farms with Indigenous farmers and ranchers making up 57% of the agricultural operations in Arizona.

Indigenous Pathways highlights the farmers, educators, chefs, and Indigenous people working to renew Native traditions, reclaim food sovereignty, and revitalize the health of their communities through farming, foraging, cooking, teaching, medicine, and ceremony.

Indigenous Farmers & Growers in Arizona

Traditional Indigenous agriculture centers around a holistic, cyclical approach that works with the climate, environment, land, animals, and resources. Indigenous people protect 80% of global diversity on only 25% of the earth’s land with less than 5% of the world’s population.

Indigenous agricultural knowledge teaches to live within the environmental context that surrounds us and is grounded in Indigenous belief systems that have been replicated and carried on over millennia.

This involves raising crops to fit the environment, rather than manipulating the environment to fit the crops. Everything is interrelated. 

AZ Indigenous Educators and Chefs - Food as Medicine

Food is medicine and as medicine, it can heal. Reconnecting with ancestral foods can help heal trauma and diseases that resulted from forced separation from traditional foods and knowledge. Eating sacred foods consumed by elders can nourish a community, both physically as well as spiritually.

Teaching others about traditional and ancestral foods is integral to food sovereignty and revitalizing cultural and community health.