South Dakota's Tatanka Ki Owetu, the Renewal AgrAbility Project received a joint grant from CoBank and Farm Credit Services to augment its Tribal Local Foods and AgrAbility programs on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Recently, year two of this grant was awarded and the project will be featured in CoBank's upcoming annual corporate giving report. This grant has allowed staff to expand their AgrAbility support technician team by two part-time positions.
Tatanka Ki Owetu AgrAbility team on Pine Ridge has been busy in 2021 and remains so in the first week of 2022. The team never stopped working in the field. Due to persistent, intergenerational poverty, access to technology and the internet wasn't an answer during Covid-19 for the team. Switching to webinars and Zoom meetings doesn't work when people don't have access. To meet the needs, the team focused on one-on-one direct education and assistance with clients at their home sites and meeting with clients outdoors, socially-distanced, and masked. With the onset of winter weather and temperatures, the team has now switched to phone check-ins and information sharing, yet also remains in the field, fabricating and installing low-cost assistive technology for their clients. Fabrication takes places either at the two partnering incubator-hubs which are the assistive-technology centers on Pine Ridge, or directly at the clients' sites. The focus on the prevention of secondary injuries only increases in the winter months as snow, ice, and sub-zero temperatures blanket the region. When temperatures recently dropped below zero with even harsher wind-chill factors of 35 below, the team chipped in to help transport badly needed hay to a double-amputee veteran's site. As mentioned above, the team has grown, and recruitment remains strong halfway into year four of the AgrAbility grant. The team will be attending the 2nd Annual Lakota Food Summit in Rapid City, SD, in February and attending the NTW in Madison, WI, in March.
Article of Interest: Please check out the article "COVID-19 in Indigenous Communities: The Lived Experiences of Extension Educators" by Hartmann, K. (2021) from the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education, 28(1). It does a good job of outlining the challenges facing tribal communities in the United States during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Submitted by Jason Schoch