Improving Health Outcomes Through Investigations of Wabanaki Food Systems in Maine

Wabanaki ancestral lands historically provided abundant resources, allowing Wabanaki people to rely exclusively on hunting, fishing, and gathering for all their subsistence needs. However, as their sacred hunting and fishing grounds were lost to colonization, the Wabanaki people lost access to their traditional foods, which has had devastating impacts on the communities' health and well-being. Without access to traditional foods like fiddleheads, corn, beans, squash, wild rice, fish, and many others, the Wabanaki people experienced a surge in many nutrition-related health problems, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart-disease, which have only increased exponentially with time. This Community Research Project (CRP) seeks to improve these health outcomes for Wabanaki people by upscaling the Wabanaki Mobile Food Pantry (WMFP), an existing program that delivers fresh and traditional foods to the Tribal communities. The CRP is grounded in the understanding that food sovereignty is fundamental to achieving and sustaining the health and well-being of Wabanaki communities. The upscaled WMFP aims to increase community access to fresh, traditional, or locally sourced foods, improve community perceptions of food pantries, support cultural connection, promote sustainable, culturally relevant food systems, and increase Tribal members' knowledge and self-efficacy surrounding the cultivation, preparation, and preservation of traditional foods.