KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
Kodiak Archipelago community members share experiences and advice at meet and greet. Kayla Desroches/KMXT
Kayla Desroches/KMXT
Four communities in the Kodiak Archipelago will receive grant money to help them establish hoop houses in their villages. The United States Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Native Americans granted The Kodiak Archipelago Leadership Institute, or KALI, $1.2 million dollars for the three-year project. It’s meant to build food security by making produce and poultry available locally in the four sites under the grant.
The participating villages are Larsen Bay with a population of about 90, Old Harbor with a population of over 200, Ouzinkie with a population of almost 190, and Port Lions with a population of 180.
KMXT’s Kayla Desroches dropped by a meet and greet at the Best Western Kodiak Inn on Thursday to talk with community representatives who had flown into the city of Kodiak for training.
The meet and greet marks the end of a day and half-long training where community members learned about their responsibilities as participants in the project along with other information.
Melissa Berns, Vice Chair of the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor, provided insight from her community’s experiences at the meeting. She says Old Harbor tried six years ago to maintain a hoop house with students working the plots during the school year, but the students lost interest when summer arrived.
Old Harbor has been more successful with the hoop house they began three years ago with a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. Berns says the way the garden works is that groups sign up to manage a plot. This year, they have about 18 families taking part in addition to community organizations.
She says the garden is a way to supplement their diets.
“We do have a store, but it does not sell fresh produce, and so our only other choice would be importing from Safeway, and as you know it takes quite some time to get that shipped in from down south or wherever the source may be, but it takes quite a while for it to get here to Kodiak, and then by the time we get it out to Old Harbor, weather permitting and maybe sitting here and rotting for a few days, and we get very poor quality produce.”
Growing foods locally solves a lot of those issues, but Berns advises the other communities who are newer to the process to be aware that the hoop houses take a lot of time and work.
“Just to build the hoop house itself, then to build the beds then to fill them and have the proper soil in there, and so you may not be growing as quickly as you want to, but not get frustrated or have that slow down your momentum, because eventually it will happen and it will flourish. And this year we just had a phenomenal year with our growing, and it took us those two years to build up to where we are today.”
Dorinda Kewan is the grants coordinator at the Native Village of Port Lions and says her community started a greenhouse years ago, but it didn’t take off due to lack of interest.
She thinks this hoop house will be different because it’ll be a business endeavor and be large enough to provide food for the entire community.
Kewan says part of the research they’ll do at the beginning of the grant process is to find out what the community would like to grow.
“We are able to make a pretty good guess about the things that we know people use the most – a lot of root vegetables, fresh salad greens, things like that. And that also we know will grow well on the island and that we won’t have to have a real steep learning curve to get those to be productive, and then things like fruits and other things that may be more difficult to do, we can look at later on and decide if we want to tackle those or not.”
She says if Port Lions produces surplus crops, they could sell that to the city of Kodiak.
Dan Clarion, Mayor of Ouzinkie, says the gardening initiative is a way to increase the revenue in the participating villages – not only through selling to the city, but also to each other.
“What we foresee is each community growing a specific crop in their hoop houses. A large number of that specific crop so that we can then crop share between all the villages, and every community could have their own local farmers market, and each community could have their own employees and farm hands and stuff, teaching the young kids that are coming up how to provide for theirselves.”
And being able to grow, harvest, and prepare your own vegetables means you’re more likely to eat them. Mary Nelson is the president of the Larsen Bay Tribal Council and says accessibility also contributes to how often kids eat vegetables. She gives her son as an example.
“You know, he’ll eat a salad once in a while just ‘cause whenever we would get it in, we would kinda ration it just ‘cause you don’t get as much and what you get you want to make sure you use and not waste it, so that’s a really big concern, so we only bring so much, so they only got so much, so I think that the little ones, if you train them and raise them in that manner, that they will eat healthier.”
As vegetables become more readily available, they could become a bigger staple in local diets in addition to providing a source of income, which is a development the villages may see over the next three years.
