Training and Support for Grassroots Organizations

Dear Supporter,

It has been a crazy year, to put it mildly, and despite all the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been a busy year for Village Earth. All of our affiliates have been responding to the pandemic in their own ways whether it’s the Knife Chief Community Bison Project delivering meals and supplies to elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Human and Hope Association providing food assistance to families in Cambodia, or the Rio Beni Foundation providing direct medical relief to communities in Bolivia.

On top of this, we at Village Earth have been busy launching our newest initiative, The Native Lands Advocacy Project (NLAP). The NLAP is an extension of the work Village Earth has been doing on the Pine Ridge Reservation for over 20 years through the Lakota Lands Recovery Project, in particular, using GIS mapping technology and data science to aid in tribal planning and raise awareness about the disparities that exist on Native lands. Very few people realize that Native Americans capture only 12.89% of the market value of agricultural products sold from Reservation lands where non-natives capture 87.11%. This disparity is an outgrowth of policies enacted as part of the General Allotment Act of 1887 and has crippled native agriculture for generations. The agricultural disparity on Native Lands is also at the root of the endemic poverty and food insecurity found on reservations throughout the United States.

The reason this injustice has been able to persist for so long is because the government has failed to adequately publish data on Native Agriculture. While the government has collected detailed agriculture data for every county in the United States since 1840 they did not start reporting it for Native Lands until 2007. There numerous other datasets that the government has failed to make public including data on land leases by non-native farmers and ranchers, land area totals, etc. We feel this was a complete abrogation of their responsibility as trustee over native lands because it makes it virtually impossible to assess their performance or hold them accountable.

Starting in 2019, Village Earth set-out to change this! With support from the Native run, Indian Land Tenure Foundation, we developed the Native Land Information System (NLIS) to serve as a web-based clearinghouse for native land information and data. Using GIS and advanced data visualizations, the NLIS. We also created a new project within Village Earth called the Native Lands Advocacy Project (NLAP) to serve as a permanent organization to maintain and update the NLIS and work with Tribes and Native organizations on specific campaigns. Visit the NLIS at https://nativeland.info

In the past two years we have filed three Freedom of Information Act requests to acquire data from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and have traveled to the National Archives in Washington D.C. in an to attempt to piece together 140 years of government land, leasing and agriculture data. We have also aggregated national datasets from the USDA and NRCS creating the most complete source of data on native lands and agriculture ever. The NLIS is also focused on highlighting what is working in native agriculture and that is why we created the first ever Native Food Sovereignty Index which combines 20 indicators that measure a range of priorities identified by native communities to make their food system more sustainable, just, and culturally appropriate.

Thus far, the NLIS has been well received in Indian County with an enthusiastic responses from Native American groups such as Intertribal Agriculture Council, Native American Agriculture Fund, NDN Collective, and Oceti Sakowin Treaty Council. In the coming year, and with your support, we hope to develop a Tribal Planning Portal on the NLIS to assist Tribes and native organizations to leverage our data to develop Integrated Resource Management Plans (IRMPs), Agriculture Resource Management Plans (ARMPs), Forest Resource Management Plans (FRMPs) etc. These plans are required by the Federal Government in order for Tribes to take over management of their natural resources and agriculture—a big step towards promoting self-determination and food sovereignty.

This holiday season, we hope you will choose to support Village Earth and our Global Affiliates with a tax-deductible contribution.