(Fort Washakie, WY) – After four years of planning, the Sweetgrass Food Lodge held its grand opening Wednesday at the Eastern Shoshone Tribal Health building, giving the Wind River Reservation its first brick-and-mortar community food center.
The word “pantry” doesn’t appear anywhere on the door, and that was intentional.
“We want to call them food lodges instead of food pantries,” said Odessa Oldham, executive director of the Sweetgrass Food Lodge. “We want it to be a place where people can come, they feel welcome. They can get their nutrition, but also their healthcare… Eventually we will even have things like cooking classes.”
The location does a lot of that work already, being inside the tribal health building, and next door to the gym where diabetes programs are held, and local folks can pump iron or run on the treadmill.
“Now people not only can come here for their healthcare, clinic checkups, or their programs, they can work out, and they can hopefully get some food,” Oldham said.
The building itself was constructed with COVID relief funds and came with a walk-in refrigerator. That side of the building was always intended for food, Oldham said, and the tribal health team fenced off the space so Sweetgrass could move in. Dave Myers, executive director of the Eastern Shoshone Tribal Health Department, has also been part of the effort from the beginning.
The groundwork started in 2020, when Jacqueline White began running mobile food pantry distributions on the reservation for the Food Bank of Wyoming during the pandemic. One mobile pantry quickly became two. Along the way, White started holding community stakeholder meetings.
“Stakeholder group meetings happened when we contacted people that were like-minded, that were interested in helping talk about developing a food pantry, or talking about how we could do food in the community, what their food access, food sovereignty, and all those things,” White said. “And so from that stakeholders group, that’s where we developed our board.”
The board is now a group of Native women running the organization. Oldham is the executive director, Denyse Ute is the vice president, Erica Yarber, and Joy Allen, alongside White.
“They are some strong indigenous women that know how to get things done,” White said. “They’re knowledgeable, and they’re just beautiful women that come together for the greater good of the community.”
The shape of the lodge came from the community too. Through the Culturally Responsive Food Initiative, or CRFI, the team surveyed Shoshone and Arapaho residents and asked them directly which foods they actually eat. That survey became a culturally relevant foods list and the mobile pantries now order from it. A photo voice project led by Ashley Newall, whose images hang on easels in the new lodge, gathered the visions of community members who White calls the first designers of the place.
“We didn’t want to be like your typical food pantry, where you go there, and they’re like, here’s a box of food, here you go,” White said. “And have that food be wasted, because indigenous people, we eat different.”
Getting the nonprofit off the ground came down to a chance conversation. White was cooking a traditional meal at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative camp when Michael Roberts, president of First Nations Development Institute, happened to be visiting. He asked what she needed. She said $600 to cover the IRS nonprofit filing. The check that arrived was for $3,000, which covered the 501(c)(3), the state fees and a mailbox.
The result is a room with real food in it for the local community. A semi truck parked over at the Frank B. Wise Business Center on opening day carried 40,000 pounds of potatoes from Idaho, a collaboration with the Farm to School program and Wyoming Hunger Initiative. The lodge moved another 40,000 pounds at the end of May and expects to hit 80,000 pounds of potatoes by the end of August. Some are bagged in 50 pound sacks, some broken down smaller, and next week the team plans drops at halls around the reservation where people can bring their own bags and take what they can use.
Jason Baldes of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative donated 25 pounds of buffalo meat the morning of the opening. Sweet corn is coming from 1890 Farms, donated by Lindsay Anderson and her family. Wyoming Hunger Initiative, Double D Ranch, the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project, Highland Church, and Wind River Development Fund have all contributed, and Mr. D’s has donated gift cards the lodge can hand to families in crisis on weekends when the doors are closed. Beef donations are expected in October and November. Canned goods come through the Food Bank of Wyoming.
Food is distributed by household size, with larger families receiving multiple boxes, the same approach the mobile pantries adopted after the team realized a single box did not go far in homes with 10 or 20 people.
About 30 people came through during the first window of hours on opening day, and the lodge tried something new that evening with a distribution from 4 to 6 p.m., a request that came directly from working community members. Regular hours will be set once staffing and funding allow. The food is free and open to anyone, White said, including people from Lander and Riverton.
“We don’t discriminate against anybody. That food is free for anybody,” she said.
Oldham has a three to five year plan and a five to 10 year plan. The nearer goal is a second lodge at Wind River Cares by Oct. 1, with hopes for locations at Ethete and Crowheart, both of which currently receive deliveries. A volunteer delivery schedule is in the works for elders, homebound single parents, and people recovering from surgery. The team plans an elders day once the lodge is fully running.
“Our long term goal is to actually build a food system that incorporates health, nutrition, culture,” Oldham said. “So that way we’re elevating our community instead of just feeding our community.”
For White, who’s spent years fielding weekend phone calls from families who needed food and had no ride, the opening was something real to celebrate.
“It’s momentous, because it was a hope, a dream and a prayer that we’re here, because it took so long,” she said. “Everything that we’ve done came from the community.”
She was quick to give others credit. “All I did was plant the seed,” she said.
White’s thinking about why it matters so much goes deeper than the behind-the-scenes logistics.
“For the Arapaho people, food is sacred to us. We utilize that food in all of our ceremonies,” White said. “If you put those good prayers and nourishment and good things into taking care of that food for your families, you’re nourishing that person’s heart, mind, body and spirit.”
The lodge is in need of supporters like you to keep it up and running. Please click this link to donate.