TThe Blackfeet Nation is a remote and rugged landscape on the windswept plains of the north. Montana. Despite abundant resources, the remote location and management by the federal government make food access difficult.
Only four grocery stores serve the entire reservation. The selection of fresh, healthy produce and meats at these stores is often limited and prices higher than in neighboring communities, making them difficult for low-income families to access. Instead, the majority of the diet consists of highly processed foods rich in sugar, carbohydrates and fat.
Meanwhile, the incidence of preventable health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and lung cancer, colorectal cancer and kidney cancer has been above the state average for more than a decade. Chronic disease rates here exceed both state and national averages and are high compared to other tribal nations across the country. In addition to health concerns, a glut of unhealthy, processed foods and widespread food insecurity mean a loss of connection to the bison's cultural heritage and the landscape in which they live.
For the Blackfeet, bison are not only a source of food, but also part of their cultural identity. Before the bison's extirpation, their movements across the plains so shaped the Blackfoot way of life that nearly 200 years later, the community is still grappling with the generational trauma that resulted from the animals' sudden disappearance from the prairies.
Recognizing these problems, the tribal government, various non-profit organizations and dedicated community members decided to take action. In 2016, the Blackfeet Nation became one of the first tribal governments to implement a program that would establish tribal management of agricultural resources on a reservation with the larger goal of establishing food sovereignty and tribal self-determination.
Known as the Agricultural Resource Management Plan (ARMP), the Blackfeet-created program was the first in the country to be built on cultural practices and focused on five pillars of Blackfeet values: creating sustainable economic development, strengthening cultural knowledge, enhancing organizational development, investing in the Piikani people, and promoting health, healing, and nutrition.
Now, nearly a decade after implementation, the community has taken the reins. Although the tribal government was able to implement the ARMP, achieving some of the larger goals and objectives proved challenging. Seeing a need to help implement some aspects of ARMP, several food-focused non-profit organizations have emerged.
One such non-profit organization is Piikani Lodge. Health Institute (PLHI), which was created to implement some of the goals of ARMP. It was founded by Kim Paul, whose research into human metabolic systems informed her vision of obesity and disease in her community. She has worked to find ways to connect Western science with traditional beliefs and practices to explore how ancestral knowledge can offer solutions.
Noticing that her community faced some of the highest rates of chronic disease among tribal nations across the country, she began to wonder if at least some of it might be due to the sudden shift away from the traditional diet of meat, berries and fat, with people instead forced to rely on government-supplied, high-carbohydrate foods.
Under Paul's leadership, PLHI began planning and conducting a study of traditional foods to examine biomarker responses to the diet that was available to the Amskapi-Piikani before colonization.
The bulk of the diet consists of bison and various berries such as chokeberries and serviceberries, as well as wild onions, wild carrots and some wild potatoes. Combined with a baseline study, the PLHI project recruited volunteers to participate in a 100-day diet to see how their bodies responded to reintroducing traditional foods. Initial responses were promising, but the study had to be shut down due to rising costs and cuts in funding, blood collection, and laboratory testing.
PLHI has just received final laboratory results and expects to be able to quantify and publish them in early 2026.
In addition to nonprofit organizations like PLHI, Blackfoot Community College (BCC) has begun providing students with the tools and space to explore traditional practices combined with modern science to help make food sovereignty a reality on the Blackfeet Reservation.
Thanks to the Blackfeet Research Program, the Indigenous Science Center, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Information Center, BCC students and faculty were able to apply modern scientific research to confirm the stories of tribal elders and explore the role of plants and wildlife in Blackfeet culture as sources of food and medicine.
Melissa Weatherwax, BCC's Director of Institutional Advancement, was able to leverage the college's land grant status to build the physical infrastructure needed to work on these projects. “My role is to empower the people doing the work and ask, How can I prepare you for what you need to do?” Weatherwax said.
As students began working to integrate food, culture and community, the college expanded its footprint by purchasing 800 acres (325 hectares) of ranch land adjacent to their campus and has since begun construction of a bison and cattle processing facility. The facility will become a classroom where students can gain skills and knowledge to work in the meat processing industry.
It's something the tribe hopes to eventually expand on to fully understand what it means to return to a buffalo-based diet. Students in the college's Extension of Agriculture program are already using the facility to develop techniques that will help local gardeners and small farmers increase crop yields in climates with exceptionally short growing seasons.
Land grant funding from the USDA was constant, but it was never sufficient to fully fund the massive work at BCC. Private donations and other federal grants have played a large role in supporting the programs.
This year, several grants funding BCC were canceled by the Trump administration. “We're definitely challenged again under the current administration, and you're seeing historical trauma resurfacing with all of these funding changes,” said Helen Auger Carlson, Piikani Research Chair and Title III director at BCC. “You can feel it every time funding for Indigenous people is withdrawn or questioned.”
Broken treaties and broken promises are known throughout Indian Country. “You can’t get away with breach of contract,” Carlson said. But despite these challenges, the mission remains, Carlson said: “Education has such power. That's what we need to have a program that heals us.”
Economic prosperity and financial security also play a large role in the challenges of restoring food sovereignty to the Blackfeet Nation, and ranching plays a central role in both.
Most of the beef produced here—approximately 60,000 head per year—ends up being sold on the national commodity market. Four companies own nearly 80% of the country's beef feedlots and processing plants, making it difficult to keep Blackfeet beef money on the reservation.
Robin Johnson, a rancher who also leads agricultural efforts at PLHI, is well aware of these challenges. After seeing how the market was consolidating and how it was affecting her profits, she began going directly to cattle buyers to cut out the middlemen. But this is not always an option for small ranches. One solution the community is considering is a tribal-owned processing facility. “It would completely put a screw on our food system here at home,” Paul said. “We produce a lot of beef for America.”
Problems persist, and there is no simple solution to overcome centuries of trauma and the difficult realities of life on reservations. But the Blackfeet Nation has been able to work proactively and from a position of strength to find long-term, sustainable solutions to the problems arising from the inequalities created by the reservation system.
“We've had so much trauma and it's still going on: no jobs, no infrastructure, hopelessness,” Paul said, “but we want to change that here.”
Aaron Agosto is a freelance photographer based in Bigfork, Montana. Since 2020, he has been photographing life in the American West.
