On a chilly Monday morning, a handful of people tossed packages of bison meat from the back of a pickup truck into a wheeled cart.
“We're going to start counting out 350 of these puppies,” said Northern Arapaho tribal member Jackie White. “Count ‘em out because we don't want to be short.”
The meat’s wrapped in white butcher paper and got picked up even earlier in the morning from the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative in Kinnear.
White is the tribal relations specialist for the Food Bank of Wyoming. The group was dropping off the packages at the Eastern Shoshone Tribal Health building in Fort Washakie, one of two spots for the day’s mobile food pantry distributions.
The meat is part of a special food sovereignty project on the Wind River Reservation that started last year. It includes traditional foods, like bison and chokecherry jam for elders, in the Food Bank of Wyoming’s monthly mobile pantries, in honor of Native American Heritage Month in November.
Also getting dropped off was a cardboard box with 30glass jars, tucked into styrofoam and filled with dark-purple jam made from chokecherries picked in Longmont, Colorado, the homelands of the Arapaho people. White collaborated with a group called the Wildlands Restorations Volunteers to pick more than 300 pounds of the fruit this summer.
The chokecherry jam was a special treat for elders, along with letters written by local schoolteachers and students.
The distribution got 700 boxes of food out into the community. It’s one part of the Food Bank’s network of mobile pantries that pop up across the state every month.
Food security has been top of mind for many this fall. Gov. Mark Gordon declared a public welfare emergency when the government shutdown paused SNAP benefits around the country, creating the Hunger Relief Program to temporarily provide additional support to food pantries.
According to Wyoming DFS Public Information Officer Kelly Douglas, an average of 28,364 people accessed SNAP in Wyoming each month last fiscal year, with an average monthly payment of about $185 per person. Counties with larger populations have more people accessing the program, with Natrona, Laramie and Fremont counties having the highest number of participants, based on data from this September.
On the Wind River Reservation, the Food Bank of Wyoming added an additional mobile pantry date on the Wind River Reservation earlier in November to meet some of that need.
The Northern Arapaho Tribe also hosted a general distribution and an elder-specific distribution before Thanksgiving, and the Eastern Shoshone Tribe is providing food gift cards for elders and coordinating a canned food drive to get holiday meal baskets to tribal members.
Heading to Arapahoe: the second drop site
After the meat and jam were dropped off at the Eastern Shoshone Tribal Health building, the crew zoomed over to the second distribution spot for the day: the Arapahoe School.
In the school parking lot, a forklift grabbed palettes stacked four high and four across with cardboard boxes from a big Food Bank of Wyoming box truck in the parking lot. Volunteers rolled the palettes into the gym, unstacked the boxes and set them up in long lines, stretching from one wall to the other.
The boxes came pre-packed with staples like beans and rice, but the next step was adding in the fresh stuff, like apples and potatoes.
Enter more local volunteers and a squad of high school students. It was all hands on deck, with one team sorting produce into bags and then others going down the line of boxes, putting in the bags, bison and other extra adds.
Volunteer Michelle Budimir was helping keep the process running smoothly, standing by the next box that needed to get its extra items. She lives in Lander and comes to help at the distribution each month with a few friends.
“ I like to volunteer and help out, for people that need it, that can't get it,” she said.
Amid all the action and moving parts, I even got interviewed by a couple curious high schoolers who wanted to try out my recorder and microphone.
Little Raven Oldman works at the school and said the students know the drill of how to help out with distribution day.
“They've been doing this for quite a long time and it's really awesome to see them just jump right in and get the job done,” she said.
Originally a different grade would help out each month. But now it’s a mixture of students from all the classes, who volunteer over and over again.
“I think they enjoy coming here to do this, so they're like, ‘I'll go!’” she said.
Students and volunteers can also grab boxes to take home. Some set food aside for their families.
Oldman said the best part is watching the kids work together as a team.
“ We're all struggling, you know, in our own way, but this really helps out a lot,” she said. “Food brings people together and that's what it's about, family and community.”
After all the boxes are filled up, it’s time to get them out to the long line of cars wrapped around the school building. A volunteer greets each car and writes down a number on its windshield, indicating how many boxes it should get based on the number of people in the household.
The cars inch forward, then pop open their trunk or backseat once they get close to the epicenter of the action. With a good-natured mix of chaos and efficiency, students and volunteers load up the boxes, adding in other foods like cartons of eggs, cartons of mini tacos and bags of pears.
Nayeli Hernandez was part of the flow, helping load up boxes into cars. She’s getting her social work degree at the University of Wyoming and was heading back to Jackson to see her family for Thanksgiving break.
“Tthe Wyoming Food Bank does a lot of food distributions,” she said. “And especially during the government shutdown, I was like, ‘This is needed,’ especially in Wyoming and rural places.”
Hernandez is currently an intern at the Wyoming Children’s Trust Fund this year. She said the on-the-ground food distribution has direct connections with her classes in school.
“ Food security is a big protective factor, specifically in child abuse, but honestly in all issues,” she said. “General welfare for the community is really important for social work.”
Jackie White was catching her breath after making sure the bison meat and chokecherries got out. While watching the cars get loaded up, she said they’ve run out of food at the last couple distributions and emphasized that it’s not just folks from the Wind River Reservation who come to pick up boxes.
“ We have people come from Lander, Riverton, Kinnear, Pavilion, Shoshone. We don't turn anybody away. As long as we have food and they're in line, they're going to get food,” she said.
Some of the elder boxes with the chokecherry jam and special letters get picked up, and others get hand-delivered to those who can’t drive or don’t have a car. White said that while the jam is a small gesture, it can still have a big impact.
“ We want them to know that we love them, we value them, and that our elders are significant to us because they're knowledge keepers,” she said.
For White, the high school students that help out with the distributions each month are her heroes.
“That's the goal: to teach our kids about giving back into the community,” she said. “They're stepping up to be leaders, and I love that.”
