MONTEZUMA COUNTY — On an October morning, Gretchen Groenke watched heavy clouds roll toward a corn field in Montezuma County. Groenke, who works with the Four Corners Food Coalition, was happy to see the rain after a dry summer. More rain is vital for her job; connecting Indigenous communities with fresh and traditional foods.

But in recent years, farmers in southwest Colorado have had to cut back on raising crops because of summer droughts. And that has made it harder for local communities to get fresh produce, Groenke and other experts said.

For many people living in the Four Corners region, water has been harder to come by as climate change heightens concerns about wildfires and prolongs drought periods. Many farmers in Montezuma County received about half of their water this year, in water-short years; the food coalition receives less produce donations, Groenke said.

She co-founded Fourth World Farms, where they use Indigenous knowledge to cultivate the landscape and educate Indigenous youth.

“There is always a question in the back of my mind, how long will we be able to stay here?” said Groenke, “Will we have to leave, and will our kids have to leave?”

Many residents in this region have the same concerns. Groups like the food coalition try to make traditional foods more accessible for Indigenous communities in hopes of improving traditional food systems, said Amber Landsing, who is a part of the Diné, Shawnee and Acoma tribes and is president of the Four Corners Food Coalition.

For generations, tribes relied on hunting, gathering, and fishing for both nutrients and cultural practices, like animal harvesting and sharing knowledge. The United States forced Indigenous communities onto reservations taking away their access to traditional foods and hunting grounds, according to a 2023 study by BMC Public Health.

“We provide the education behind traditional foods, the history behind it, how to use it, how to use it properly, how to harvest, how to harvest in a respectful way,” Landsing said.

The Climate Curve of the Four Corners

Climate change and land management practices are also threatening traditional food systems. More unreliable weather patterns change harvest times, and fragmented land by roads, farms and homes changes the distribution of plants and animals, according to a 2023 study published by BMC Public Health.

The San Juan Mountains and Four Corners region have experienced 2 degrees to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, said Imtiaz Rangwala, lead climate scientist at the North Central Adaptation Science Center.

And a varying climate means vegetation on riverbanks is changing. and Harvesting spots are being altered or disappearing, and some plants, like the juniper, and animal species are unstable or declining, according to the BMC Public Health study.

Changes in weather and climate conditions have changed the ways that Indigenous people are able to access traditional food.

“My kids have eaten out of this river for 20 years,” Lansing said. “When the river is low there is no food, and my kids can’t eat.”

Overgrazing and tilling practices in the past in the West made soil less porous; now those soils struggle to hold onto water. This increases evaporation and decreases the amount of time that water has to seep into the soil making the climate dryer.

“Functioning of land as a sponge, has been less effective because of degradation.” Rangwala said.

In Gunnison,Colorado, the San Juan Mountain Institute worked to build rock dams near streams and meadows to slow down the flow of water. That helps new vegetation grow and repair those ecosystems, he said.

In southwestern Colorado and the Four Corners region, farmers, ranchers and local communities rely heavily on snowpack for water supply. As temperatures rise, snow melts faster, particularly in lower elevations. That makes water availability a big concern, Rangwala said.

No growing season is the same, but in dry years, some farmers and ranchers must cut back on their water use, by choosing not to grow certain thirsty crops, like alfalfa, or fallowing some fields entirely.

For Indigenous farmers, it is a hard choice not to give their crops enough water because the earth, the plants, and the animals are an extension of their own families, Brandon Francis, a Navajo farmer and educator, said.

“It’s not an economic choice,” he said. “It’s a cultural choice and it’s a spiritual choice, and it’s very hard.”

Rippling impacts on Indigenous food systems

Not having access to traditional foods negatively impacts Indigenous people’s health, not only physically but mentally because it disconnects them from their culture and from their communities, Landsing said.

One of the most significant crops for many Indigenous communities is corn because it is used in ceremonies and is relied upon as a source of strength and resilience, Francis said.

For Navajo people, caring for those seeds through generational seed saving keeps the culture and people alive. Francis has been farming his whole life. For him, food provides a sense of connection and kinship that keeps tradition and culture alive.

“It’s one of the ways we can reconnect with the earth is through food, and I really enjoy that aspect,” Francis said. “Everyone has to eat.”

That connection to food changed with U.S. reservation policies for many Indigenous communities.

The Ute tribes, for example, used to cover territory across the state of Colorado. Their reservation now takes up a small portion of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, cutting them off from their original land and hunting grounds.

The U.S. government gave tribes food that their bodies were not used to digesting, such as flour, sugar, and canned meats. That has had significant effects on their physical and mental health, Landsing said.

“It takes 15 generations for a group of people to adapt to a new food,” she said.

Traditional food practices connect Indigenous people to their culture and knowledge that was taken from them, while they heal generational trauma that has been passed down, she said.

“Traditional foods don’t just physically nurture our bodies,” she said, “but they nurture our bodies at a microcellular level that heals from the inside out.”

Indigenous communities will continue to evolve with the changes, Landsing said. They’ve been doing it for generations.

“Our traditional food systems rely entirely on our cultures, our knowledge, our ecosystems, our social structures. So, when change in the climate happens, it affects all of those,” Landsing said. “However, we are some of the most adaptive people on the planet.”