Slim Buttes Community Farming Project
Tom Cook, Project Director
Slim Butte Community, S.D.
(308) 432-2290

When Tom Cook decided to defy the draft in 1970, he couldn't have dreamed that he was inadvertently setting his life on a course that would lead him to the Dakota Badlands some 20 years later. Cook, a Mohawk Indian from upstate New York, had grown up on his family's farm and was driving a tractor by the time he was 11. When the draft call came, he said, "I figured it wasn't my war, and told them I wouldn't go." Instead of a fine or jail, however, Cook was sentenced to two years of community service, and spent the time developing and directing a community gardening project on the St. Regis Mohawk reservation.

After a few years working as a high-rise steelworker in New York City, as many Mohawks do, Cook moved west, marrying a Lakota woman, Loretta Afraid of Bear, and settling down on her family's property near Slim Buttes in Shannon County.

Nine years ago, realizing that his family and virtually all of his neighbors were struggling to feed themselves even with the help of food stamps and welfare grants, he decided to start a gardening project for the Lakota, for whom community gardening had been a tradition in the past but had completely died out.

His model was extremely simple, as most good models are: With the help of grants and loans (including a major grant from the Bryn Mawr Church of Philadelphia), he purchased a tractor and small truck. He tilled, plowed and disked an acre of property where his wife's family, all 15 of them, lived in a 15-by-30-foot log cabin, and began growing produce for them and a cluster of neighbors. "The produce from the garden supports about 30 people for two or three months a year," he said.

More important, as the years went by, Cook spread the gospel of family gardening through the reservation. He tills and plows land for gardens, buys seeds and seedlings using limited grant money and donations, and offers gardening advice, although he finds it's rarely needed, since the reservation's older people still remember the basics from pre-War days when community gardens were common, and they love to teach the younger folks how to do it.

Cook now claims responsibility for 196 gardens producing vegetables for more than 1,000 people, and he says this stretches his time, energy and money to the limit. He's received small grants, mostly from the Christian Relief Services' Running Strong for American Indian Youth program, but his current grant runs out July 1, and he's not sure where the money will come from to finish out the season, much less buy the additional tractor and truck he'd need to expand the project to Wounded Knee and Kyle, as he'd like to do.

"We have so many social problems, and they're all derived from dependency ... inertia caused by dependency," he says. "I'm hoping with the revival of interest in gardening, there'll be a surge of interest in self-reliance."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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