Wasna woman

By Mary Garrigan, Journal Staff Writer | Wednesday, October 06, 2004

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Jerry Goes In Center is on a nutritional mission to promote fast food to the Lakota people.

No, she doesn't want them to eat more high-fat burgers, french fries and sugar-laden sodas, but rather what she calls the original "Lakota fast food" — buffalo wasna.

Wasna (pronounced wah-SHNA) is a traditional food of the Plains Indians made from a mixture of dried meat (usually buffalo), dried berries (usually chokecherries) and fat (usually kidney fat or bone marrow) that is pounded together. The resulting mixture is a nutritional powerhouse that the Rapid City wasna maker believes can help restore health and nutritional balance to her people.

"Wasna is a food created by our Lakota ancestors," she said. "It's a superior food, high in protein, high in iron and very low in carbohydrates."

Goes In Center, 48, grew up in Pine Ridge and in Indian boarding schools, eating the standard commodities diet of reservation life. "A lot of canned foods and white bread," she said. She ate the "reservation comfort foods" — fry bread and corn meal mush — developed from the government-run commodity food programs.

But she also knew about the traditional foods of the Lakota diet thanks to her grandmother, Kate Goes In Center, who spoke only Lakota and taught her children and grandchildren to gather wild turnips (tinpsila), to dry corn and meat and to pick berries. That connection to the culinary traditions of the nomadic Lakota eventually led her back to making wasna.

Her grandmother would have dried her own buffalo meat to make wasna in a rawhide bowl with a pounding stone.

But Goes In Center takes a decidedly more modern approach, employing a $2,000 commercial food processor to grind the organic, grass-fed dried buffalo she buys from the InterTribal Bison Cooperative.

The 1-ounce snack packets of wasna that she prepares and sells out of her Lakota Community home each contains

8.5 grams of protein, 9.5 grams of fructose and 100 calories. Because it is made from dried buffalo meat, it has 1.44 times more iron per ounce than beef; 70 percent less fat than beef and about 50 percent less cholesterol, she said. It has been shown to raise iron levels in the blood within 15 minutes of eating it, Goes In Center said.

The small packets are marketed as a snack item, but Goes In Center also suggests eating one, with a large glass of water, for breakfast. A 1-ounce packet supplies part of a person's protein requirement for the day and, because the dried meat is nutritionally dense, it satisfies hunger for long periods, she said. "Another interesting fact about wasna, it will satisfy you more while eating less and it takes longer to

digest, so you will feel full longer," she said. Drinking

water with the wasna is

important, she said, because that helps rehydrate it.

She believes eating buffalo wasna will prove to be an important tool in the fight against diabetes among Indian people. Protein is slow to digest in the stomach, so it acts as a buffer for the pancreas, she said, slowing down the absorption of sugars that affect insulin production.

"We need to go back to eating buffalo wasna. We need to look at our ancestors' diet and lifestyle as an example to live by," she said. Genetically, Plains Indians, who lived a feast-and-famine existence, are not conditioned to eat three meals a day, Goes In Center said. When fresh meat was scarce, her ancestors ate

wasna instead.

The European foods — flour, sugar, coffee and salt pork — that became part of their diet after Indians were forced onto reservations changed their diets for the worse, she said. So did the post-World War II government programs that altered their lifestyles away from subsistence gardening and ranching practices.

"I feel that is why we have such a high rate of diabetes in Indian country," she said.

Non-Indians may know wasna as "pemmican," and most older Lakota people are familiar with it, she said.

Getting a new generation of Lakota children to eat wasna is the goal of a contract

she has with Loneman School.

She supplies packets of it as an after-school snack. Its chewy texture and slightly sweet taste is popular with kids, and much better for them than cookies, soda pop or salty snacks such as potato chips.

"They love it," she said.

For a time, the Oglala Sioux Tribe provided wasna made by Goes In Center as a monthly food supplement to dialysis patients.

Funds ran out, but she hopes to renew that contract in the future.

In addition to those contracts, Goes In Center sells wasna to people who still consider it a sacred food for use in traditional ceremonies. They want to serve it at wakes, Sun Dance ceremony and other

rituals and celebrations, but she hopes more Lakota people will begin to eat it as the common, everyday food it is.

Calling herself the Wasna Woman, she takes a grassroots approach to marketing in the villages and towns on the reservation. "I walk around with my basket of wasna and ask everybody I see if they want to buy some," she said.

For Goes In Center, making wasna is an entrepreneurial project, but it is also a spiritual practice. She likes to honor her grandmother with every batch.

"When making wasna, I'm very respectful and I make it with pride," she said. "To honor our ancestors, I make an offering to the spirits every time, just like my grandmother taught me."

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8410 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com