‘Indian Country is hurting:’ How feds failed Native American food program

People would have gone hungry if she didn’t, so Wendy Zika worked straight through her weekend.

A 62-year-old exemplar of Minnesota Nice, she unloaded a truck - pallet by pallet - on her own the weekend of Aug. 23. “It put a big strain on me,” she said. “That was the struggle the last two months.”

Zika, a member of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa in the North Star State, is one of the thousands of Americans whose lives have been upended by months of late deliveries from the federal government’s Native American food assistance program, Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations.

Tribal leaders and food administrators across the country said delays have stretched their staff and tribes since May, a month after the federal government moved from three warehouses to one run by a sole distribution provider. The warehouses were consolidated because the government could no longer extend the contract and was forced to send it out to bid again, but they received just one valid proposal from a provider to handle warehousing and distribution, an official said.

That provider - Paris Brothers, Inc. in Kansas City, Mo. - declined to answer specific questions addressing allegations others have made about the company.

But, through spokesman Will Gregory, the company released a statement to The Washington Post saying that “Paris Brothers, in partnership with the USDA, is actively addressing recent challenges to ensure the seamless distribution of food and resources to the communities we serve.” The statement added that the company is committed to the “vital work.”

The Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations - or FDPIR, pronounced “fuh-dipper” - was created by the Food Stamp Act of 1977 to get nutritious food to low-income Native Americans. Essentially, the program is the Native American version of SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

For those who run the tribal food programs, filling the need isn’t as simple as just running to Costco. Zika, the food distribution coordinator for her tribe about 25 miles from the Canadian border, said the closest place that sells frozen meat is 118 miles away - and she doesn’t have a freezer van to keep the meat at a safe temperature.

In late August, she said she was out of ground beef because her nearly 70 recipients hungry for protein snatched up her 15 cases of hamburger meat. Once deliveries normalize, Zika is determined never to repeat the situation.

“I’m not going to run out again,” she said.

The Post spoke with tribes with more than 7,000 FDPIR recipients and one tribe with a dozen people in the program. Tribal organizations of all sizes say they have been left with few answers and empty shelves.

“The need is there. The hunger is there. But the food isn’t,” said Mary Greene-Trottier, president of the National Association of Food Distribution Programs on Indian Reservations.

Things improved in August, with Paris Brothers increasing from shipping 94 trucks the week of Aug. 5 to 140 trucks the week of Aug. 19, according to a spokeswoman for the United States Department of Agriculture. The agency announced in the middle of the month it would give $11 million to tribal organizations to buy food.

It’s appreciated, said Greene-Trottier, but does little good for her Spirit Lake Tribe for a simple reason: There aren’t any places to buy the food they need in rural North Dakota.

“It’s like having a blank check in a desert,” she said.

A bipartisan group of seven U.S. senators sent an Aug. 23 letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calling for “immediate action” to fix the “extreme disruptions in food deliveries.”

Vilsack, in his first interview on the issue, four days later told The Post that his team had implemented short-term fixes, including imposing a seven-day workweek at the Paris Brothers warehouse and sending customer experts from the military and Federal Emergency Management Agency to the warehouse in Kansas City. He said a 20-person team is getting granular, literally helping Paris Brothers find ways to better organize paperwork.

In the longer term, he said, the USDA will send the $35.5 million contract back out for bid, because the current plan isn’t working and “we need to start again from scratch.”

The program is supposed to remove stress from Native American communities, he said, that often don’t have access to or money for healthy food.

“Unfortunately, mistakes were made that created more stress,” Vilsack said.

‘Red flag’

Reservations are often in rural areas. And independent grocers in those areas are particularly vulnerable to inflation, The Post has reported.

So the FDPIR program is critical, supplying beans, meat and fresh vegetables to more than 53,000 tribal members in more than 100 tribal organizations.

“It might be their only opportunity to have the fresh vegetables and fruits,” Greene-Trottier said.

Unlike SNAP, the FDPIR program sends culturally relevant foods - the rural grocery stores that dot Indian Country don’t stock ground bison or blue cornmeal.

So the sudden shift in FDPIR’s workflow worried tribal leaders.

Officials with the USDA met with tribal leaders who run the program in February to tell them FDPIR would be moving to one warehouse, Greene-Trottier said.

“Immediately,” she said, “that was a red flag for us.”

Federal liaisons assured them there would be no problem, she said. But the June trucks didn’t arrive on time. When they asked why, she said the tribes were told that the sole warehouse just needed a few more weeks. But then many trucks in July never arrived or came late.

Greene-Trottier said they offered a number of solutions, including going to the warehouse themselves to pick up the food. She said they were denied.

“The lack of communication has been extremely frustrating,” she said.

Greene-Trottier, who handles the program for her community, said the Spirit Lake Tribe received one truck in July compared to their usual two or two and a half per month. She said her warehouse shelves were empty.

In August, they were short 44 of their roughly 140 items.

“You wouldn’t go back to that grocery store,” she said.

When asked how this happened, Vilsack began by explaining a quirk of governmental contract regulations.

Since 2007, he said, the FDPIR food has been stored and delivered by Paris Brothers and another company named Americold. But the government reached their limit of how many times they could extend the contract before having to send it back out for bid. It was set to expire March 31, 2024.

Vilsack said his staff started in September 2022 figuring out how the new bid would work. His department sent out a request for proposals in August 2023 with a deadline of Sept. 11, 2023. He said only one of the seven bids considered met all the criteria - Paris Brothers.

He said the first problem happened right then, when the bid committee should have had a much deeper discussion about whether Paris Brothers could actually handle the job on its own.

“Paris Brothers needs to do some soul searching as well,” he said. “They felt they could do this … they had some challenges hiring people and understanding the magnitude of what they were taking on.”

The delays got so bad because he and his lieutenants didn’t know about the issue, Vilsack said.

Greene-Trottier said she and her fellow tribal food program leaders were telling the agency about the problem weeks before then.

A letter she and other leaders wrote to Vilsack in August claimed that Paris Brothers had been “fined hundreds of thousands of dollars as punishment for the disruptions.” Asked whether the USDA had fined the company, Vilsack said he had been told by USDA attorneys not to discuss the fines. (Americold will be given a six-month contract to reduce the strain on Paris Brothers, he said.)

Vilsack promised a complete review of the situation to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Obviously, it’s unacceptable,” he said, adding: “People depend on us.”

‘No answers’

Tribes came together to fill the gap, like the Apache Tribe’s Jennifer Boynton in Oklahoma, who said she gave meat and vegetables to the Kiowa Tribe when their truck came a week later. The Apache, she said, had too much food because they received an extra shipment in the chaos.

But some aren’t lucky enough to have tribal neighbors.

Amelia Owle-Arkansas, who runs FDPIR for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, said she is one of the two tribal organizations in the southeast offering the program.

Owle-Arkansas has 550 to 600 tribal members; many come to her wanting to know when there will be enough food again.

“It’s really heard when there’s lack of communication (from) Paris Brothers (and) USDA. There’s always a middle man in there, but us, the boots-on-the-ground people who are having to deal with the participants … there’s no answers,” she said.

There’s only one grocery store on the reservation, nestled in the Great Smoky Mountains. Parts of the reservation are an hour away from the food Owle-Arkansas provides.

“If they’re not open for our people to get food, we’re the next option,” she said. “If we don’t have it, our community doesn’t have it.”

Owle-Arkansas said her clients have already started to leave FDPIR for SNAP. Many tribes across the country said younger people usually prefer SNAP because they can’t or don’t want to cook the nutritious food FDPIR offers. If FDPIR goes away, Owle-Arkansas said, her community will stop eating the wild rice and catfish her tribe has lived on for hundreds of years.

“You’re not going to find that in your small grocery chains that are normally on a reservation,” she said.

Larger tribes were more insulated from the shortages.

Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said his tribe has 468,000 members and 7,281 people enrolled in FDPIR.

He said they still have a month of food - despite being out of tuna, cranberry sauce and pumpkin. But he is also concerned that smaller tribes may have lost the confidence of their members.

“Indian Country is hurting,” he said.