Montana food banks are trying to adjust after the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut $500 million dollars from a nationwide emergency food assistance program. One of the organizations hit is a food bank that serves the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Tribes.
The Center Pole founder and executive director Peggy White Wellknown Buffalo and her team set up in a gas station parking lot off Interstate 90 one late weekday morning in Crow Agency. The organization trucks food around to distribute it to people in their communities.
“We try to be in a location where it’s easier for them to come from the housing projects and around town,” said Wellknown Buffalo.
Soon, the table is stacked with boxes of canned salmon, loose potatoes and meat. Cars line up to sign for bags of food and load them into their cars.
With only a few small grocery stores and gas stations located across the large swath of southeast Montana, the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations are considered food deserts.
The grassroots non-profit Center Pole tries to fill that gap with help from the Montana Food Bank Network through both purchases and food supplemented through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that directs food to low income areas.
Wellknown Buffalo says the need is high.
“Sometimes we stay until [3 p.m.], but, today, a lot of people have been calling,” she said.
After Crow Agency, they head to Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, where they say the stock of food goes fast.
Montana Food Bank Network recently learned about cuts slated for more-than 70 food banks across the state, Center Pole included.
Montana Food Bank Network distributes food through TEFAP, and Program Manager Jesse Schraufnagel says they had committed to delivering food through the end of the year when they learned that one of the program’s primary funding streams had been eliminated.
“As of the beginning of this month, all of those truck loads have been cancelled, so what that amounts to is 40 percent of our total TEFAP allocation that we’re anticipating not receiving through the end of the year,” said Schraufnagel.
The Montana Food Bank Network says that funding also accounts for a little more than half of Center Pole’s TEFAP allocation. According to their numbers and rough estimates from Center Pole, that would make up more than a quarter of the total food Center Pole distributes in a year.
Wellknown Buffalo says Center Pole plans to navigate the cuts to their pantry by establishing public gardens to grow food and Indigenous plants they source from the hills in the region.
“We’re gonna get hit with the craziness of what our government is doing, but the ones who are gonna suffer is my people,” said Wellknown Buffalo. “Us. Natives.”
Montana Food Bank Network says it’s looking for ways to supplement the food and funding loss for its members.
