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Page 1 of 4 Hank Gobin loves junk food.
 Muckleshoot women prepare salmon on the reservation near Auburn, circa 1950. Photo from the Seattle Post-intelligencer Collection, courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry.
But Gobin, the cultural resources director for the Tulalip Tribes, can’t indulge his sweet tooth as often as he’d like because he suffers from type 2 diabetes, a condition that’s disturbingly common among Native Americans. In the Pacific Northwest, about one Native person in seven has the disease—more than double the rate of the general population. And new diagnoses are coming faster every day. It’s a crisis, for Gobin personally and for his people.
But there may be hope for the future, and it may lie in the past. One day about 10 years ago, Gobin was in a storage facility of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., studying a pair of old skulls. They dated from about 1870 and had belonged to a Tulalip mother and daughter. “And I noticed that their teeth were all so even, so strong-looking,” Gobin says. “There didn’t appear to be any cavities or decay or deformity. And I said, ‘You know, this really is a statement about the diet that they had during the 1870s, even though that was not a good period for our people.’ ” Around the same time, one of Gobin’s doctors told him that if Native Americans could somehow revert to a more traditional diet, there might not be any diabetes epidemic.
From these two eye-opening experiences, the Puget Sound Traditional Food and Diabetes Project was born. A collaboration among the Tulalip Tribes, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, the Suquamish Indian Tribe, King County and the University of Washington, the project aims to combat diabetes by encouraging Native people to eat what their ancestors ate.
 Salmonberry blossoms and Siberian miner's lettuce. Photo by Joy Lacy.
“Foods that you think of as real traditional Native American foods, like frybread, which you get at every powwow—that’s reservation food,” adds Peter Lape, curator of archaeology for the Burke Museum. “You went from people eating a really diverse array of wild plant and animal food to, within 50 years, eating white flour and fat.”
The diabetes project is based on this knowledge, and on a couple of inferences drawn from it: that Native Americans may be particularly vulnerable to diabetes because their exposure to these foods is still so recent (they may be particularly susceptible to alcoholism for the same reason); and, conversely, that a traditional diet may be uniquely beneficial—even therapeutic—to them. “As far as we know, Native Americans now who trace their ancestry to people from this area—their ancestors have been here for thousands of years,” Lape says. “So they have adapted to eating the kinds of foods that are available here. There are almost certainly evolutionary factors at work that make the diet of your ancestors a healthy diet for you in particular.”
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