On Nov. 1st, when the Trump administration announced it would not disburse benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, due to the ongoing government shutdown, tribal governments began to scramble. Approximately 25 percent of Indigenous households are considered food insecure and rely on SNAP as well as the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR, a monthly food package program.

“Usually, when it comes to feeding the low-income or poor people, Congress has always found a way to do it,” said OJ Semans, a member of the Rosebud Sioux and director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, an advocacy group representing nations with large land bases. “Now they don’t.”

A federal judge has ordered the administration to make SNAP payments to states by tomorrow. But when households will have access to those benefits remains unclear. In the meantime, dozens of tribes have fallen back on food sovereignty initiatives that have been built over the last 40 years in order to supplement food supplies. From coastal tribes engaged in the restoration of salmon, to Plains nations reintroducing bison to the landscape, Indigenous food sovereignty is increasing food security and self-sufficiency for tribes.

“It doesn’t always take a crisis to realize that having a food source and being able to feed your own people is a great idea,” said Kelli Case, the senior attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative.

But many of those programs have been hard hit by climate change over the last decade. Now, disappearing federal food assistance programs and climate change’s diminishment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security initiatives are putting tribal nations in vulnerable, if not outright dangerous, positions. In the last week, a handful of tribal nations have declared states of emergency due to the administration’s freezing of SNAP benefits. For most the last emergency declarations happened at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Semans, SNAP is handled through states but tribal leaders have advocated for the reinstatement of funding to tribes by citing federal trust and treaty responsibilities – the legal responsibility the federal government has to fund and provide services in exchange lands. When it comes to federal funds and tribes, “anything that happens in the United States should be recognized through a treaty obligation,” Semans said.

But without action from the Trump administration, nations have little choice but to rely on themselves. At a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing last week, Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Democrat, said that more than half of her constituents – Shoshone-Paiute members of the Duck Valley Reservation – would lose access to essential food support as a result of the shutdown. “In response, the tribe is preparing to rely on traditional practices such as hunting elk to feed their members,” she said. Later this month, the Shoshone-Paiute tribe will conduct a workshop for members to learn how to process wild game as part of their food sovereignty and self-sufficiency initiative.

But even with budding and established food programs, tribes are still facing problems. In March, the Trump administration eliminated the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, a Biden-era plan that allocated $100 million to help tribes purchase traditional foods from local farmers and producers and distribute them.

Earl Heavyrunner, a Blackfeet tribal member who manages his nation’s food distribution program, said on his reservation, about 20 percent of households receive SNAP benefits, while another 40 percent participate in the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, which supplies a monthly food package to families and individuals.

“I’ve been working for the program for 24 years now and this is the first time I’ve ever seen it like this,” said Heavyrunner. As the freeze continues, Heavyrunner and other tribal members have been hunting elk and culling bison to feed households. “There are other reservations that are doing pretty much the same we’re doing.”

Tribal nations have always practiced hunting and agriculture, but as the United States moved westward into “Indian Territory” policies of extermination wiped out buffalo herds on the plains, livestock in the southwest, and nearly destroyed salmon and other fish habitats along the Pacific coast by damming rivers for hydroelectric power. Displacement of nations from their traditional homelands and the establishment of reservations nearly destroyed tribes’ abilities to feed themselves.

“When they got confined on their reservation and couldn’t [hunt] anymore … what did they have to do then?” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi tribal member who assists the Indigenous Resilience Center at the University of Arizona. “You started getting the introduction of all these commodity foods.”

Johnson is involved with dry farming, a Hopi technique used to grow crops in a desert and has been used for a millenia by the Hopi and other tribes. However, increased droughts and extreme weather events are disrupting harvests and pushing tribal members to remain reliant on programs like SNAP. “We have probably had more periods of not raising the crops, and we haven’t [been] raising the crops because of climate change.”

Still, Johnson said he’ll continue farming in order to preserve the area’s biodiversity and restore the Hopi diet.

“What we need is models to get away from the SNAP stuff,” he said. “That’s the beauty that I would hope comes out of this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The government froze food aid. Tribes are thawing old traditions. on Nov 6, 2025.

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