Indigenous Initiative Network Alliance

• Families in poverty are regrettably far too common, the fact that the common matrix to supply their basic life needs is based on currency is their greatest nemesis. Families who do not have currency are hungry.
• My solution recognizes that every family has an expertise or commodity that is of essential value to other families, i.e. a farmer has fresh produce, a mechanic can fix a vehicle, a baker can make bread, etc. An equitable value can be placed on the services and commodities which can be traded/bartered on a system of credit.
• My solution does not see color or geography, it is a process that can be replicated anywhere to impact food insecurity and lessen the hardship of acquiring basic family life needs.   

The specific intent of the Indigenous Initiative Network Alliance is to confront hunger in our Indigenous communities. The successful colonization of our people is bourn out by the sad state of dependency that envelop too many families. Our poverty stricken families often times lack the basic resources to keep enough food on the table. There are resources that help families get food, i.e. government financial assistance, food stamps, and currently, COVID19 related assistance. These forms of assistance are not permanent, someday they will be no more. What will our people do then? 

Generally more than 25% of Indigenous peoples of the USA are in a poverty state. This condition is amplified and exacerbated by the concurrent and usual consequential incidence of substance abuse, despondency, violence, high morbidity rates and loss of dignity. We continue to lose ground as a proud people.      

The acronym of Indigenous Initiative Network Alliance is IINA which means life in our Dine' (Navajo) tongue. IINA will seek to address the conditions of poverty and marginalization. The network would be organized by extended families, clans or communities, one network could be composed of, i.e. a farmer, a person with a truck, a baker, a mechanic and a carpenter. Their skills and commodities are needed by each family. 

The IINA process will establish a consensus based valuation of these services and commodities. There will be trade and barter between the families to acquire needed items on a system of credit. A record of reciprocation will be minutely kept on an app downloadable on computers or phones, participants will know how much service and commodity are acquired and due on what time schedule.

Ideally, a despondent unemployed carpenter or other network member will have opportunity to see to the urgent needs of their family, including and most importantly, food on the table. This unique opportunity may help to rebuild the dignity of the member, this as a building step could do vast good in the rescuing of our Indigenous nations.      

The Shiprock community of the Navajo Nation was rated the 3rd highest of poverty stricken Native American and Alaskan Native communities, U.S. Census 2013. About one third of Native children are in poverty and around 50% of Native families are food insecure. The IINA concept directly addresses the Shiprock community, then the Navajo Nation, other Native nations, it also speaks to the poverty conditions of Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and throughout the world. 

The IINA process is one that will be a mechanism of survival upon the eventual probable termination of public assistance programs, it engages and optimizes the skills/services of members and their made commodities to create a process where we take care of each other. As a farmer, I have the capacity to meet the basic hunger needs of many families and am glad to do so, particularly if there is meaningful and useful reciprocity.  

The IINA concept will not only address food insecurity, it will increase access to the community wealth of people resources and abilities. It re-engages the timeless practice of trade and barter, a necessary reviving of a cultural practice due to economic conditions. The IINA concept will provide healthy fresh produce to families to counter the devastation of diabetes and obesity. The effort also increases skills development as family members see the tangible benefits of application of skills by program participants. The project implementation will require development of software application that will keep records of participants' benefits and reciprocal expectations.   

The IINA concept proposes to optimize the trade/barter process that has been a mainstay to secure life goods for centuries. It is at a concept stage because it has not been utilized in an organized and formal manner in these trying modern day times of economic disadvantage for the benefit of our poverty level community members. The concept encapsulates several major themes; it gets food on the table and secures basic life needs for families without the use of currency, it increases our sustainable farming capacity, it creates the need for family life skills development, it fosters our quest for food resiliency and it will empower family providers with dignity and accomplishment by being able to provide basic life needs for the family without pay employment and money.