Learning as a community practice

About 20 participants met monthly from August 2024 through July 2025 to take part in the GPSS program. The program trains them to become community educators who can share food preservation techniques with their family, neighbors and host training sessions on their own. No previous experience was required; instead, participants learned side by side through discussion, hands-on practice and community “give-back” workshops.

Macy conducted the training sessions in the Portland metro area. She said that although more American Indian/Alaska Native populations live in urban areas, Native programs off reservation often do not have access to the same grants that are for Tribal populations on reservations. This funding for GPSS, which supports work in urban areas, addresses this gap.

Hibbard-Swanson added that the training team emphasizes creating a discussion-based learning experience so each participant gets to share their opinions and stories.

“The way that knowledge is taught and transmitted in Native communities is often a little bit different,” Hibbard-Swanson said. “People are more comfortable learning from elders and through storytelling and hands-on practice, really working in a group setting.”

One example is sun drying, a method rarely covered in Extension’s standard Master Food Preserver curriculum. He added that in some areas where people don’t have electricity, sun drying is the best option to store food for a longer time, and there are some traditional foods where sun drying is just the traditional practice that people have been doing since time immemorial.

The GPSS approach emphasizes group discussion, shared problem-solving and practical experience.

“When we put them in a setting where [participants] discuss and you present the research, where they can analyze it themselves, they come to that conclusion themselves, that they want to follow a safe practice,” Hibbard-Swanson said. “And then they understand it better, because they’ve worked through the why.”

Canning is one area where those discussions become especially important. Hibbard-Swanson pointed to the risks of botulism, a rare but often fatal illness that can result from improperly canned food. He noted that people may not recognize the danger if they rely on family or friends’ methods that aren’t research-based and sometimes avoid illness only by chance.

“Those conversations are really sensitive, because it has to do with family, they have to do with history, they have to do with culture and tradition,” he said. “At the end of the day, everybody around the table can agree that saving health and saving lives is the most important thing, and if we can slightly change the way that we preserve food to make sure that we don’t make someone ill, that’s worth it.”

Muk Muk Mania

DeAnne Norton, who took part in the training to become a community educator, is one of the people who has benefited from the canning session. Norton said she used to be very afraid of a pressure canner because she heard anecdotes of people blown away by the lid and other scary accidents related to the canner. So she barely tried canning before, even though she had a canner at home in Depoe Bay.

Now she feels more confident using it after the hands-on practices in GPSS classes.

As a vegan, she hopes to let more people learn that, besides salmon and buffalo, which are common foods for her community, there are health benefits of having dried fruits and vegetables and different ways to preserve them.

Freeze drying is one of the techniques Norton said she’s fascinated by. She co-presented this technique at Muk Muk Mania, a community food celebration held in Grand Ronde in May. Together with Francene Ambrose, Grand Ronde program manager at the Marion Polk Food Share, they showed the audience multiple kinds of freeze-dried herbs, vegetables, fruits and even soup powder.

“If you take a grape and make it freeze-dried, it doesn’t become a raisin, it’s still a grape and tastes just like candy,” she said. “For young kids who just want a bunch of candy, freeze-dried fruit is a great option.”

For community educators, presenting at Muk Muk Mania was their first time to teach GPSS concepts. For many in the audience, it was also a chance to see where certain foods come from and to discover new ways of preparing their own.

Among those who stopped by the freeze-drying table was Denise Harvey, a former Tribal councilwoman of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Living with diabetes, Harvey is looking for ways to introduce healthier eating into her community. She said she had bought freeze-dried products before, but this was the first time she saw how the process works — and that it can be done with equipment available locally.

“Sometimes people talk about wanting to eat healthy, but they don’t get the exposure to how you do that,” Harvey said. “This is a great opportunity for people to learn and give new ideas.”

There are also community educators who came up with new ideas to add to the training. Jerald Harris works for hayu-munk skukum (youth enrichment), which provides culturally relevant after-school and no-school day programs in Grand Ronde. He noticed that the kids in his class were into Korean culture and would love to try kimchi with spam musubi. That gave him the inspiration to learn how to ferment kimchi at GPSS.

On his tables at Muk Muk Mania, he displayed a few jars of fresh kimchi and sauerkraut for people to try, along with an array of photos of failed fermenting examples, such as white and green fungus in a contaminated kimchi jar.

“Learning the techniques makes you more in control of what’s in your food,” he said. “I hope to remove more people’s fear of trying to make their own food. You see so many scares like ‘Oh, canning can lead to botulism.’ Just follow the rules and you’ll be okay.”

Outreach continues

In August, 29 community educators graduated from the GPSS pilot program across the three sites. According to the post-program survey results, all the participants agreed that they had changed their home food preservation practices over the course of the program to adopt safe techniques. More than three-quarters of the participants reported that they preserve foods to continue a cultural tradition, eating home-preserved foods weekly or more frequently.

After the pilot year, Extension educators plan to bring the program to Native-focused conferences and share it with Oregon’s nine federally recognized Tribes. They hope to gather feedback and share the curriculum with other communities in addition to the current three.

However, with the federal NIFA grant program on pause, Hibbard-Swanson said he’s unsure whether the team can offer the community education trainings again next year. Still, the team is exploring other options to continue the program in the future.

“It’s been a request for so many years to offer more public education on Indigenous food preservation,” Hibbard-Swanson said. “Now to see Tribal members offering classes in their community and teaching preservation techniques with traditional foods, the impact is so much bigger than we could have done without having partnered with these educators.”

Those who are interested can visit Master Food Preserver program. Contact Jared Hibbard-Swanson to learn more about the GPSS curriculum and how you can contribute.