UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 27, Page 6
April 14, 1994
Summer trip to focus on Native American culture

     Marie Fanelli-Kuczmarski, associate professor of nutrition and
dietetics, may have developed the ultimate in transcultural study courses.
Offered in Hawaii and New Mexico and Arizona, hers give students the
opportunity to eat their way through Native American cultures.
     Her five-credit "Transcultural Food Habits" course taught in Hawaii
during Winter Session has grown in popularity from six to more than 30
students, who study the cultures of the Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese,
Japanese and Filipino populations.
     Now, for the first time, she will offer a similar course this summer
designed to take an in-depth look at the traditional and current food
habits of Native Americans through visits to several pueblos between
Albuquerque and Taos, N.M.; the Zuni Indian Reservation, south of Gallup,
N.M.; and the Hopi Indian Reservation and the Navajo Nation in Arizona.
Student applications are due by April 20.
     Specifically, the course covers traditional and contemporary food
habits and ways in which culture, diet and health are interrelated.
     Students enrolled in the summer session course will work with
dietitians, nurses and other health professionals in community settings;
interview Native Americans about their food habits and medicine men about
their practices; participate in preparation of food and taste traditional,
feast and healing foods; and visit museums, a commodity warehouse, a WIC
distribution center and hospitals.
     "It's a chance to see diet and its relationship to culture and to
health," Fanelli-Kuczmarski said. "Someone from the Indian Health Service
nutritional department, who is an Indian, will be talking to the students
about different diseases- especially diabetes, which is prevalent in Indian
populations. She also will discuss health problems as they relate to
culture-the way Indian women with diabetes, who dance barefoot, were prone
to cut their feet and develop gangrene. Urging them to wear shoes when they
dance went against their cultural beliefs. If they wore shoes, they
wouldn't feel in touch with the Earth."
     Students will have a chance to see bread baking at the Isleta Pueblo,
experience Feast Day at Santo Domingo, tour the Indian Pueblo Cultural
Center Museum and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, taste traditional
Zuni feast foods, Navajo foods and Hopi traditional foods and more.
     The course is scheduled for the first five-week summer session, with
tentative travel dates set June 1-22. Estimated cost is $1,600.
     For information, call 831-8976.