Margaret Smith spends a week each month in a blue minivan, crisscrossing northwestern Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation to deliver buffalo meat, hominy corn and wild rice to elders with diabetes.

At 84, Smith often makes the long trips across the 1,300-square-mile reservation alone.

But Smith does it with a smile, even through the frigid winters.

Her trips are the heart of the Mino-Miijim Project, an initiative of the nonprofit White Earth Land Recovery Project. Mino-Miijim, Anishinaabe for “good food,” provides alternatives to high-cholesterol and sugary foods by giving diabetics the makings of a traditional meal.

One of the 170 packages goes home with her. Diabetic herself, Smith knows the needs of those she serves. “I love visiting people because I know, looking at them, I would be lonely if I wasn’t out; so I know they are,” Smith said.

As many as 40 percent of the reservation’s elders may be diabetic, said Winona LaDuke, a longtime environmental activist who founded the land recovery project in 1989. And a University of North Dakota study found older American Indians are almost three times as likely to have diabetes than their white counterparts.

The goal of Mino-Miijim is to replace the diet of poverty.

"It's not just a medical program, and it's not just a preventative health program," LaDuke said. "It’s a cultural restoration program." That meets the mission of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. Its first goal was to bring land within the reservation’s 36-mileby- 36-mile border back under Indian ownership. Created by an 1867 treaty, the White Earth Reservation sits about 70 miles east of Fargo, N.D., and was first held in common trust by Minnesota’s Ojibwe tribes.

But the reservation was almost completely owned by non-Indians by 1920.

About 10,000 acres of state- and countyowned land was returned to the tribe in the 1980s, although fights to restore all the reservation failed. So LaDuke founded the landrecovery project to reclaim the rest.

Her group now owns about 1,500 acres. Tax and legal issues have stalled efforts to give some of the land to the tribal government, she said. But the project expanded into other environmental and cultural work.

The project also developed Native Harvest, which sells traditional food raised on or near the reservation – and led to the idea for Mino-Miijim. “It seemed to us a strange thing that we were selling food, but not really providing food to our community,” LaDuke said.

Mino-Miijim began a year and a half ago, when Smith first trekked around the reservation to find elders who needed the food. She had tried to get names of diabetics from the public health office, but found out the agency couldn’t disclose them. “So I just went home to home, talking to people,” she said.

In the two months it took to cover the reservation, Smith came back with 175 names.

Some of the food is raised by the project itself while other commodities are purchased from neighbors. The buffalo is sold by Steve Roberts, a non-Indian who lives within the reservation’s borders and is “doing the right thing ecologically for the land,” LaDuke said.

The deliveries also include hominy, rice, coffee, jam and maple syrup. Some of the supplies last all month, others are enough for about a week’s worth of meals.

Smith said the cultural connection can mean as much as the food itself. “They really look forward to it,” she said.