ONEIDA NATION HOMELANDS, N.Y. – Mayan Indian coffee growers of Guatemala are joining the Oneida Indian Nation in an import deal its promoters hope will bring ties between North and South American Indigenous peoples to a new level.
The result of years of personal contacts, the deal unites the new-found purchasing power of Indian casinos with the self-help efforts of Central American Indian farmers. It also revives a trade connection that flourished before contact with Europeans.
“Investment in collaborative ventures with other Native peoples is a natural for us,” said Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter. “Native nations once traded goods from Canada to Mexico and from Mexico to South America, even the Caribbean. We see this coffee import program as a step in helping revive those grand traditions where Native people prospered by common commerce.”
The Oneida Nation is starting to test-market a trademarked blend of coffee called MayaGold developed by the Kekchi people of northern Guatemala. Halbritter said this shade-grown coffee is not only the mainstay of the Maya Kekchi family farms, it’s ecologically friendly. Their farming methods preserve old-growth forests, he said, and also produce a higher quality bean than do the high-volume plantations.
The Kekchi, one of 22 Mayan peoples in that country, are the fourth largest linguistic group. They number 700,000, living in both lowland and high country straddling the Sierra de Minas and Maya mountains. The Native producers are exporting through a Maya-owned company, Shchel, S. A., run by the community organizer Roderico Teni.
“Our Maya people are great farmers, producers of excellent quality coffee beans,” said Teni. He has put together a grower’s cooperative of 1,000 Kekchi farmers, organized a credit union and helped many communities in settling title issues and managing their lands. Teni traveled in North American for years, building networks with potential economic partners for his people.
Halbritter also has long-standing personal links with the Guatemalan Natives. He recalls meeting Mayan leaders in 1977 in Geneva, Switzerland, during the first international Indigenous peoples’ conference.
“We heard horribly dramatic stories about their oppression, ” he said.
But his closest ties developed a few years later, as the result of a chance meeting in the Washington, D.C., airport. Halbritter said his mother, Gloria, was passing through the airport some time in 1985 when she noticed a family she could tell were of Native origin who had just arrived.
“Her heart went out to them,” he said.
As an Oneida elder, she gave them a traditional Iroquois greeting and learned they were fleeing what was then an oppressive regime in Guatemala.
At the time Halbritter was a student leader at Syracuse University. When his mother told him about the meeting, he invited the family members to campus as speakers. “I had them tell their story of leaving Guatemala and was able to pay them something.”
The head of the family, Victor Montejo, later became a well-known anthropologist.
“They were such beautiful people,” Halbritter said.
“I was almost pre-introduced as to the idea. It made it very easy to work together,.” Halbritter said of his reaction of Teni’s proposal to import Mayan coffee.
Coffee itself isn’t a native crop, arriving in Central America only with the European invasion. But Indian growers have made it a mainstay and developed their own blends.
The MayaGold import derives from several Kekchi varieties blended for depth of flavor by a Shchel tasting program.
As a first step, the Oneida Nation imported a freight container of coffee beans, 30,000 pounds worth. The MayaGold blend will be marketed, both ground and whole bean, in partnership with two U. S. companies, Nature’s Finest Products, Inc., a nationwide marketer of specialty coffees, and Stewart’s Private Blends Foods, Inc. Stewart’s will roast and package the bean.
Marketing is under way on the Internet and at the Oneida’s Turning Stone Casino Resort. The coffee will be offered as a gourmet product to Turning Stone patrons, who Halbritter said, “are often well traveled and experienced with the world’s different cultures. They’re a group of people well suited to appreciate the quality of the coffee that is going to be offered.”
The coffee deal may be the first step in turning casino buying power to the benefit of the Native economy, Halbritter said. “We’re taking a look at all types of products used in the casino business. We’re thinking what products could be provided by other locations.”
Halbritter said he hopes other casino tribes will follow the Oneida example. He said he plans to pitch the MayaGold story to an October meeting of the United Southern and Eastern Tribes at Turning Stone.
Several other tribes have shown an interest in his invitation to join the Mayan initiative, he said, including the Meti of Ontario and several of the California nations with casinos.
He said the Oneidas would take care that benefits of the deals really reach the Indigenous farmers. The nation will follow the fair trade principle of making sure the farmers receive a living wage for their produce, instead of letting middlemen or government intermediaries take the profit.
The Native-to-Native contact “will help in offering more secure conditions and a fair price to people who in the past have been under the dictates of an oppressive regime,” he said. “We want to help not just the Mayans of Guatemala, but wherever we can.
“This is so much better than grants or giving that create dependency,” he said. “This is really where the U. S. government and other nations should be going for Indigenous people.”
