Working Towards Self-Sufficiency In the mid 1970s, the Mashantucket Pequots were a long way from achieving their goal of economic self-sufficiency.  As tribal member John Holder remembers, “We had zero income. There wasn’t something going on that provided income, and we were kind of in a situation where you were forced to use what you have.” The Maple Sugar Project One of the few things Mashantucket did have was an abundance of maple trees.  Tribal member Charlene Jones remembers: “My Grandmother used to boil sap into syrup right on her stove. Small quantities for just their household, but we wanted to do it for market.  We were young kids --some of us were seven, eight years old.  [Tribal Chairman] Skip Hayward was really involved in tapping the trees and teaching us children how to follow the veins of the tree.  It was labor intensive to say the least.  There was a loft up on top of the sugar shack. They’d have us kids down there until late at night.  It was pitch black out, and it seemed far away then. So we’d be up there with our sleeping bags all cuddled up trying to keep warm.” “It sold very well,” recalls tribal member and MPMRC Executive Director Theresa Hayward Bell.  “We could not make enough syrup and keep it in house.  But it was also a seasonal endeavor, and the tribe knew that we still had to do something a lot different for the tribe to be able to become economically self-supporting.” The Swine Project “We used to sit down in meetings and talk about different ways to make money, different ways to develop,” recalls tribal member Bruce Kirchner.  “We talked about everything from bake sales to community gardens, and it must have come up at that time to raise pigs.” “I remember the piglets,” says tribal member Charlene Jones, “I think they were four months old at the time.”  “We got eighteen of them, but  eventually they did have babies.  They had litter on top of litter on top of litter.” Tribal Elder Loretta Libby recalls that “They would get loose and they’d run all over town here.”  "And we’d be out --all of us --out chasing the pigs.  There was times we were buying grain out of our own pockets.” “There was no money,” says Charlene Jones, “and it was like you were constantly feeding them.”  “Everyone became attached to these original eighteen pigs, and they never went to market.  Eventually they all had names --they became pets.” “We couldn’t kill the animals,” says Theresa Bell.  “We could feed them, we could grow them bigger than anybody else, but we had a hard time when it came to butchering them because we fell in love with the animals.” As Loretta Libby explains, “So that didn’t work out either, but we tried it anyway.”  “It’s not like we weren’t trying to make ourselves self-sufficient. We worked at it really hard.” Garden and Greenhouse “When we all started moving back up to the reservation,” recalls Theresa Bell, “we wanted to do community things to bring the community together on the reservation.” ”The Community Garden was one of the first things we started,” says then-Tribal Chairman Richard “Skip” Hayward.  “But trying to get this land tillable was almost impossible. So we said, ‘Let's try greenhouses.’  We raised money from all different sources --state, federal, local, private, churches --to build a hydroponic greenhouse.   I mean, I went around knocking on everybody's door.” The tribe ended up building a state-of-the-art greenhouse facililty, and for the first time, a Pequot enterprise was able to hire full-time employees.  They kicked off the project with plenty of enthusiasm, but no experience in the commercial produce industry. Theresa Bell recalls: “I was coming to work for the reservation, I was excited --‘I’m going to grow lettuce!’  I never thought about marketing, I just had to grow it!  And we grew plenty of it --ten thousand heads a week!  And we went to the New York food market, and it was scary to see a business of that size and how huge it was.  And we tried to sell this lettuce, but we could not get access to the food market.” Without access to commercial buyers, their business could not survive.  After a promising start and a huge investment of time and energy, the tribe was forced to close down the most ambitious project they had ever undertaken.