The Fort Mojave Indian Tribe lives in the remote Mojave Desert in Needles, Calif. Despite athletic roots, people in the tribe today suffer from diabetes and obesity, conditions that affect other North American aboriginals at epidemic levels.
Timothy Williams hopes to change that.
As chairman of the tribe—which has 419 members under the age of 18—he has enlisted the help of CrossFit Kids’ Jeff and Mikki Lee Martin, who run CrossFit Brand X in Ramona, Calif.
“Wishing, hoping for change is nothing. You have to take that step,” Jeff Martin explains.
Part of the solution is fitness, but the other part is nutrition.
“It isn’t just, ‘Nutrition supports your athletic achievement,’ it’s, ‘Nutrition supports the basis of what we do in life and being healthy in life,’” Martin says.
Williams, an instructor at Fort Mojave Indian Tribe CrossFit, believes CrossFit is the answer for Native Americans throughout the country, and he’s reaching out to other leaders in the community.
“We’ve done all of the diabetes programs that the government’s given us. We’ve done everything that the government’s told us that we needed to do in order to live a healthier lifestyle. It hasn’t worked. This works,” he says. “And so if you need more help in starting your own CrossFit and looking at food policy and looking at how we can do this together, please call me.”
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Additional reading: CrossFit Akwesasne: Done With the Blame Game by Emily Beers, published Jan. 2, 2012.