Angel Tomeo Sam: No one should go hungry on stolen land

By Angel Tomeo Sam

When I was a child, food stamps kept me alive. They kept food in our cupboards and dignity in my mother’s heart. Later, as a single mother having to raise babies just 14 months apart, fleeing domestic violence, and caring for a child with disabilities, I depended on SNAP and WIC. Formula, cereal milk, and fruit were not luxuries; they were lifelines.

Today, I stand on the other side as a service provider and advocate at Auntie’s House and Yoyot Sp’q’n’i in Spokane, and as a core organizer of Setting the Table, a community effort responding to the SNAP shutdown. Every day I see who is harmed when food aid is threatened. They are people with jobs who still can’t afford groceries, grandparents raising grandkids, parents rebuilding after prison, survivors of gender-based violence, elders choosing between rent, medicine, and food.

I see clearly people who rely on SNAP and WIC are not lazy. They are not freeloaders. They are American families who work hard and believe in the promise that no one in this country should go hungry. If we make access to basic food benefits hinge on whether someone is an immigrant, LGBTQ2S+, disabled or simply poor, then we’ve abandoned the very principles that built this program. By that logic, we wouldn’t have food stamps for anyone.

This debate lands in November, when our nation tells its favorite story of gratitude and abundance. Vibrant pictures of pilgrims and Indians at a shared table of plenty. The truer story runs deeper.

Those newcomers just off the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria survived because Indigenous people generously fed them. Indigenous people offered food they gathered and preserved, food meant to carry their own communities through winter. That generosity was not charity. It was spiritual practice. It honored the land as a living relative and affirmed our responsibility to one another.

Somewhere along the way, this country forgot. We replaced community with commerce, gratitude with greed, kinship with competition. Now, when people go hungry, we blame them instead of the systems that fail them. Cutting off food assistance in a nation as wealthy as ours is not “budget reform.” It is cruelty disguised as policy.

Here are the facts – local and current:

• WIC in Spokane County (FFY 2024): 17,513 people participated – 12,746 infants and children and 4,767 pregnant/postpartum participants. Local stores redeemed $9,003,427 in WIC benefits, including $2,696,902 in fruits and vegetables through the WIC Cash Value Benefit.

• SNAP in Spokane County: The most recent county count published shows 83,972 SNAP recipients in 2022, nearly 1 in 5 county residents.

• SNAP (national profile): In FY 2023, about 39% of participants were children, 20% were older adults, and 10% were non-elderly people with disabilities.

• Washington’s economic impact: In May 2025 alone, more than 905,000 Washingtonians used SNAP, and $167 million in benefits went to Washington retailers in that single month. That’s a stabilizing force for family budgets and our local grocery economy.

Food is a basic need and not a political litmus test.

If America truly believes in opportunity and freedom from tyranny, then we must remember that food is freedom. You cannot talk about liberty to people whose stomachs are empty. As someone who once needed help and now offers it, I know how thin the line is between stability and hunger. A paycheck, a relationship, or a safe home can disappear overnight. The SNAP shutdown isn’t an abstract argument – it is a direct assault on families already holding on by a thread.

This is the season when we gather to give thanks. But gratitude without justice is hollow. If we want to honor the spirit of that first meal, the real one, rooted in the generosity of Indigenous stewards, then we must feed our neighbors and defend the programs that do. That means restoring November benefits, protecting WIC, and ensuring that immigrants, LGBTQ2S+ people, disabled people, and all impacted communities are not used as bargaining chips. Programs designed to prevent hunger must be judged by one moral question: “Do our children, elders, and working families have enough to eat?”

The answer we choose will say who we are. The truth remains simple. No one should go hungry on stolen land.

Angel Tomeo Sam is Executive Director of Yoyot Sp’q’n’i and founder of Auntie’s House Healing Shelter in Spokane County. She serves in the leadership of Experience Matters, is Compliance Officer for Justice Not Jails PAC, and is a core organizer of the Setting the Table Initiative to mobilize communities impacted by the SNAP shutdown.