Background
Background
At its core, food sovereignty is the right of communities to define and determine their own food systems.
Food Sovereignty
The Indigenous Food Systems Resilience project identifies four key principles of Indigenous food sovereignty:
- Sacred or divine sovereignty, which includes the right to food and the responsibility of interdependent relationships with the land and our nonhuman relatives.
- Participation by individuals, families, communities, and regions on a day-to-day basis.
- Self-determination in accessing healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods.
- Policy reform to reconcile Indigenous values with colonial legal and economic structures.
Each community can define the specifics of what food sovereignty means to them. For example, “the Menominee Nation describes food sovereignty as living our traditional Menominee ways, identity, values and relationships to provide a tribally sustained community food system for future generations.”
Regardless of the precise definition, Tribal communities in Wisconsin are engaging in many innovative efforts to transform food systems and improve community access to healthy and culturally appropriate foods.
Project Background
The project is currently funded by a four-year grant (2023–2026) from the Wisconsin Rural Partnerships Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The institute is part of a broader Institute for Rural Partnerships housed at UW–Madison, Auburn University, and the University of Vermont and funded by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The institute aims to promote equitable, resilient, and prosperous food and agricultural systems and expanded opportunities for rural community development.
Related Initiatives
Our project joins a long list of food sovereignty initiatives in the Great Lakes region’s Tribal communities. Some examples include:
- The Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition’s Tribal Elder Food Box Program, begun in 2021, provides healthy, culturally appropriate food to elders and creates a guaranteed market for Tribal food producers. In 2023, the program delivered 570,000 food boxes to 3,750 elders from all 11 federally recognized Tribal Nations in Wisconsin.
- The Wild Rice in the Classroom project engages teachers and K-12 students in hands-on learning and conservation in the Green Bay coastal wetlands. In 2022, more than 400 students participated in their classrooms or on field trips to local marshes.
- The Indigenous Seed Keepers Network is a national network supporting Tribal seed sovereignty projects.
- The Red Cliff Fish Company, owned and operated by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, enables Tribal anglers to provide fresh, nutritious fish to the community while also acting as guardians and stewards of the ecosystem.
- The Tribal Climate Adaptation Menu, developed by a diverse group of collaborators representing Tribal, academic, intertribal and government entities in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, reveals how climate change is impacting plant and animal relatives, including those traditionally key to Indigenous food systems in the region.
- Gikinoo’wizhiwe Onji Waaban (Guiding for Tomorrow) and Minisan integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge and academic research around the impacts of climate change on Indigenous lifeways in the Great Lakes region.
- With Tribal and regional partners, Wisconsin Sea Grant has developed a Manoomin Education and Outreach Toolkit to increase awareness of wild rice’s cultural and spiritual significance, as well as its important ecological functions.
- The UW Arboretum Indigenous Research Garden creates an interactive space to share traditional foodways in Dejope, including growing the Three Sisters and tapping maple trees.
Our Tribal partners include individuals affiliated with several of these existing efforts, and our project seeks to complement and amplify their impacts.
