Opportunities for Engagement

Open Positions

INDIGENOUS RESEARCH GARDEN STUDENT INTERN

May – September 2025
$18/hour, 20-30 hours/week
Must be enrolled at an educational institution
Helps coordinate planting, maintenance, harvesting, volunteers at UW Arboretum Indigenous Research Garden
Supports project staff, graduate students, Tribal partners in other project areas

Please reach out to Hanna McIntosh (hanna.mcintosh@wisc.edu) or Daniel Cornelius (daniel.cornelius@wisc.edu) with questions.

Upcoming Events

INTRODUCTION TO INDIGENOUS AGRONOMY WEBINAR SERIES

What is Indigenous agronomy? How can western agronomy be used in Indigenous food systems? How is Indigenous agronomy used in practice? Join the Rural Partnerships Institute Indigenous Food Systems Project for this interactive webinar series. All of the webinars will be interactive, so please come with your questions, expertise, and knowledge to share.

Please sign up for any webinars you are interested in, even if you cannot attend. The Zoom link will be emailed to participants before the webinar. All webinars will be recorded and recordings will be emailed to everyone who registered.

Indigenous Agronomy in Practice

March 6, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

What is Indigenous agronomy in practice? This webinar will highlight a research partnership between UW-Madison PhD student Daniel Hayden and the Ohe·láku corn growers cooperative in Oneida. Daniel Hayden and Lea Zeise will share their collaborative research on intercropping cover crops with Tuscarora white corn and discuss what Indigenous agronomy means to them in practice. Following their presentation will be a community discussion for Tribal producers. Bring your questions, expertise, and knowledge to share. This webinar will be recorded. The recording will be emailed to everyone who registers even if they cannot attend the live webinar.

Daniel Hayden (Comanche) is a doctoral student at UW–Madison in the Department of Plant Pathology doing research with Tribal partners on intercropping with Native corns.

Lea Zeise (Oneida Nation) cares for ancestral Indigenous varieties of corn with a cooperative she co-founded called Ohe·láku (oh-hey-LAH-goo) since 2016. Since 2021, Lea has led Ohe·láku’s partnership with UW-Madison to conduct cover crop research in the cornfields to reduce tillage and improve soil and microbial community health.

Archaeology and History of Wisconsin’s Native Agriculture

March 19 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

More info coming soon!

Dr. Bill Gartner is a Lecturer and Principal Investigator in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who works with the Menominee Nation to study the history of ancestral Menominee raised field agricultural systems and land use.

Scaling Indigenous Corn Production: From Mounds to Combines

March 27, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

This session will follow Indigenous corn seed from planting through the season all the way to harvest and drying before it’s processed to hulled hominy corn for the Tribal Elder Food Box. Each step will be detailed, including perspectives on scales of production from mounds and hand planting to mechanical corn planters and combine harvesters. Expanding the processing scale to meet the nearly two thousand units required for the Tribal Elder Food Box will also be covered.

Dan Cornelius (Oneida) (bio coming soon).

Basics of Indigenous Agronomy

April 1, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom (registration required for Zoom link)

This webinar will cover introductory agronomy for Tribal producers and Tribal staff members. Bring your questions for instructor Will Fulwider and your expertise and knowledge to share in a community discussion.

We are also offering an in-person Indigenous Agronomy Field Training in March (see below).

Will Fulwider is the Regional Crops Educator with Dane and Dodge County Extension. He collaborates with farmers in the two counties on building an educational program using applied, on-farm research centering on increasing farmer profitability through reduced input approaches. Collaborative research themes include nitrogen cycling with cover crops, integrating winter annuals into crop rotations in Wisconsin, and finding approaches to agricultural production in solar farms.

FOUNDATIONAL INDIGENOUS AGRONOMY FIELD TRAINING hosted by the Ho-Chunk Department of Agriculture

March 13, 2025 from 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM at Whirling Thunder Training Farm in Tomah, WI

We are collaborating with the Ho-Chunk Department of Agriculture and Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Advisory Council to host a full-day training on the foundations of Indigenous agronomy for Tribal producers and Tribal staff members. Instructors Will Fulwider and Erin Silva will cover foundational agronomy concepts including basic soil science, nutrient management and organic sources of nutrients, tillage equipment, avoiding or mitigating compaction, organic weed management, and planning rotations. The afternoon will include introduction to equipment implements.

We are working with our partners at the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Advisory Council to reimburse Tribal members from Tribes in Wisconsin for travel expenses. Information on eligibility in the registration form.

Erin Silva is a Professor and Extension Specialist in the UW–Madison Department of Plant Pathology and Director of the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS). Her research program focuses on developing effective and profitable production recommendations for climate-smart organic and agroecological systems and she has a wealth of experience in organic, cover cropping, no-till, and soil health practices.

TRACTOR SAFETY TRAINING

April 8, 2025 from 9 AM – 4:30 PM at Arlington Agricultural Research Station (if weather conditions do not allow us to be in the field that day, we will postpone to April 22)

If you cannot attend this training, please fill out this interest form to let us know you are interested in attending a future tractor safety training.

Join us for a full-day tractor safety training for Tribal producers and Tribal staff members hosted by the Rural Partnerships Institute Indigenous Food Systems Project and UW Extension in collaboration with the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Advisory Council. Instructors Brian Luck and John Shutske will provide a general introduction to equipment safety and the basics of tractors and combines in a morning classroom session. In the afternoon, participants will rotate outdoor stations to learn hands-on the basics of tractor operation and safety. Different types of tractors, attachments, and equipment will be provided. Stations will cover getting readying tractors to operate, tractor operation and driving, hooking up and pulling PTO and drawbar implements, trailering safety, and skid steer operation.

We are collaborating with our partners at the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Advisory Council to reimburse Tribal members from Tribes in Wisconsin for travel expenses. Information on eligibility in the registration form.

Please reach out to Will Fulwider (will.fulwider@wisc.edu) with questions about the training.

Brian Luck is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist and Vice Chair of the UW–-Madison Department of Biological Systems Engineering. Brian’s research program focuses on machine automation, data acquisition, image processing, and providing unbiased information about precision agriculture technologies to farmers.

John Shutske is a Professor of Biological Systems Engineering and Director of the UW–Madison Center for Agricultural Safety & Health. John is an agricultural safety and health specialist, focusing on issues of injury prevention, worker health, mental health, stress management, and risk assessment.

Related Initiatives

Our project joins a long list of food sovereignty initiatives in the 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.
In an effort to reduce health disparities, Family Health La Clinica’s Mobile Migrant Health Services travels to farming and ranching worksites to provide healthcare to migrant and seasonal agricultural workers across Wisconsin.
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.

A bright green corn field with a bright blue sky in the background — Photo Credit Hanna McIntosh

Our Tribal partners include individuals affiliated with several of these existing efforts, and our project seeks to complement and amplify their impacts.