On a Saturday in June, Linda Black Elk stands beside a picnic table that is covered in small bowls filled with a rainbow of brightly colored spices.
"Kids love Doritos," she tells the crowd around her, "but they're less than healthy."
Clad in orange overalls, Black Elk exudes enthusiasm. Food is her life. She's an ethnobotanist, and works to restore traditional indigenous foodways at public schools in her home state of Minnesota.
Beneath a white festival tent on a grassy hill at the REED Center for Ecosystem Reintegration in Middletown, Maryland, she shares a recipe for homemade Doritos that uses a native spice mix she calls "Indige-dash."
"Salt, chili powder, and sumac powder," she tells the crowd. "Spray the corn chips with avocado oil, and then sprinkle this spice blend. … It is so crazy delicious."
The event, the Forest, Food, & Fire Ecological Summit, is a celebration of indigenous foodways native to the Eastern Woodlands, a region that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Great Plains, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
Participants can choose between foraging walks, mushroom hunts and informational sessions on rewilding — an effort to increase biodiversity and restore natural ecosystems. Later, three indigenous chefs will compete in a cooking contest, turning local ingredients like milkweed flower, rainbow trout and lion's mane mushrooms into several-course meals.
The summit was organized by Troy Wiipongwii, the director of innovation and entrepreneurship at the College of William & Mary's Institute for Integrative Conservation.
Wiipongwii also directs the Traditional Eastern Woodlands Foodways Alliance, a group which includes members of the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Lumbee, Monacan, Nansemond, Pamunkey, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes. In 2024, the alliance won a nearly half-million dollar grant from the US Department of Agriculture to train school nutritionists on how to procure and prepare indigenous meals from the region.
The group has worked with chefs, school nutritionists and K-12 students to create an indigenous lunch menu. Their USDA-approved recipes — which include turkey wild rice soup, a three sisters stew with bison or venison, rabbit wild rice stew, bison empanadas and a fiddlehead wrap — are available to public school cafeterias in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.
But preparing indigenous recipes is more complicated than just following directions, Wiipongwii says: "There's a nuance there to how some of the things need to be prepared to truly kind of encapture what's meant by indigenous. Otherwise, it's just indigenous-inspired, right?"
Later this summer, William & Mary's Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation will launch training programs for school nutritionists addressing topics like ingredient procurement and how to make culturally appropriate substitutions when ingredients are unavailable.
Indigenous recipes need to reflect local conservation goals, holistic health and tribal culture. Wiipongwii points out that readily available ingredients don't always check those boxes.
"You can buy corn, beans and squash in a regular grocery store," he says. "These are GMO corn. These are GMO beans. These are GMO squash. They have lost that indigenous essence."
Other ingredients can be nearly impossible to obtain. Wild venison, for example, is illegal to buy or sell in Virginia. The Eastern Woodlands Alliance hopes to eventually lobby state legislatures for legal pathways to buy and sell wild venison, but until then, cafeteria chefs will need to use alternatives.
In Virginia, this school lunch program marks a big step towards native food sovereignty — the right tribes have to access traditional foods.
Because of colonialism, forced removal and genocide, Virginia's native tribes have only recently received federal recognition. Despite having one of the oldest reservations in the US, dating back to 1646, the Pamunkey Tribe didn't receive federal recognition until just ten years ago. Six more Virginia tribes got federal recognition in 2018. The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, which is the biggest native group east of the Mississippi River, has had federal recognition for less than a year.
There's a "unique relationship that federally recognized tribes have with the federal government," says Wiipongwii. Federal recognition grants a tribe the right to self-governance and makes members eligible for earmarked federal funds. Those funds, in turn, boost programs that serve tribal members' needs.
Wiipongwii's cousin, Jess Phillips, is the environmental director of her tribe, the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe in New Kent County. As a mother and grandmother, she says, "it's important for kids to be able to access and enjoy those foods as early as possible."
Local, fresh and minimally processed, indigenous foods tend to be quite healthy. They also connect people to the land around them. As a child, Phillips foraged for foods like sassafras and muscadine grapes with her mother. These days, her own kids pick and eat wild wood sorrel, which they call "sour candy." Phillips is eager to see more young people connecting with their environments in public school cafeterias.
Until now, indigenous foodways have been shared primarily within families. But with the possibility of eating indigenous meals in public schools, those traditions can continue beyond the confines of individual homes.
After all, says Black Elk, native foods are all around us.
" When you teach a kid that the plants that they're walking over every day are actually not weeds, they are food and medicine," she says, "it totally changes the way they look at the world."
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