At Michigan State University, the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Summit asked what it means to feed a people and who gets to decide.

The Indigenous Food Sovereignty Summit, co-hosted by Michigan State University and the University of Michigan in April, has been years in the making. The summit was co-coordinated by the Native American Institute, or NAI, housed within University Outreach and Engagement, and Tribal Extension in MSU Extension, and grew out of work conducted through the Michigan Inter-Tribal Land Grant Extension System. Its roots trace back to spring 2023, when NAI and Tribal Extension conducted listening sessions with Tribal Nations across Michigan to better understand community priorities and opportunities for collaboration. Throughout those conversations, food sovereignty consistently emerged as a key priority.

While some Tribes were already running comprehensive programs, others were just beginning to ask questions about the programs they might want to create. Kevin Leonard, director of NAI and co-chair of the summit, brought what he heard back to colleagues, and the idea of a dedicated gathering began to take shape.

By March 2025, roughly 50 people had come together to begin planning a food sovereignty event in earnest, some from Tribal communities and others from various university offices, extension programs and student organizations across the state. What held the effort together was not any single institution’s directive but something more durable: a dense web of relationships built over decades of work in Tribal communities and on campus.

Stephen Stresow-Cortez, a doctoral student studying vegetable production and soil health at MSU, described how the conference came together through those connections. “Everyone was like, ‘I know a guy; I know something,’” he said. “And this whole thing happened.”

Jorhie Beadle, interim director of MSU’s Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment program, a living-learning community for students interested in environmental studies and sustainability, co-organized the youth networking event held alongside the summit’s second evening. She described the commitment that kept the planning committee grounded through more than a year of preparation. The people doing indigenous food work in their communities every day were not abstract stakeholders to be consulted but, rather, the reason the summit existed. “This is their lives,” she said. “Their livelihood.”

Forty of the original 50 planners stayed on through to the event itself, each bringing their own expertise, community ties and institutional knowledge to bear on what would become the first summit of its kind at a land-grant university.

What is food sovereignty?

On Monday, April 6, the summit opened with a ceremony, prayer, songs and a welcome before the first panel posed the question the entire gathering had been convened to answer. The responses offered by panelists Rosebud Bear Schneider, Jahi Chappell and Robin Michigiizhigookwe Clark centered on sovereignty, not as a synonym for access or as a policy category, but rather, cultivating Indigenous food systems focused on cultural resilience and community-driven solutions.

Leonard, speaking in conversation during the event, carefully offered his own definition. Food sovereignty is the ability to control the pathways that feed a community, to not be reliant on external forces for those resources. He traced the history plainly. When treaties were signed and land was taken, hunting, gathering and fishing rights were supposed to be retained by our Tribal communities in perpetuity. They were not.

Communities became reliant on government commodities. “The shiny cans that are non-labeled,” he said. “You know it’s government food.” Foods like fry bread, often misread as traditionally Indigenous, are what people made from what they were given. Reclaiming food sovereignty means returning to wild game, manoomin or wild rice, leafy vegetables and fruits. Foods cultivated on this land for tens of thousands of years in service of what Leonard described as the deeper meaning of sovereignty: the ability of Tribal Nations to govern themselves and sustain their own communities.

The afternoon broke into concurrent sessions on manoomin stewardship, Tribal food producer assistance programs, and deepening relationships with plant relatives through knowledge sharing, while the vendor trade show filled the adjacent ballroom. Emily Proctor, co-chair of the summit and a Tribal educator with MSU Extension who is a member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, described the trade show as a welcoming space, full of conversation and activity, showcasing the community’s artistic talents and traditional foods. The seed-sharing stations drew particular interest throughout the day. In a conference organized around the idea of food sovereignty, passing seeds from one set of hands to another was an integral part of the programming.

Across generations

Tuesday sessions moved through treaty rights and governance in the morning and food sovereignty across generations in the afternoon, a through-line that connected elder knowledge to the responsibilities of the next generation. The evening extended that theme in a different register. The Intergenerational Knowledge Share, held at the MSU Multicultural Center, was designed not as a formal program but as a space where students, practitioners, elders and speakers could find one another without an agenda mediating the conversation.

The event was shaped in part by Faith Cummings, a first-year student from the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, studying environmental sustainability, who joined the planning team specifically to offer a student’s perspective. When the organizers asked what students wanted from an event like this, her answer was direct. “Networking is an important word to me,” she said. “I want to learn how to do that.”

For many of the students present, the summit’s sheer scale had an immediate impact and affirmation. Jacob Doss, a senior studying sociology with a minor in law, justice and public policy, and chair of the hospitality committee through the North American Indigenous Student Organization, said the opening session caught him off guard. “I was pretty shocked when I came to the opening, and I was like, ‘Wow, there are so many people here.’”

Indigenous students at MSU number around 180, and the experience of feeling isolated within a large institution is familiar to most of them. Being surrounded for three days by practitioners, scholars, elders and peers who have devoted their lives to these questions carried a different weight entirely. “It’s empowering,” he said.

Julia Gross-Turkey, a senior from Six Nations of the Grand River studying criminal justice with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, said that what she would take with her were the hallway conversations, people sharing what they remembered about food, what their communities were doing and what they were trying to hold on to. “Seeing how many people care about this and how we’re all trying to work toward this is something that I really like and have taken away so far,” she said.

The breakout session Leonard said he will remember most came on Tuesday afternoon, when Jefferson Ballew IV and Sonja Ballew led a presentation on the Indigenous sugar bush, demonstrating the tools ancestors used to harvest sap and produce syrup and sugar. The session brought the physical presence of ancestral practice into the room, handled and explained by people who carry that knowledge as a living inheritance, something rarely seen in a university conference setting.

“It was so great to see the tools our ancestors used to harvest sap and how they used those tools to make syrup and sugar,” Leonard said. “It also cleared up some misconceptions about how those tools were used.”

Question of scale

Wednesday’s keynote arrived with the weight of a question the previous two days had been building toward. Speaker and U-M faculty member Kyle Whyte asked how Indigenous peoples’ climate and food actions scale up, a question that directly addresses the challenge of bringing traditional ecological knowledge into conversation with the agriculture industry. For Proctor, it was the talk she had been waiting for. “Dr. Whyte’s keynote perfectly summed up the work we are doing and how it does not fit within the traditional Western idea of scalability,” she said, “but is very much scalable in every aspect.”

The summit closed Wednesday afternoon with a session called “Planting the Seeds for the Future,” a working conversation designed to begin shaping what comes next. Several institutions have already expressed interest in hosting a 2028 gathering, including Northern Michigan University, Mid Michigan College and Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College. Leonard’s original vision had been to alternate between MSU and the University of Michigan, a partnership that grew out of his relationship with Jeremy Moghtader, the former director of MSU’s student organic farm and now assistant director of the Campus as Lab initiative at the U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

During planning, however, a different possibility gained traction. Future summits might be hosted at Tribal colleges or on Tribal land, taking the gathering to the communities it serves rather than asking those communities to travel to East Lansing. As Stresow-Cortez put it, “MSU asks people to come here a lot. Instead, let us go to where the community is.”

A week after the summit ended, Proctor reflected on what the three days had accomplished. “I feel we accomplished our goal of creating a space for our community to share traditional ecological knowledge and to learn from one another.”

Reflecting on the impact of the panelists’ stories, she noted, “The stories shared by our panelists were from the heart and helped show the passion for this work and the importance of food sovereignty to our communities and our overall health and well-being.”

Proctor described the foundational care, rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and community, that will be essential to sustaining future convenings. “It’s almost like a beautiful system that ebbs and flows,” she said. “But you have to nurture it and maintain those elements.”

Leonard is thinking down the line. His hope is that in 10 years, every Tribe in Michigan will have seed savers and established farms and that MSU will be seen as a genuine collaborative partner in that work. “Less education on what food sovereignty is,” he said, “and more discussion about how we need it everywhere.”