Tribes in the Great Lakes Region 

Tribal nations across the Great Lakes Region are reclaiming food sovereignty and restoring physical, cultural, and economic health to their communities.

The Great Lakes Intertribal Food Coalition, comprised of diverse groups, are reestablishing traditional trade routes, creating a viable small business ecosystem of producers, and generating economic pathways for tribal members to produce traditional foods and products. In doing so, they are replacing certain extractive, colonial, and government-funded food systems designed to exclude and harm their communities. These groups include tribal elders across Wisconsin, tribal food producers, state food distributors, and local educators.

Building on pandemic-era rapid-response efforts, the coalition has created and sustained critical food justice infrastructure and networks that feed their elders, reshape and build local food systems, and reflect Indigenous approaches to community care. The results are remarkable: they have expanded economic opportunities, improved health outcomes, and reignited meaningful cultural and intergenerational connections. This powerful cross-community work is a promising model for how regional communities can work together to revitalize, restore, and celebrate cross-generational learning, culture, and community. Key highlights of their work include:

• The distribution of Tribal Elder Food Boxes are connecting the dots between Tribe members in caring ways that bring greater wealth and health to the whole community. Working together, sovereign Indigenous tribes in the region are coordinating efforts to feed elders through a collaborative distribution of recurring food boxes that are packed with locally grown, culturally relevant, nutritionally dense and sustainably raised food. They’ve distributed more than 94,000 boxes since the program’s inception in June 2021. For these communities, sustaining their own food and sovereignty go hand-in-hand. 
• Local cooperatives coordinate acquiring, repacking, and distribution of the large amounts of food needed for the Tribal Elder Food Box program, providing the capacity to distribute food themselves. Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin coordinates a team of volunteers to pack the food. Individual tribal distribution centers coordinate volunteers to hand out boxes in their own communities across the region.
• Active efforts by the Coalition to build relationships between Indigenous producers and small farmers have helped provide them both with stable and value-based market opportunities and a reliable source of income. 
• The Coalition is conducting a full food systems assessment of each Tribes’ needs, assets, and interests to help Tribes expand their food systems programs, including expansion into intertribal initiatives. Initiatives like farm-to-school, food-as-medicine, and produce prescription programs, each of which could serve to diversify markets for Native producers, all serve as critical steps toward long-term economic stability.
• Intertribal, state, and national politics influence many issues that tribal nations may or may not agree on, and the level of intertribal collaboration exemplified by the work of this community is historic in the modern context. Tribe members are partnering with the understanding that the health of tribal elders, the knowledge-keepers of their respective nations, rises above any differences or concerns.