Ancient traditions, new tools

Service & Community

Troy Wiipongwii is applying his academic expertise to drive real-world solutions. (Photo by Stephen Salpukas)

Troy Wiipongwii scrolls through colorful graphs and charts displayed on his computer, demonstrating a program that he's developed in collaboration with other William & Mary faculty and Indigenous leaders.

The platform gives Indigenous communities foundational information to understand the agricultural potential of their lands and develop their own food systems - an important step toward establishing food sovereignty.

"Indigenous food sovereignty is a movement led by communities and tribal nations to have more control over their food: where it comes from, what it looks like, who is producing it, etc.," he said.

The program is just one of the many things that Wiipongwii, director of innovation and entrepreneurship in conservation at William & Mary's Institute for Integrative Conservation, has done to help Indigenous communities reclaim their food systems. He's co-founded a tea company using native plants. He's partnered with tribes, chefs and farmers to create over 30 unique dishes. And he doesn't plan on slowing down any time soon.

For his career success and community impact, he was named to Virginia Business Insider's inaugural Forty Under 40 list earlier this year.

"The idea is to help the communities produce their own culturally appropriate food through environmentally sustainable methods versus relying mainly on food industrially mass produced and shipped from thousands of miles away," he said.

Bridging the information gap

Wiipongwii, who is of Chickahominy descent, sees many potential benefits with such a home-grown model. It could bolster the economic growth of Indigenous farmers, create more resilience against supply chain shocks and public health crises and connect people back to culturally significant food that can be much more nutritious than what they'd typically shop for at a supermarket.

This last point, potential health impacts, was a motivating factor for Zach Conrad to join the project. Wiipongwii's W&M grad school mentor turned friend and collaborator, Conrad is an associate professor in the department of health sciences and an expert on nutritional epidemiology and food systems science, which means he studies the health, environmental and economic implications of different diets.

"Indigenous people in the U.S. are up to three times more likely to die from conditions that are nutrition-related and preventable," said Conrad. "By equipping their communities with the decision-support tools they need to cultivate crops on their lands, they can regain sovereignty over their food systems, which can increase their access to healthy foods."

In 2020, Conrad, Wiipongwii and Matthias Leu, chair of William & Mary's biology department and an expert in geospatial analyses, launched the Indigenous Food Systems project to study all the tribal lands of the 24 tribes in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina - totaling over 3 million acres. A grant from the Jeffress Trust Awards Program in Research Advancing Health Equity supported their efforts.

The project had three phases.

Phase one focused on data collection - land boundaries, climate variables, soil characteristics and topography. Phase two used this data to produce a geospatial model capable of identifying what crops could be grown where, to varying levels of sustainability. And the third phase ascertained the type and quantity of crops that could be grown on the land, and therefore how many people could be fed.

Results from the initial phases were recently published in Scientific Reports, and the team is preparing an additional peer-reviewed paper detailing the results of phase three for publication in 2026.

Throughout the project, the team partnered closely with an Indigenous Advisory Council to gather feedback about the cultural appropriateness of the study design and answer ongoing questions about what crops they would like to see in their own food systems.

As of July 1, tribe members can log on to this platform, input their population size and demographics, desired food types and other parameters to get current and predictive data on what crops they should cultivate, where they'll find the most sustainable growing conditions and how much they need to feed their population - a significant step toward Indigenous food sovereignty.

For someone like Jessica Phillips, environmental director for the Eastern Chickahominy tribe, this tool is a game changer.

"The Indigenous Food Systems project, and the computer model developed by Native community member Troy Wiipongwii, has been instrumental for our tribe," said Phillips. "It guides us in comparing subsistence and economic ventures, mapping optimal growing areas and preparing for climate change and land loss while being versatile enough to filter for each crop type."

Wiipongwii's focus on Indigenous food systems typifies the work of the Institute for Integrative Conservation. Many of the institute's projects take a community-driven approach to address a fundamental aspect of human well-being in balance with the needs of nature.

One bite at a time

While designing the computer model, Wiipongwii and his collaborators tackled another important question: What are Indigenous foods?

Over time, in the eastern United States, Indigenous cuisine has merged with early African and European foods creating American and Southern cuisine, making the answer more nuanced, said Wiipongwii.

"Indigenous foodways don't have to be purely pre-contact," he said. "They can blend foods that come from around the world with their unique spin on it."

To build on this understanding of modern-day Indigenous foods, Wiipongwii believes it's important to evaluate two factors: food literacy and food demand.

"Food literacy is about helping communities reconnect with and understand what plants are native to their local area and might have been eaten by their ancestors pre-contact. And food demand has to do with understanding what current Indigenous communities actually have an appetite for. What types of foods might they substitute into their diet to replace non-native plants and animal proteins?"

"Indigenous foodways don't have to be purely pre-contact. They can blend foods that come from around the world with their unique spin on it."

Troy Wiipongwii

Wiipongwii decided to take a grassroots approach to researching these elements by helping to found the Traditional Eastern Woodlands Foodways Alliance (TEWFA).

"TEWFA is a collaboration between myself, tribal partners, urban Indian organizations and individual farmers and chefs to create Indigenous dishes and build an Indigenous food system for the modern day," said Wiipongwii.

Since its founding, TEWFA has created 30 unique dishes, each containing at least three native plants (using corn instead of wheat or lamb's quarter instead of spinach) and has "tested" these foods out with half a dozen communities in Virginia, North Carolina, New York and Maryland at Indigenous Peoples Feasts. Locals come, try the food and then rate the dishes according to flavor, cultural relevance and how likely they'd be to incorporate the native ingredients into their at-home cooking.

"We've had hundreds of people attend these events and received a lot of positive feedback," said Wiipongwii. "It really helps connect people with each other and leave with tangible recipes that they can replicate at home, school and tribal elder programs."

Wiipongwii has even helped these events come to William & Mary. On Nov. 1, the third annual Indigenous Peoples Feast will be held at the Raymond A. Mason School of Business and is open to the public.

Two hundred people gathered at William & Mary School of Education for W&M's inaugural Indigenous Peoples Feast. (Photo by Margaret Morrison)

Fueled by some USDA funding and working in collaboration with the Lumbee Tribe, TEWFA was able to test the demand for their recipes in several K-12 public schools in North Carolina. Thanks to the project's success, schools in Robeson County, North Carolina, will be incorporating these foods into school lunch programs during Native American Heritage month this November.

TEWFA's work has also given birth to several for-profit businesses, including IndigineiTEA. Wiipongwii co-founded this venture with foragers and partners from the Reed Center - a nonprofit researching ecologically beneficial food systems. The teas are made from a base of yaupon holly (ilex vomitoria) the only native plant in the U.S. that contains caffeine. Blends of leaves from other native plants are then added to produce unique flavor profiles.

Looking ahead

Not one to rest on his laurels, Wiipongwii continues to develop the Indigenous Food Systems project with his local and academic partners. In addition to updating the pilot of the computer program, they are curating and refining a vast database of over 44,000 native plants. The goal is to identify which species are edible and, among those, evaluate their nutritional profile and potential market viability as substitutes for current non-native ingredients.

"With the use of computational models, and natural language processing, this tool will operate like a self-contained search engine," said Wiipongwii. "Consumers will be able to ask questions like 'What is a good substitute for black pepper? What's the environmental impact and nutrient composition of pawpaw? What is a unique recipe I can create from the foraged ingredients I have: lamb's quarter, mulberry leaves, chicken of the woods, etc.?'"

Wiipongwii aims to launch this tool in the summer of 2026.

For W&M students interested in learning more about his genre of work, Wiipongwii teaches a course on sustainable food systems each year.

Catherine Tyson

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