Returning to the land: Virginia Indigenous groups want healthier lives, communities by owning and producing own food

Emily Richardson leaned on her cane in her garden in Caroline County, watching granddaughter Jay Richardson Grebe gather the “three sisters” — crops of corn, beans and squash. Richardson has lived on her lush land, about two hours north of Norfolk, for more than 60 years. She and Grebe are members of the Rappahannock Tribe and, for the past two years, Richardson has been teaching her granddaughter traditional Indigenous growing methods, such as how and why to plant the three sisters together.

Grebe is a director and founder of Just Harvest, a year-old nonprofit that teaches food sovereignty — controlling and producing what you eat — in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula. It’s led by people of various ethnic groups with backgrounds from academia to agriculture to spiritual leadership. Through workshops, the group encourages creating healthier food systems in neighborhoods, as Indigenous tribes did for centuries.

Richardson and Grebe’s ancestors lived along the Rappahannock River, which runs from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay, until colonizers four centuries ago pushed the tribe north into counties including present-day Caroline, King William, and King and Queen.

“Food sovereignty was one of the first weapons of war used against us,” Grebe said. “They burned our fields. Starved us. Changed the planting methods. Stole our land. Most of our first-contact tribes in the area were almost wiped out.”

Tribes around Virginia, particularly in and near Hampton Roads, are promoting the benefits and need to return to foodways that sustained them for centuries. Beyond the diseases and war that European explorers brought, colonizers stole land. The Powhatan Indians in the 1600s, for example, were forced inland from Werowocomoco, present-day Gloucester County, and away from the familiar rivers where they fished and fields where they grew medicinal herbs and vegetables and hunted for game.

In the mid-1800s, the U.S. government forced 100,000 American Indians living east of the Mississippi River to move to present-day Oklahoma. Thousands died.

Several groups are working to get Indigenous people back to their roots.

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A journal article published recently in “Current Developments in Nutrition” identified four elements that have proven successful: The transmission of knowledge and skills within the community through workshops; cultural connectedness through cultivation practices; preparation and consumption of traditional foods; and community-based collaborations.

Troy Wiipongwii is an adjunct lecturer and incoming director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Conservation at William & Mary. He and his team are using the four.

He and colleague Zach Conrad, assistant professor of kinesiology at W&M, are developing software and an app to identify tribal lands that are best for growing crops and estimate how much food can be produced from Indigenous food systems. Both are affiliates of the school’s Global Research Institute and received a research grant last year for the project.

Wiipongwii, who is Chickahominy, was adopted and grew up in New Jersey, away from any type of farming life. He reconnected with his biological family in Virginia and Maryland when he was 16.

During the establishment of the English colonies, his ancestors migrated from the Chickahominy River to what is today considered Charles City and New Kent County. Tribes changed their eating habits and now consume much processed and high-calorie foods, he explained.

“Furthermore, the vast majority of the tribal communities do not eat traditional foods today.”

The pandemic was a reminder of how disruptions in food pathways affect the quality of life and health. People were afraid to shop or had to rely on what was left on shelves when they did, instead of being able to go to their gardens.

Wiipongwii and Conrad went to the leaders of several state- and federally-recognized tribes before submitting their grant application, including the Mattaponi, Pamunkey, Chickahominy, Rappahannock and Nansemond. The tribes wanted to do more with growing food but issues such as housing and health care were taking precedence.

“Different communities have different needs,” Wiipongwii said.

The Eastern Chickahominy in Providence Forge received a USDA grant to partner with local farmers for food. Wiipongwii wonders, though, what will happen when the grant runs out. The Nansemond in Suffolk relied on oysters centuries ago while living along the James River — they were a significant part of the Powhatan Confederacy diet. Now the tribe, based primarily in Chesapeake and Suffolk, has an oyster restoration project but it will take time before enough are grown to be a good food source.

The W&M technology can provide data for grants. It can let Indigenous communities know how much food they will need, how much it will cost and the infrastructure they need to produce it. The tribal communities gave their blessings to the researchers to move forward with the grant.

In October, about 200 people gathered at W&M for an Indigenous Peoples Feast. It brought together 26 tribes, including 10 of the 11 state-recognized tribes, and several from North Carolina and across the country, according to a W&M online article. They spent the day learning about food sovereignty, eating and learning about traditional and contemporary Indigenous dishes such as bison meat pies, Indian fry bread tacos and a shrimp dish using burdock root.

Wiipongwii projects the software will be completed in the spring and hopes to have another feast in May, featuring a spring harvest. The app will roll out in 2025.

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During the growing season, corn stalks tower over a rustic picket fence in a plot along Colonial Williamsburg’s Duke of Gloucester Street. Vines of beans wrap around the stalks while yellow squash underneath keep the ground moist.

The Three Sisters Garden is where Native people can get food and seeds. It’s part of the Colonial Garden in which gardeners use 18th-century tools and techniques to grow herbs, vegetables and plants that represent the plots of the enslaved, American Indians and wealthy households. It is 2 years old.

“It not only teaches visitors about our Native Nations’ gardening methods and its history, but it puts Indigenous people in a space that it’s never been in Williamsburg,” said Christopher Custalow, who is Cherokee and the Indigenous Communities Engagement Manager at Colonial Williamsburg.

Tribes were known for having large plots. In a video produced by Colonial Williamsburg, a researcher notes that 17th-century journalist and cartographer Henry Timberlake observed them in the 1700s and that it took him an hour or more to walk through them.

In the first year of the Three Sisters garden, Martin Saniga, a member of the Saponi (also spelled Sappony) tribe of North Carolina, suggested planting Tutelo strawberry corn because it needed more seeds to grow. It is a rare pink corn from the Tutelo-Saponi people who have resided in the rolling hills of Person County, North Carolina and Halifax County, Virginia, since the early 1700s. After growing the corn, seeds were returned to help the tribe.

“It was too important for them to have the seeds back,” Custalow said. “We’ll continue this effort with any tribe that needs the type of assistance that we provide.”

He hopes to grow ingredients for a future Indigenous feast like the one he attended at W&M.

Growing corn, beans and squash together is efficient, Custalow said. The beans provide nitrogen for the corn; the corn supports the beans; the squash grows on the ground, preventing weeds from sprouting. The trio constituted about half of the Powhatan diet, according to a Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation article.

Custalow said in the Tutelo community, corn represents a woman and bean represents a man. Corn woman was looking for a partner to marry and found a bean man. They got together and grew well. Gardeners at Three Sisters experimented by growing them separately, then together. They found that corn woman grew better with her bean man.

The tale might be a legend, Custalow said, but “there’s some science going on there.”

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Grebe plants, harvests and weeds Just Harvest’s garden, which is on her grandmother’s land. She also teaches people how to garden, including making planters out of Coke bottles, Mason jars and creating community gardens that neighbors own and till. At workshops, Just Harvest distributes seeds such as corn, pumpkin and greens, and baby plants. Seeds are harvested from participants and shared.

Grebe sees the necessity: Four counties rely on two or three chain stores for groceries, she said. The stores can be a drive for some and don’t have the freshest fruits and vegetables. Modern Indigenous people didn’t teach their children to farm, she said. They felt they had to leave home and experience big city life or go to college to be successful.

Grebe remembers sitting on the porch as a young girl, snapping green beans with her grandmother and aunties. But she didn’t help her grandmother in the garden. She left home and got a bachelor’s in visual arts and a master’s in education from Frostburg State University in Maryland. Eventually, her grandmother grew tired and ceased gardening. Grebe found dusty jars of tomatoes, kale and greens in her grandmother’s basement.

About a couple of years ago, Grebe’s 5-year-old daughter wanted to start a garden and Mom had to study YouTube videos until her grandmother stepped in. Grebe had also become involved with a project through the University of Virginia that wanted to improve communities’ resilience to flooding. It asked people in her community how the program could help them. She and several others said they needed to feed people and teach people how to feed themselves. That was the beginning of Just Harvest.

Richardson allows the organization to use her land for free. The nonprofit is trying to get funding to buy back some of the land that was once tribal territory. It’s hosting a seed harvesting workshop in January.

“It’s been great to see people from diverse backgrounds come to the workshops,” Grebe said, “connect with each other and share food together.”