The move of an Indigenous food law and policy group to the University of Tulsa was already underway when the organization’s co-founder was named the school’s next president.
In 2012, Stacy Leeds, a Cherokee Nation citizen, was coming off a class-action settlement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on its loan practices to Native American people and tribes. In that work, she — along with attorney Janie Simms Hipp of the Chickasaw Nation — saw a need for food and agricultural experts in Indian Country.
The women started the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative to provide expertise in regulations for bureaucratic food and agriculture systems that become even more complex with the addition of land ownership arrangements and traditions within sovereign nations.
At the time, Leeds was the dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law. Hipp joined the university as a visiting professor while serving as the initiative’s first executive director. It made sense to headquarter the organization at the Fayetteville, Arkansas, campus.
Both women eventually left the university for other opportunities, while the organization remained there.
In 2024, Carly Griffith Hotvedt, a Cherokee Nation citizen and Tulsa resident, took over the organization. She joined IFAI in 2019 after working for the Muscogee Nation in helping facilitate the creation of its Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Without the organization’s founders or any federally recognized tribes in Arkansas, the initiative and its staff of 16 began looking for a different home.
“It was always a strange fit,” Griffith Hotvedt said.
Through tribal and Oklahoma connections, the group found the right fit at TU. The main campus is located on the Muscogee Reservation, and the North Campus is within the Cherokee Nation.
“We were in negotiations for the (memorandum of understanding) to move over. Then they announced that Stacy was coming in as president,” Griffith Hotvedt said. “Now it felt like this was meant to be. It was getting the band back together.”
Leeds took over as TU president on July 1, and the initiative joined the TU College of Law on Oct. 1.
At the heart of the group’s work is providing solutions for food sovereignty.
It recently published a guide for tribes to set up agriculture departments and conservation districts, to grow and expand existing agri-enterprises and to establish regulations around issues such as food safety.
“We interpret the federal minimum requirements through the lens of tribal sovereignty to ensure that tribes are preserving their own sovereignty while also engaging in federal compliance to support interstate commerce,” Griffith Hotvedt said.
The group provides resources to tribal attorneys, who are often expected to be knowledgeable in all areas of law, from gaming to foster care. It’s often difficult to specialize in food and agriculture, Griffith Hotvedt said.
“The work that we do is intended to reduce that barrier to access and provide information to cover the gap in that subject matter,” she said. “We have this landscape of federal policies that have been superimposed on our foodways, our cultural and traditional practices, that separated us physically from our food sources.
“In a regulatory fashion, it just compounds when we have all these programs developed from the Farm Bill programs and USDA, where we didn’t have a seat at the table.”
The next chapter for the organization will involve more research, legal analysis and academic publishing.
“I want to really integrate and get embedded within the TU community,” Griffith Hotvedt said.
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