In “Virginia Public Schools Serve Indigenous Cuisine,” Gravy producer Anya Groner takes listeners to the second annual Indigenous Peoples Feast at the College of William & Mary. The evening’s menu showcases indigenous food–foraged wild rice, duck confit, acorn grits, and a four-corn stew. But these dishes aren’t just for enjoying tonight. With the help of a USDA grant, they’ll eventually be served at public school cafeterias in Virginia’s coastal Tidewater Region.

Coming up with the menu wasn’t easy. Centuries of forced assimilation, land grabs, and genocide prevented cultural knowledge from being passed down through generations. Designed by Chef Diosa Hall from the Mohawk Nation and Chef Joe Rocchi from the Pamunkey Tribe, the meal combined native plants and fowl from the Eastern Seaboard with contemporary culinary trends, emphasizing the entire production process, from tiny seed to plated meal. Volunteers foraged herbs like plantain and bergamot. Hunters donated ducks. Growers harvested sustainably farmed vegetables.

Scaling up the supply chain to make these ingredients available to hundreds of schools could take two or three decades. Dr. Troy Wiipongwii is the Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Conservation at the College of William and Mary and a founding member of the Traditional Eastern Woodlands Foodways Alliance, the intertribal group leading this program. He says sustainable foods cost almost double to produce, but they’re worth it. Agricultural systems like food forests not only rebuild ecosystems, but they also produce nutrient-dense food that’s healthier to eat. Wiipongwii put together a K-12 curriculum integrating indigenous foodways into science, math, health, and humanities to change attitudes around food production.

Chef Hall believes making native foods available in public schools will give indigenous students a sense of belonging. That’s especially important because schools haven’t always been welcoming places for Native children. For centuries, residential schools took children from Native families and forced them to learn European culture and adopt Christianity. Hall hopes the new menu she helped put together will reclaim some of the cultural practices targeted by the residential schools.

Listen to find out what it will take to keep indigenous food traditions visible in the nation’s cultural landscape—and how kids rate acorn grits and butternut squash against the typical school lunch.

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