A new store has big plans to bring more food produced by American Indians to the Madison area. The Native Market will offer wild rice, indigenous corn, vegetables, maple syrup and other products grown or cultivated by tribes in Wisconsin and other states. Now open only a couple of hours a week, the store, at 1732 Fordem Ave., will officially open in June, serving also as a regional distribution hub and art gallery for Native American artists.
“The endgame of what we are trying to do is to create a more resilient intertribal food distribution network that encourages more local production,” says Dan Cornelius, general manager of the Mobile Farmers Market, also a venture of the Intertribal Agriculture Council. Since 2013, the mobile market has traversed the Midwest bringing tribal goods to farmers’ markets, food summits and other festivals that celebrate small-scale, local agriculture.
The group has also organized pop-up markets across the state and started community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects. A recently launched seed library aims to make organic, high-quality seeds more widely available in the Great Lakes region.
Producers from the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, the Bad River Tribe, the Red Cliff Band and the Fond du Lac Band are among those partnering with the Intertribal Agriculture Council. The group is always on the lookout for gardeners and farmers on tribal lands who are seeking to scale up and make an income off their harvest.
“Having that distribution capacity for doing a smaller quantity of products is really important to emerging producers,” says Cornelius. “This type of support makes it a lot easier to break into new markets that are actively seeking local food suppliers.”
Educating the public on indigenous foods is also a central mission of the mobile market and new store in Madison. There is some historical irony, says Cornelius, to re-introducing crops like wild rice and hominy corn to the region.
“We don’t grow wild rice [in the Madison area] anymore because of pollution in the lakes and [man-made] changes to hydrology,” Cornelius explains. “We’ve all but forgotten the foods that 500 years ago used to be staples of the Wisconsin diet.”
Cornelius says the market will also build “partnerships with other local retailers and restaurants so there is wider availability and interest in these foods.”
The mobile market and new brick-and-mortar shop are funded in part by USDA grants that were supported by James Beard award-winning chef Tory Miller, proprietor of L’Etoile, Sujeo and other Madison restaurants. The organization is also exploring financial assistance from the city of Madison.
“I think it’s blowing up right now,” says Cornelius. “The whole ‘Farm to Plate’ movement really illustrates the growing excitement about indigenous, locally produced food.”
