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…