At Ashawaug Farm in southwest Rhode Island, Dawn and Cassius Spears are doing more than growing food — they’re keeping centuries of Indigenous agricultural knowledge alive. The couple cultivates three Narragansett heritage crops: white corn, succotash beans and crookneck squash.
While they want to grow their farm’s reach beyond their roadside stand, doing so has proven difficult. Like countless small-scale food producers, the Spears have turned to federal assistance programs for support — only to watch some of those programs get slashed or dramatically reduced under the Trump administration, including U.S. Department of Agriculture initiatives that specifically helped tribal farmers.
Native tribes had been counting on those programs to grow and share culturally meaningful foods within their communities.
“When we go into these federal programs, we’re hoping that they’ll last long enough,” Cassius Spears said. “They usually start out with a good song and dance. And they’re going to last a long time. And then something happens where they get cut.”
During the pandemic, the Biden administration launched two programs designed to help states and tribes buy locally grown food for food banks and schools: the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA) and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program (LFS). These initiatives gave farmers — including those from tribal communities — dependable buyers for their goods. Tribal governments also received funding to purchase food from nearby producers and distribute it to their members.
The arrangement allowed tribes to direct federal money straight to small producers, said Carly Griffith Hotvedt, executive director of the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative and a member of Cherokee Nation. The Spears’ farm supplied food to a tribal farm in neighboring Connecticut that was drawing on LFPA funds, following an agreement reached in August 2022.
In some cases, tribes used that funding to source culturally important items like bison meat, specific varieties of berries and wild rice, which were distributed in food boxes to tribal members. For lower-income individuals within those communities, it was often the only realistic way to access those foods, Hotvedt said.
“It wasn’t just commodity foods in that box. It was highly local, traditionally relevant, culturally relevant foods that were included,” Hotvedt said.
In March 2025, the Trump administration’s Agriculture Department shut down both programs, which had together provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks. Officials said the programs no longer fit the agency’s priorities.
U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, and Sen. Jim Justice, a West Virginia Republican, have since introduced legislation they say takes the strongest elements of those two programs and builds a lasting grant structure. The bill would let state and tribal governments purchase locally sourced food from nearby producers and channel it to hunger relief organizations and schools in their areas.
Reed expressed concern that the USDA cuts would leave families across the country struggling to put food on the table — and that what food they could access would be less fresh and nutritious.
Reed is pushing to attach the legislation to the Farm Bill, the sweeping multi-year federal law that shapes agricultural and food policy across the country. The House passed its version of the Farm Bill in April, and a Senate committee released a draft in late June. The House version also contains a bipartisan proposal for a permanent program modeled after the Local Food Purchase Assistance program, which would allow states to work through the USDA to build cooperative agreements linking local farmers with food distribution organizations.
Both proposals would reserve 10% of program funding specifically for tribes.
For any new program to truly work, Congress must include mandatory funding so that farmers can plan ahead, buy supplies and hire workers with confidence, said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The House version, she noted, would require Congress to approve funding on a yearly basis.
Reed said he’s pushing hard for mandatory funding in the Senate version, arguing that without it, very little actually gets funded — and that farms are already under enormous financial strain. A program that’s only optional, he said, won’t provide the stability farmers need.
“We really want to punch through the existing obstacles for small farmers and Native American farmers,” he said.
Dawn and Cassius Spears want to see Indigenous producers given priority when tribal entities are purchasing food. They also believe that creating dedicated programs accessible directly to Indigenous producers — outside of tribal government channels — would open doors for more Native farmers.
On an early morning at the start of this year’s planting season, Dawn Spears worked beneath the canopy of one of her farm’s high tunnels, carefully separating tiny tomato plants before moving them to an outdoor field. The farm’s name honors the Narragansett word for the river running through town. What began as a small community garden and food sovereignty effort has grown into a 6-acre operation.
Her 9-year-old grandson, Giizhig, wandered in to offer a hand.
“Only if you want to,” Spears told him. “It’s always good to know how to do it, right?”
Passing that knowledge to the next generation is central to her mission. But her culture extends beyond farming — it includes gathering wild foods and protecting the land where those foods naturally grow. She’s working to preserve land near the farm as surrounding development expands, with plans to introduce native plants that can be foraged for food. Federal programs, she said, can also play a role in helping communities secure access to that land.
“If you take a person away from the land that they come from, then it’s like they’re not whole,” she said. “We have to eat the food that’s naturally from that space that we come from.”
