“It’s more than a food program.”

In Checotah, Oklahoma, a Chickasaw ranching family are running 1,200 pairs across 6,500 acres. When they decided to branch into retail beef, they asked a question their families had been asking for generations: could they sell to the Chickasaw Nation directly?

The Chickasaw Nation has run 638 Self-Determination programs for decades and was part of the 1994 Self-Governance Demonstration Program. When Congress passed the 2018 Farm Bill creating the FDPIR Self-Determination Demonstration Project, Chickasaw Nation moved fast to procure food locally from its own citizens for the first time. The result: 62 new jobs in Council Hill, multiple processing locations, and a guaranteed market that allowed one Chickasaw family business to grow into Muskogee, Checotah, and Eufaula. 

When USDA’s mismanagement of FDPIR inventory created a national crisis, Chickasaw Nation’s local supply chain held. This story shares why Tribes are calling on Congress to make FDPIR Self-Determination permanent, and why food procurement is, as Chickasaw leadership puts it, full circle.