When he was young, Luke Swampdog Tyree ’14 MESc would hunt with his family on the Virginia land where his ancestors of the Monacan Indian Nation are buried and dream of reclaiming it.
“When I was 14, I wrote a paper that stated my only goal in life was to get that land back,” said Tyree.
He never deviated from that plan.
Tyree was a first-generation high school graduate, and money was hard to come by. When he graduated from the University of Hawaii at Hilo as valedictorian, he was living in the bed of a 1984 Nissan pickup truck. He applied to the Yale School of the Environment, he said, with a sense of “youthful spite,” prompted by a 1943 letter written by a Virginia government official who named his family specifically, alongside other people of color in his community, as not being deserving of the right to build their own wealth and prosperity.
Once accepted, Tyree still wasn’t sure how he’d manage the tuition, but a fruitful conversation with YSE Professor Gordon Geballe ’81 PhD conveyed to him that the school truly wanted him to attend and that more support might be possible. Geballe encouraged him to apply for more scholarships and establish a concrete plan to make attending YSE a reality and that discussion convinced him to come.
“My classmates will tell you … I wore raggedy clothes the whole time I was there, the same Corona sweatshirt hoodie. Before I came to Yale it was raggedy, and it got worse and worse while I was there," he recalled.
The process of applying for those scholarships taught him how to write the grants that would be central to his work later with the non-profit foundation he founded, NDPonics, he noted. He also credits YSE for helping him learn the methodology that enabled him to apply and receive a patent for bio-stimulant foliar sprays that boost a plant’s abilities to absorb nutrients and grow. With the help of Gerald Torres, professor of environmental justice, he also authored the original version of a constitution for his Tribe.
After graduating, he has led NDPonics, working to reclaim, restore, and protect the natural habitat of the Indigenous people of the hills in Virginia. In honor of his efforts, Tyree received the Prospect Street Award, which recognizes a recent YSE graduate who has made significant contributions in the environmental field and exemplifies the spirit of the school.
The nonprofit has already helped reclaim about 1,000 acres, including a tract that was slated for clearing.
“I had an 800-acre piece of land that was really culturally important. The state of Virginia was going to buy it, and then they were going to clear cut big swaths of it because they needed to pay for it but couldn't get funding after the pandemic," Tyree said.
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Facing a one-year deadline to save the land, he was able to rally funders and secure a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for fish passage. What started out as a $1 million debt and the threat of desecration to his ancestral land turned into purchasing and preserving the land and generating $2 million in income. The funding has supported youth outreach, language programs, acorn gatherings (in which participants learn nature-based skills), and assistance for Indigenous mothers.
“Every dollar I got, I stretched it into $10,” he said. “I know how to do that.”
That need to stretch dollars that he once thought might prevent him from attending Yale turned out to be the very skill that allowed NDPonics to thrive, he said. The connections he made at YSE also help him to reach like-minded folks who are eager to help the cause and that network is still growing, he said.
The momentum is now in NDPonics’ favor for even more ambitious projects and he is hoping to establish an endowment to fund NDPonics going forward, he said, noting though that his remoteness from the grid can sometimes create challenges in spreading the word.
“I still live in the woods,” he said. “I still subsistence farm. But if I don’t do that, I lose the whole purpose of who I am.”