Abstract
The popularity of ‘food sovereignty’ to cover a range of positions, interventions, and struggles within the food system is testament, above all, to the term’s adaptability. Food sovereignty is centrally, though not exclusively, about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system—it is a way of talking about a theoretically-informed food systems practice. Since people are different, we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts, albeit consonant with a core set of principles (including women’s rights, a shared opposition to genetically modified crops, and a demand for agriculture to be removed from current international trade agreements). In this paper we look at the analytical points of friction in applying ideas of food sovereignty within the context of Indigenous struggles in North America. This, we argue, helps to clarify one of the central themes in food sovereignty: that it is a continuation of anti-colonial struggles, even in post-colonial contexts. Such an examination has dividends both for scholars of food sovereignty and for those of Indigenous politics: by helping to problematize notions of food sovereignty and postcoloniality, but also by posing pointed questions around gender for Indigenous struggles.
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These political-discursive visions of Indigenous self-determination differ from normative-theoretical accounts in a number of ways, yet a key commonality is their thoroughgoing refusal of gendered analyses of contemporary colonialism or the persistent, essentialist divisions and oppressions induced by colonization. Even the most popular accounts are conspicuously un-gendered (see for example, Alfred 1999; Alfred 2005; Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2008). Thus colonial governments and anticolonial theorists may unwittingly work in tandem to “normalize and perpetuate an irrelevance of gender and the disenfranchisement of Indian women in Native sovereignty struggles” (Barker 2006, p. 128).
This is a live debate in the field of Indigenous Studies and in Indigenous politics generally. The language used earlier in this paper—that of ‘right relationships’—is preferable to a discourse that implies a morally autonomous, modernist self (and further, of a conceptualization of the individual that itself ‘performs’ imperialism). This being said, the vocabulary of rights is well-suited to framing wrongdoing and justifying forward-looking change and/or backward-looking redress, while having the added benefit of being widely recognized and ‘spoken’ as such. Accordingly, the utility of rights in stemming the further colonialist erosion of Indigenous nations and territories has been noted by many Indigenous (and in particular, feminist Indigenous) scholars, while globally human rights have become the lingua franca of international Indigenous advocacy. See for example, Gabriel 2011; Kuokkanen 2012. .
Adding insult to injury, governmental publications (such as Eating Well with Canada's Food Guide - First Nations, Inuit and Métis) list bannock as a traditional food, an example of “how [Indigenous] people got, and continue to get, nutrients found in milk products” (and which must now be replaced by milk products as prophylaxis against the premature mortality and morbidity stemming from the colonial dietary shift) (Health Canada 2007, p. 3).
Manoomin was also a key staple of the traditional food systems and economies of many Anishnaabeg whose communities lie to the north of Minnesota, in Ontario and Manitoba (A. Mills, personal communication, 24 October 2013).
Non-Indigenous fishermen and hunters invariably resist any assertion that boils down to a non-universal right to hunt or fish out-of-season.
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The authors are grateful for editorial and reviewer comments in improving this piece, and extend thanks to the members of the Indigenous Studies Workshop at the University of Victoria for their valuable feedback. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Grey, S., Patel, R. Food sovereignty as decolonization: some contributions from Indigenous movements to food system and development politics. Agric Hum Values 32, 431–444 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9548-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9548-9