Abstract
In this paper I express pessimism about the ability of universities and other knowledge-producing institutions to be in genuine solidarity with food justice and food-sovereignty movements, given the way these institutions treat knowledge as a commodity. Using a distinction between worldviews that treat knowledge as a commodity with worldviews that do not, I endeavor to understand a particular case concerning attitudes toward knowledge about wild rice and their role in the struggle to repair the relationship between University of Minnesota researchers and the Anishinaabe people. The tendency to treat knowledge as a commodity is hard to avoid within universities and other knowledge-producing institutions, given entrenched norms that support the colonizing role these institutions historically have played. Attention to the effects of commodifying knowledge ought to be a priority if we are interested in producing knowledge that supports rather than harms movements for liberation, sovereignty, and justice.
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- 1.
I will not provide a substantive definition of solidarity in this paper since I think such an account is a bigger project than can be addressed here. I mean the term to describe the relationship of trying to stand with or advocate with people who are fighting for their own rights, respect, or liberation when one is not a member of that group. This includes people oppressed in different ways by similar structures (e.g., Latinx and Black coalitions against racism) who wish to work in coalition, as well as a subset of people who benefit from the structures against which the group is struggling, but who nonetheless are interested (at least superficially, if not when it really comes down to it) in dismantling those structures. I am inclined to think that “solidarity” describes a relationship rather than a state, and that it includes reflexivity and growth. For one characterization of various kinds of solidarity, see Scholz (2008).
Food justice refers to “a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities” (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010, ix). Food sovereignty is the concept popularized by La Via Campesina, which defines it as “The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations” (2007, 1). For a discussion of the uses and meaning of “food justice” and “-sovereignty”, see Cadieux and Slocum (2015).
- 2.
The University of Minnesota was funded by the 1862 Morrill Act which created land-grant universities by giving federal land to states, which were then to sell the land to settlers to create endowments for the universities. In Minnesota, this land was acquired by the federal government through a series of treaties with the Dakota, often procured under duress. The nominal payment to the Dakota was dramatically delayed, and the resulting privation led to the US—Dakota War in 1862, after which 38 Dakota were executed in the largest mass-execution in US history, and the Dakota were forced out of Minnesota.
- 3.
Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the participation of people who straddle this boundary has been important and fruitful as they have knowledge from within both worlds. I will nonetheless continue talking about “scientists” and “Anishinaabeg” as synecdoche for a worldview characteristic of each.
- 4.
The risk of biological contamination is related in a different way to the gap in understanding at issue here: wild rice is at risk from sulfate runoff from mining operations, and many scientists are interested in doing research that can help “save” wild rice from this pollution. This has been one contested area of possible (depending who you ask) collaboration between scientists and Anishinaabeg.
- 5.
It is worth noting here, that the meaning and use of species is not uncontentious. There has been much discussion among philosophers and scientists about the concept (for one compendium of this discussion, see Wheeler and Meier 2000), so appeals to species membership are far from conclusive.
- 6.
Here is a focus on governance that illustrates another important difference between commodified Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge. As Kyle Powys Whyte explains in an effort to resist the instrumentalization of Indigenous knowledges by interested non-Native academics and policy-makers, one central feature of Indigenous knowledges is their role in Indigenous governance (Whyte 2015).
- 7.
In point of fact the University of Minnesota does not to my knowledge hold patents on the 6 varieties of wild rice developed as a result of its research. The harms to wild rice that concern Anishinaabeg are distinct from the sort of concerns characteristic of small farmers resisting the influence of patent-hoarding corporations like Monsanto. Nonetheless the habits of treating knowledge as property plays an important role in this harm.
- 8.
Tuck and Yang use incommensurability as a powerful tool to describe moves to settler-innocence that try to incorporate Indigenous worldviews into existing colonial epistemologies in their paper, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” (Tuck and Wayne 2012). Incommensurability may be another productive way of thinking about the gulf between University of Minnesota researcher’s and Anishinaabe attitudes toward knowledge.
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Bowman, M. (2017). Institutions and Solidarity: Wild Rice Research, Relationships, and the Commodification of Knowledge. In: Werkheiser, I., Piso, Z. (eds) Food Justice in US and Global Contexts. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57174-4_18
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