“If you’re walking through a supermarket, bring your ancestors home with you.” – Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot)
What is food sovereignty? “Food sovereignty”, a term coined by members of Via Campesina in 1996, asserts that the people who produce, distribute, and consume food should control the mechanisms and policies of food production and distribution.
What is Indigenous food sovereignty? The inherent right of Indigenous people to define their own food systems. Throughout Indian Country, Native “food sovereignty” describes a myriad of local efforts to transform and reclaim local food systems, from combating hunger, increasing access to healthy and traditional foods, enhancing community health, and creating food policies, to targeting food as a mechanism for entrepreneurship and economic development.
Centuries of colonization have caused us to be separated from our foods. As Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot) explained: “…a loss of land, a loss of rights, a loss of knowledge, environmental toxins, cultural oppression and a modern lifestyle that impedes our access to traditional foods.” Many other factors have disrupted Indigenous communities’ ability to control our own food systems. The following resources explore the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples across the Americas. The resources address aspects of Indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare.
Books on Indigenous Food Sovereignty
- The Pueblo Food Experience: Whole Food of Our Ancestors, Roxanne Swentzell, Patricia M. Perea, 2016
- Feeding 7 Generations: a Salish Cookbook,
- Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing, Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, 2015
- Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (Volume 18) (New Directions in Native American Studies Series), 2019
- The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, Sean Sherman, 2017
Online resources
- La Via Campesina
- Native Food Systems, First Nations Development Institute
- Lakota foods and food sovereignty w/ Lisa & Arlo Iron Cloud, The Red Nation Podcast, 2019
- All My Relations Podcast, Ep #2: Food Sovereignty: A Growing Movement, March 2, 2019
- Ancestral Guard Youth Project
- White Earth Land Recovery Project
- Food sovereignty: Valerie Segrest, TEDxRainier, 2014
- Garden Warriors Good Seeds, from Garden Warriors to Good Seeds: Indigenizing the Local Food Movement
- The Sioux Chef
- Decolonizing Diet project
- Comida, Territorio y Memoria: Situación alimentaria de los pueblos indígenas colombianos
- Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (great database of native plants of North America)
Foods:
- Twitter thread of Indigenous foods you can buy!
- Ziibimijwang Farm
- BirchBark Coffee Co.
- Ramona Farms, American Indian Foods
- Association of Guardians of the Native Potato from Central Peru (South America)
- Native Harvest Ojibwe Products, a subdivision of White Earth Land Recovery Project
- Camas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camassia
- Billy Frank: http://billyfrankjr.org/
Groups to follow:
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