Indigenous Food Systems

Reviewed by: Indigenous Food Systems: Concepts, Cases, and Conversations ed. by Priscilla Settee and Shailesh Shukla Liza Grandia (bio) Indigenous Food Systems: Concepts, Cases, and Conversations edited by Priscilla Settee and Shailesh Shukla Canadian Scholars, 2020 in 1996, seventy organizations representing peasant, Indigenous, fisherfolk, farmworker, and other land-based movements from six continents gathered in Tlaxcala, Mexico, for the second international conference organized by Via Campesina (translated in English as “the peasant way”). Countering the caloric-centric rhetoric of “food security” from the Cold War era, Via Campesina delegates proclaimed core principles of “food sovereignty” to support the rights of small food producers to control land, water, and natural resources. The language of sovereignty appealed to many impoverished nations who had begun to question unfair World Trade Organization rules on agriculture and also resonated with North American tribal governments for whom the concept underscores their inherent right to self-determination. With agribusiness giants merging into just three global conglomerates in the 2000–2010s, the defense of seeds from patents or genetic modification rightly became a global mobilizing issue for Via Campesina, which now represents 200 million families from 182 organizations. Not all small producers plant seeds, however. While some of Turtle Island was agrarian (and on par with other great agricultural civilizations in Mesopotamia and China), two-thirds of North America’s Original Peoples relied on seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering. The wild rice, berries, meat, and medicines of First Nations/Inuit/Métis food systems of the far North, by necessity, are stewarded collectively and transgenerationally. As one author aptly put it, “Asatiwisipe Anishinaabeg food sovereignty needs a community to feed a community” (63). Health itself in Cree is miyupimaatisiiun (“being alive [together] well” [89]). Emphasizing this fundamental point in multiple ways, this marvelous volume is organized into three parts: a conceptual introduction, community cases, and final reflections for action. Readers should sample the dessert first—that is, the final editorial synthesis (chapter 15)—then delve backward through the cases and chew last on the theoretical chapters (if their digestion can handle the “phenomenological” dressing). For use as a textbook, each chapter has an outline, definitions, role models in the author biographies, and brilliant pedagogical questions for broader critical thinking. On average, a third of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples are food insecure. [End Page 162] Rather than approaching the topic from deficit-based questions of “lack,” hunger, and poverty, the authors document and make visible the quiet but consequential ways that Indigenous Peoples remain resiliently committed to harvesting, bartering, and sharing land/bush/country food—even across long distances with their urban kinfolk (chapter 10). While corporate billionaires seek prestige with phallic space rockets, First Nations subsistence systems display a truer form of affluence, where “the hunter who is generous with the products of his harvest is usually one of the most influential men in the community” (66, from chapter 4 on Anishinaabe customary laws, wildlife knowledge, and trapping practices). For subsistence producers, territory is simultaneously foodscape, landscape, and culturescape through blood memory. Ancestral bush skills of seasonal and long-term planning are also plain hard work—and “to be alone in the still silence of the wilderness is not easy to master” (58). Bureaucratic systems can never capture the intricate web of social and ecological relations needed to survive on the land, so subsistence providers face innumerable institutional obstacles in acquiring hunting, harvesting, and firearm permits to continue millennial practices in their own territory. Although the settler fur trade caused the near extinction of key wildlife species (e.g., beaver, bison, wolf) that served as “ecosystem engineers,” the Northern Store (directly descended from two British colonial companies) continues to enjoy a retail monopoly in many remote towns, charging outrageous prices for subsidized junk food. Even while Indigenous advocates have successfully begun to decolonize Canada’s Food Guide to include “nutritious traditional foods” in the food pyramid, other public health regulations perversely force traditional foods underground. Chuckling at the absurdity of settler “help,” one Elder reflected on how “someone from Winnipeg” decided to send a northern First Nation some cows that promptly got eaten by wolves (73). With gentle critique of the agrarian bias of the global food sovereignty

Agriculture · Archaeology · China · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Food security · Food sovereignty · Geography · Indigenous · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Ecology