Guides: Environmental Inequalities, Justice, and Sustainability: Food Sovereignty

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Indigenous food sovereignty is critical because many health issues are tied to colonialism and the exploitation of resources and people. Food in the most intimate connection to ourselves, our ancestors, our communities, but most importantly, to our future generations.

Source: I-Collective

Mexican-origin foods, foodways, and social movements : decolonial perspectives by Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781610756181
Publication Date: 2017
This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities. The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow's transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways from Chiapas to Alaska. Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, which takes into account the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species and generations. Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems through daily lived acts of producing and sharing food, knowledge, and seeds in both place-based and displaced communities. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.
The Struggle for Food Sovereignty by Remy Herrera (Editor); Kin Chi Lau (Editor)
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0745335942
Publication Date: 2015-09-15
Food sovereignty--or the right of a people to operate and control their own food and agricultural systems--has all but disappeared throughout much of the world, usurped by multinational corporations engaging in industrialized farming and global trade. The Struggle for Food Sovereignty examines the prospects and struggles of family farms, peasants, and others in the fight for control over local sustenance and rights of access to land and food. The authors examine the issues in both the global north and south, finding a common vision even amid apparently radically differing political and economic conditions.
Translating Food Sovereignty by Matthew C. Canfield
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781503613447
Publication Date: 2022-04-19
In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to these problems, growing global "food sovereignty" movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansive social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the ground up.

A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other by Charlotte Coté
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0295749520
Publication Date: 2021-11-01
In the dense rainforest of the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Somass River (c̓uumaas) brings sockeye salmon (miaat) into the Nuu-chah-nulth community of Tseshaht. C̓uumaas and miaat are central to the sacred food practices that have been a crucial part of the Indigenous community's efforts to enact food sovereignty, decolonize their diet, and preserve their ancestral knowledge. In A Drum in One Hand, a Salmon in the Other, Charlotte Coté shares contemporary Nuu-chah-nulth practices of traditional food revitalization in the context of broader efforts to re-Indigenize their diets. Coté shares evocative stories of her Tseshaht community's and her own work to revitalize relationships to haum (traditional food) as a way to nurture health and wellness. As Indigenous peoples continue to face food insecurity due to ongoing inequality, environmental degradation and the Westernization of traditional diets, Coté foregrounds healing and cultural sustenance via everyday enactments of food sovereignty: berry picking, salmon fishing, and building a community garden on reclaimed residential school grounds. This book is for everyone with concerns about their health and shows how food plays a major role in physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness
Food Sovereignty the Navajo Way by Charlotte J. Frisbie; Tall Tall Woman (Contribution by); Augusta Sandoval (Contribution by)
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780826358882
Publication Date: 2018-04-15
Around the world, indigenous peoples are returning to traditional foods produced by traditional methods of subsistence. The goal of controlling their own food systems, known as food sovereignty, is to reestablish healthy lifeways to combat contemporary diseases such as diabetes and obesity. This is the first book to focus on the dietary practices of the Navajos, from the earliest known times into the present, and relate them to the Navajo Nation's participation in the global food sovereignty movement. It documents the time-honored foods and recipes of a Navajo woman over almost a century, from the days when Navajos gathered or hunted almost everything they ate to a time when their diet was dominated by highly processed foods.
Indigenous food sovereignty in the United States : restoring cultural knowledge, protecting environments, and regaining health by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780806165783
Publication Date: 2019
Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect 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. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

Food Sovereignty Articles

Food Sovereignty Articles
Indigenous Food Sovereignty Articles

Food Sovereignty in the city?: A methodological proposal for evaluating food sovereignty in urban settings
Although the possibility of achieving food sovereignty in urban environments is controversial, we believe that food sovereignty is attainable. In this work we propose a methodology for evaluating it, then test that proposal using San Cristóbal de Las Casas as a case study. For this purpose, we used a participatory methodology to construct a system of food-sovereignty indicators for urban settings. After review and validation by participants and a group of experts, that system consisted of 30 indicators. We tested it by using it to survey households in San Cristóbal. We found that the set of 30 indicators is coherent with the principles of food sovereignty, and that it enabled us to reveal the alimentary vulnerability of the city’s families. We hope that the principles that form the basis for the proposed methodology will be applicable when designing instruments for assessing other cities’ levels of food sovereignty.
Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice
Even as resilience thinking becomes evermore popular as part of strategic programming among development and humanitarian organizations, uncertainty about how to define, operationalize, measure, and evaluate resilience for development goals prevails. As a result, many organizations and institutions have undertaken individual, collective, and simultaneous efforts toward clarification and definition. This has opened up a unique opportunity for a rethinking of development practices. The emergent consensus about what resilience means within development practice will have important consequences both for development practitioners and the communities in which they work. Incorporating resilience thinking into development practice has the potential to radically transform this arena in favor of social and environmental justice, but it could also flounder as a way to dress old ideas in new clothes or, at worst, to further exploit, disempower, and marginalize the world’s most vulnerable populations. We seek to make an intervention into the definitional debates surrounding resilience that supports the former and helps prevent the latter. We argue that resilience thinking as it has been developed in social-ecological systems and allied literatures has a lot in common with the concept of food sovereignty and that paying attention to some of the lessons and claims of food sovereignty movements could contribute toward building a consensus around resilience that supports social and environmental justice. In particular, the food sovereignty movement relies on a strategy that elevates rights. We suggest that a rights-based approach to resilience-oriented development practice could contribute to its application in just and equitable ways.

We Need to Live off the Land: An Exploration and Conceptualization of Community-Based Indigenous Food Sovereignty Experiences and Practices
Although Indigenous food systems are sustainable in nature, many of these systems have been forcibly altered among Indigenous communities within Canada, as a consequence of colonization. Indigenous Food Sovereignty (IFS) movements work to counteract the dismantling of Indigenous food systems as well as the negative health impacts of environmental dispossession experienced by Indigenous communities. Through community-based participatory research methodologies and the utilization of Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing, this research project explored community perspectives of IFS in Western Canada. Reflexive thematic analysis of qualitative data collected during a sharing circle held with community members identified the influence of Indigenous Knowledge and community support on three main aspects of Indigenous food sovereignty, including (1) environmental concerns, (2) sustainable practices and (3) a strong relationship with the land and waters. Through the sharing of stories and memories related to traditional foods and current sovereignty projects, community members identified concerns for their local ecosystem as well as a desire to preserve its natural state for generations to come. The strengthening of IFS movements is critical to the overall wellbeing of Indigenous communities within Canada. Support is needed for movements that honour relationships with traditional foods and recognize traditional lands and waters as necessary for healing and sustaining the health of Indigenous communities

Additional Resources

The Indigenous Food Systems Network
The Indigenous Food Systems Network Website was developed by the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (WGIFS) and is designed to allow individuals and groups involved with Indigenous food related action, research, and policy reform to network and share relevant resources and information.
Why Food Sovereignty Matters:American Indian and Alaska Native communities often lack easy access to fresh, affordable food
There’s no universal definition for food sovereignty, but it can be described as the ability of communities to determine the quantity and quality of the food that they consume by controlling how their food is produced and distributed. Food sovereignty initiatives like farm-to-table and farm-to-school programs are important for the long-term health, economic stability, and cultural preservation of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities. A growing number of AI/AN individuals today are starting to regain control of their food supply by growing traditional foods on their own and collaborating with the federal government.