Medicine Food: Critical Environmental Justice Studies,Native North American Literature,and the Movement for Food Sovereignty

The recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine—not only for the body but also for the soul and for the spiritual connection to history, ancestors and the land. ¹

—Winona LaDuke

In Power, Justice, and the Environment, David Naguib Pellow and Robert Brulle give a name to an academic field emerging around a movement—”critical environmental justice studies.” ² Pellow and Brulle's collection shines a constructively critical, rather than broadly congratulatory, light on the environmental justice movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors examine the extensive literature that has provided ample case studies, demographies, and statistics proving that environmental risks have been inequitably distributed, with poor people, people of color, and people of the Global South bearing a greater share of the burden than richer people and people of the Global North. An earlier collection, The Environmental Justice Reader, brings the voices of writers and artists into the conversation as it explores not only politics and policy, but poetics and pedagogy. Contributors examine how literature, art, public gardens, and street theater strengthen the movement by making its culturally diverse and anti-discrimination agendas more accessible to audiences both inside and outside academia. ³ Contributor Julie Sze, for example, observes that most of the “literature of environmental justice” has taken a sociological and statistical approach. Yet, there are other kinds of intellectual inquiry, she argues, that should not be ignored. Literary works, or “environmental justice literature,” contributes importantly to academic environmental justice studies by offering a way of looking at the issues through visual images and metaphors, rather than statistics alone. Literature often sets issues within a more flexible, global context and illuminates connections to history, Sze observes. It allows environmental justice to be seen not only as a political movement concerned with public policy but also as a cultural movement interested in issues of ideology and representation. ⁴

In American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place, I explored how literature set within Native North American communities enhances understanding of the social and environmental injustices that followed the colonization, conquest, slavery, and exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands. I drew connections to the environmental justice movement and raised questions about the demographic homogeneity of the contemporary environmental movement and the narrow scope of environmental literary studies focused on North American non-fiction nature writing. Building on the work of scholars working in American studies and ethnic studies who were mapping the terrain of a growing literary movement concerned with ecological issues, I discussed how Native North American indigenous writers were representing environmental injustices in their communities in ways that directed readers away from post-1960s environmentalist concepts such as “wilderness” and towards concepts connected to indigenous agroecological farming traditions. ⁵ Indigenous writers are not romanticizing “earlier, simpler times,” I concluded. ⁶ They are drawing readers into a “middle place” between nature and culture where the garden or farm might be seen as “a powerful symbol of political resistance.” ⁷

In my recent scholarship and teaching, I am using literature to enhance understanding of why indigenous peoples around the world are advocating for a rights and culturally based approach to food. In the classroom, this focus can help students understand why an increasingly industrialized food system has become an important site of contest over human health, food, food policy, agricultural practices, and global ecological health. However, it is important at the outset of any discussion or course focused on indigenous food sovereignty to state clearly that the act of gardening and farming is not just a symbol among indigenous peoples and/or urban communities which are organizing around access to fresh, healthy foods. As the widely discussed case of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles illustrates, many indigenous and urban gardeners are not so much interested in symbolic politics as they are in simply providing traditional “first food” cuisines that may likely improve the health of their families. ⁸ While sympathetic or interested others, including academics, might view gardening or agroecological farming as a symbol of political resistance, this may not be the focus of the farmers/gardeners who are exercising their autonomy without feigning to inspire or lead an organized political movement, although some do become part of such movements. Moreover, it is likely that few Native farmers themselves are necessarily familiar with the creative works of Native North American writers, although it is understood that poetry and novels can inspire organized acts of political-discursive resistance.

That said, most U.S. college students, and indeed a large number of Americans know little to nothing about how their food is produced. Native North American literature which addresses first foods and agroecological farming practices can make discussion of the “right to food” accessible and illustrate why this issue matters not just to indigenous peoples but to all people. For that reason, it is important to set this literature into a historical and political context that illuminates how the notion that indigenous peoples have a sovereign “right to food” has been affirmed in an array of international instruments created by international governmental and non-government alliances. These documents include the United Nations International Bill of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976). ⁹ “Food sovereignty” entered international policy debates when it was put forward at the 1996 World Food Summit and later defined at the First Indigenous Peoples' Global Consultation on the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty organized in 2002 by the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), an organization of Indigenous Peoples from North, Central, South America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. ¹⁰ The “Declaration of Atitlán,” which emerged from this meeting, affirmed that “Food sovereignty for indigenous peoples is a collective right based on rights to our lands, territories and natural resources, the practice of our cultures, languages and traditions, and is essential to our identity as Peoples.” ¹¹ This Declaration emerged from over thirty years of previous work, in the form of meetings and summits, held throughout the Americas, and increasingly focused around a concept of “food sovereignty,” which called attention to the ideologies and external forces that have been threatening indigenous food systems for hundreds of years. ¹²

In 2007, the range of rights required for the full exercise of “food sovereignty” was affirmed by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which pays particular attention to the connections between the right to cultural and economic self-determination and the right to maintain and protect seeds and medicines anciently developed through traditional agroecological practices. ¹³ It is important to note that each of the UNDRIP Articles focused on “first foods” and “food sovereignty” grew out of the Global South campaigns mentioned above and the persistent responses of indigenous North American communities to broken treaties between First Nations and the expansionist U.S. For example, in the fifty years after the Pacific Northwest territory of Washington became a state (1889–1939), non-indigenous commercial fishers caught salmon by the millions of tons in the Pacific Ocean and Puget Sound, but the state blamed declining fish runs on Indian netting and lawlessness. It was argued that Indian fishermen didn't follow state-mandated seasons, didn't get licenses or heed catch limits. Then, in 1974, after years of protests and indigenous-led “fish-ins,” and a lawsuit against the state of Washington based in sovereign rights, Federal Judge George H. Boldt issued one of the most sweeping rulings in the history of the Pacific Northwest, affirming the treaty rights of Northwest tribal fishermen and allocating to them 50 percent of the harvestable catch of salmon and steelhead. According to University of Colorado law professor Charles F. Wilkinson, the Boldt decision is still among the two or three most-significant decisions in the history of Indian law. ¹⁴ But beyond its importance to U.S. Indian law, what is important for the food sovereignty and environmental justice movements about this decision is that it calls attention to the ways in which struggles for fishing rights in the Northwest were about the defense of first foods, which are at the center of tribal identities. This means that the struggle for fishing rights, which began even before Washington's statehood, must be seen as an earlier form of the struggle for food sovereignty couched in the language of tribal sovereignty and treaty rights. In other words, the food sovereignty movement began well before the World Food Summit and domestic U.S. environmental justice groups became active in the 1980s–90s. Thus, the food sovereignty movement has deep roots in indigenous campaigns to force states to abide by treaty obligations including the right to “first foods” like salmon, elk, deer, camas, geoduck, and huckleberry. ¹⁵

Aware of these hemispheric organizational activities, a number of Native North American poets and novelists began producing creative writings in the 1990s that illustrate the historical relationship between indigenous peoples and the foods that are culturally and nutritionally necessary to their survival. ¹⁶ But in this short essay, I will limit my focus to the work of two of the most celebrated Native North American women writers, Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). Each has written novels with clear connections to contemporary place-based indigenous groups that are organizing to reinvigorate traditional food systems and protect ancient strains of domesticated staple crops like corn, and non-domesticated foods like wild rice, cactus fruits, tepary beans, and amaranth.

LaDuke, the first novelist whose work I will examine, is a well-known food sovereignty activist and scholar. In 1999, she wrote All Our Relations, an in-depth nonfiction study describing the environmental and cultural ravages of corporations and government on U.S. reservation lands. The book also details Native resistance to this degradation. There is a “direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity,” LaDuke observes, and, in each chapter, she illustrates that wherever indigenous peoples remain, “there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity.” ¹⁷ Her novel, Last Standing Woman, spans seven generations of her own community's history and tells the stories of over fifty characters whose words and actions illustrate the links between cultural diversity and biodiversity. LaDuke introduces readers to wild rice and its place among the White Earth Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) people of Minnesota as the narrator delves into the history behind characters that represent the ordinary people who are organizing their community to oppose large scale political and economic forces that threaten the forests and lakes where they live and work. After the publication of this novel, in a move that mirrors the activities of her characters, LaDuke founded Native Harvest, an Ojibwe community development group that brings together traditional singers, dancers, and weavers with farmers, agroecologists, ethnoecologists, economists, historians, and artists to promote the idea that “food is medicine” not only for the body but for connecting the community spiritually “to history, ancestors and the land.” ¹⁸ Native Harvest also promotes economic self-reliance by working to “restore traditional foods and capture a fair market price” for wild rice, hominy corn, raspberries, maple syrup, and buffalo sausage. ¹⁹

Leslie Marmon Silko, the second novelist whose work I examine here, is best known for Ceremony, which is the Native North American novel most assigned in college and university courses for the last thirty years. Her second novel, Almanac of the Dead garnered respect among both literary critics and indigenous community organizers for its provocative representation of an “Army of Retribution” with affinities to the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, a group that surprised the world as a guerilla uprising in 1994 but quickly made it clear that their primary goal was not violence, but taking a stand against trade liberalization policies that threatened the cultural and economic futures of indigenous American peoples. ²⁰ The Zapatista rebellion drew the world's attention to the decades-long organizing among indigenous groups around foods, farming, and food sovereignty. Their activities spurred Silko's interest in the politics of food and she set her next novel, Gardens in the Dunes, in the lands of the Tohono O'odham people who have been living for centuries in the Sonoran Desert straddling the Arizona, U.S.-Sonora, Mexico borders. In 1996, members of this tribe organized Tohono O'odham Community Action (TOCA) to protect traditionally cultivated strains of corn and tepary beans and wild O'odham foods and medicines like amaranth and cactus fruits. ²¹ This novel is set in the nineteenth century and does not address the twenty-first century activities of TOCA, but the actions of its characters offer readers historical insight into why contemporary indigenous groups are organizing globally to protect their right to fresh, healthy culturally meaningful foods. In what follows, I read Last Standing Woman and Gardens in the Dunes as “case studies” that contribute to critical environmental justice studies by enhancing understanding of the reasons real-world indigenous communities are organizing around foods such as wild rice and amaranth and creating international documents that position them to take a stand on global debates surrounding biodiversity, trade liberalization and food sovereignty.

Last Standing Woman depicts the ways in which contemporary indigenous groups are organizing to protect local cultures and ecologies from corporate activities that interfere with traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering activities. The novel introduces readers to the effects of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887 which divided U.S. reservation lands and allotted them to individual tribal members who were expected to become farmers. However, Anishinaabe lands tended to be poor for farming and many individuals were forced to sell their plots in order to be able to survive economically. Today, over 90 percent of the lands granted by treaty to the Anishinaabe at White Earth are owned by non-Anishinaabe. Despite these losses, 45 percent of the people still living at White Earth continue to gather wild rice. ²² Harvesting of wild rice is not a major focus of the novel, yet the grain itself is placed firmly at the cultural center. On the first pages, LaDuke writes, “There were many migrations that brought the people here, to the place where the food grows on water … , the land where the manoomin, the wild rice, grows.” ²³ Several of the characters make clear connections between human disease, social breakdown, and environmental destruction and illustrate how ordinary people can successfully organize to mediate intra-tribal conflicts and negotiate within both intra-national and international contexts to protect and restore tribal and food sovereignty.

For example, when the tribal council attempts to sign profitable leases with a company whose clear-cutting activities would contaminate community lakes, many of the Anishinaabe characters, and a few “progressive whites,” rise up to form the “Protect Our Land Coalition” and take over the tribal council's offices (147). Main character Alanis (a half-Irish/half-Anishinaabe reporter who grew up in California) provides the group with their main weapon. She researches and writes news stories that shine a light on the tribal council's illicit objectives. The resulting media pressure forces the council to abandon the proposed logging lease. By protecting the lands and waters surrounding their community, the Coalition is protecting Manoomin, or wild rice, which is considered sacred because of its key place in the ecosystem of the Northern Minnesota Lakes region and because, writes LaDuke, it is “the centerpiece of our community's nutrition and sustenance, our ceremonies, and our thanksgiving feasts.” ²⁴

When Alanis decides to move “home” from California to White Earth, she reflects Winona LaDuke's own decision, after growing up in California, to return to the home of her father and work for the recovery of lands lost to allotment and logging. LaDuke links land recovery to the recovery of the Annishinaabe food system. Her fictional characters demonstrate how real-world community activists can organize programs like White Earth Land Recovery and Native Harvest. These programs may not be “taking over” tribal council offices, but they are “taking back” the right to protect and maintain the wild and cultivated foods upon which the Annishinaabe have depended for thousands of years. LaDuke's novel points to the degradation of the lakes upon which the wild rice depends, while her scholarship and activism since 1997 have directed attention to the activities of corporate and university plant breeders who are further undermining the livelihood of Annishinaabe people by developing and seeking patents for varieties of hybridized and genetically altered strains of wild rice.

In Sustainable Tribal Economies, LaDuke and her Native Harvest co-authors link the development of these new strains of rice to local and global debates about biodiversity, trade liberalization, and patenting. Indigenous wild rice, or zizania palustris is a wind-pollinated grass, sharing only some genetic strains with other rice crops internationally. Over the past thirty years, the special characteristics of wild rice have become a profit making enterprise for large multi-national biotechnology corporations who have developed commercialized strains of wild rice that grow in paddies rather than in lakes and can be harvested mechanically. In “Patents and Biopiracy,” LaDuke recounts how growing national demand for paddy strains of “wild rice” devastated the economy at White Earth and how “subsequent interest by corporations such as Uncle Ben's, Green Giant, and General Foods, permanently altered the market for traditionally harvested wild rice.” ²⁵

Native Harvest argues that if commercially-developed, patented rice strains, which are wind-pollinated, are allowed to contaminate the sacred manoomin, the economy of White Earth will be further undermined. ²⁶ Traditional Anishinaabe ricer Joe LaGarde worries that the reservoir of genetic diversity of the natural wild rice of Minnesota could be lost if hybridized or GMO strains of paddy rice are planted anywhere near the lakes where wild rice grows. “We're concerned,” explains Joe, “about the possible (crossbreeding) of these ‘hybrid cultivated varieties' with our lake rice.” ²⁷ Thus the organizing activities that are the focus of Last Standing Woman offer insight into why community groups like Native Harvest look to historic treaty agreements and the creation of new international legal instruments such as UNDRIP to support their fight for control over life-forms, foods, and medicines that have been the collective property, heritage, and economic base of their cultures for centuries. As Minnesota Chippewa (Anishinaabe) Tribe President Norman Deschamps puts it, “We are of the opinion that the wild rice rights assured by treaty accrue not only to individual grains of rice, but to the very essence of the resource.… We were promised the rice that grew in the waters of our people, and all the value that rice holds.” ²⁸ Article 31 of the UNDRIP also links “traditional knowledge” to “seeds, medicines, [and] knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora” and calls for states to “take effective measures to recognize and protect” the right of indigenous communities to economic control over the “intellectual property” embodied in their cultural heritage. ²⁹

In Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko offers a “case study” that helps readers understand the nineteenth century prehistory to twenty-first century organizing around the protection of “intellectual and property rights” to traditional foods, medicines, and seeds. Silko tells the story of Indigo, an eight year old “Sand Lizard” girl, and Grandmother Fleet, the elder and medicine woman who teaches her to provide for herself by planting corn and amaranth in a desert garden near the Colorado River. Silko bases the Sand Lizards on an actual band of the Tohono O'odham people known as the Hia C-ed O'odham or Sand People. ³⁰ Today this once distinct band has faded into the larger group of O'odham people still living in the Sonoran Desert. By depicting amaranth as an important plant growing at the edges of Indigo's subsistance garden, Silko connects her main character to the Aztecs and the politics that suppressed knowledge about this once important staple crop. Before Spanish colonization, amaranth was the foundation of Aztec wealth. It is estimated that the Aztecs grew 20,000 tons of amaranth a year. However, in 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernàn Cortez saw the Aztecs making amaranth into a bread they shaped into an image of one of their gods, he considered it an affront to Catholicism and ordered the elimination of the crop. The Spanish razed and burned vast fields of amaranth and made it a crime to cultivate the plant.

As Andrew Mushita and Carol Thompson observe in Biopiracy of Biodiversity, history often remembers the wars that end great civilizations, but what is often forgotten is the devastation that results when a food central to a culture's health and well-being is eliminated. Mushita and Thompson note that if amaranth had continued to be cultivated, this grain would be nutritionally first among today's great staple crops, including wheat, rice, and corn. ³¹ The seeds and greens of this fast-growing, long-producing plant provide much of the nutrition necessary for human sustenance. Amaranth reseeds itself, needs little water to grow, and can thrive in poor soils. For this reason, it is not an accident that Silko represents Grandmother Fleet teaching Indigo how to grow amaranth. “When there was nothing else to eat,” Indigo remembers, “there was amaranth.” ³² In the novel, amaranth represents the value placed on the broad ethnobotanical knowledge which has collectively and accretionally evolved through generations. Silko is also illustrating that the demise of plants that are considered “medicine foods” because of their superior nutritional qualities is political, not botanical. The result of the loss of amaranth and other culturally-important foods, five centuries later, is the decline of human health among the O'odham, and the decline of the environment where it was replaced with crops that, today, require heavy synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to thrive, including genetically modified corn.

Later in the novel, Indigo's journey to Europe introduces readers to the history of resistance throughout the Americas to the piracy of indigenous seeds and medicines and the theft of agroecological knowledge. Indigo is adopted by a wealthy white American couple, Hattie and Edward, who take her on an extended trip through England and Italy to visit the gardens there. While she is in England, Indigo visits the “kitchen garden” of Hattie's Aunt Bronwyn who tells Indigo, “Your people gave the world so many vegetables, fruits, and flowers.” ³³ Indigo's growing understanding of the global movement of seeds and foods original to the Americas, including corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and chocolate, helps readers better understand the substantial contribution of indigenous American peoples to contemporary global food traditions. The novel celebrates seed exchange that nourishes people around the world but it also interrogates the ethics of plant breeding, hybridization, and biotechnologies that enrich colonizing nations and corporations. Detailed information about Edward who has secret dealings with the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry in Washington, D.C. and the Kew Botanical Gardens in Britain reveal that he is actually engaging in the theft and transport of living organisms from Global South countries for the profit of Global North nations that are capital-rich but biodiversity-poor. Edward's pursuit of orchids, citron, and seeds of all kinds raises questions about the field of “economic botany,” which emerged in the nineteenth century, and brought plant breeders and botanists together with corporations that were developing new strains of seeds and plants to be sold and grown for profit. British and American adventurers and botanists pirated many valuable plants, including rubber from the Amazon, but failed to recognize or remunerate the original cultivators of the plants they were stealing for profit. ³⁴

Both Grandmother Fleet's and Aunt Bronwyn's gardens are examples of free seed exchange. In contrast, Edward and his colleagues work in laboratories to hybridize, or cross, wild and indigenous-bred plants to produce seeds that can be sold as commodities. Grandmother Fleet, Indigo, and Aunt Bronwyn freely share their seeds, and thus mirror the perspectives of many indigenous farmers today who believe that seeds should be freely planted to nutritionally and culturally enrich communities. They oppose trade liberalization policies that threaten access to traditionally cultivated seeds that may have been stolen, altered for one of two traits, then patented for profit. The proposed Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA), for example, will permit “the practice of patenting plants and animal forms as well as seeds. It promotes the private rights of corporations over local communities and their genetic heritage and traditional medicines.” ³⁵ If approved, the FTAA could also make countries which sign this agreement liable for “unfair trade practices” if they decline to import patented GMO seeds on the grounds that they might cross-pollinate with indigenous seed stocks. So, when indigenous peoples take a stand against trade liberalization, they are not simply rejecting possible contamination of indigenous seeds and plants; they are seeking protection from patents which privatize knowledge and restrict free exchange of seeds.” ³⁶ As Gardens in the Dunes illustrates, valuing the contributions of plant breeders or scientists like Edward above the intellectual contributions of the original healers and cultivators of traditional foods and medicines like Grandmother Fleet is a social and environmental injustice that has negative impacts on the ability of indigenous communities to maintain their food sovereignty and cultural and economic well-being.

Both Last Standing Woman and Gardens in the Dunes can be read as case studies that promote better understanding of what members of Native Harvest mean when they say the “recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine.” ³⁷ Since the 1960s, indigenous peoples have experienced dramatically increasing rates of adult onset diabetes, a disease that results when the body cannot break down the refined sugars, starches, and fats commonly found in processed foods. This disease began increasing in indigenous U.S. communities in the 1930s, when the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs began forcing people to leave their homes to become wage laborers (in the logging industry of Minnesota or in the cotton fields of Arizona, for example) in order to retain their officially-recognized tribal status. Entire families left their communities for six to eight months each year and it became impossible for many families to plant, tend, and maintain their fields or collect wild foods. ³⁸ Many began eating the cheap, highly processed foods readily available in American grocery stores and fast food restaurants, and in the process, they were increasingly exposed to the risks of diabetes which include blindness, declining health, and early death. Today, over 50% of the Tohono O'odham population suffers from adult onset diabetes.” ³⁹ The missions of both Native Harvest and TOCA are to restore traditional food systems in indigenous communities and fight diabetes by providing access to traditional foods that have long been considered “medicines” for both human and ecological health.

Literary works focused on medicine foods contribute to critical environmental justice studies by offering richly drawn, visual images and narratives that call for change and participation in altering power relations at the root of social and ecological problems. Read as cultural critique, literature provides a critical tool for illustrating why indigenous groups, non-profits, and nations are working with international organizations like the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), ethnobotonists, and progressive genomic scientists and food policy makers to create and promote international documents like UNDRIP that provides communities and countries with a basis in international law for choosing to reject or postpone the import of patented seeds or plants. ⁴⁰ These groups and documents may indeed be providing a counterweight to the proposed FTAA which has been stalled since 2005, as more countries recognize that two decades of economic liberalization have brought few of the promised benefits of “free trade.” ⁴¹ With the UNDRIP, indigenous farmers around the world have declared sovereignty over their seeds on their sovereign and communal lands. They oppose profits reaped by large multinational biotechnology corporations from piracy. But more importantly, they recognize that if indigenous crops become GMO because of pollen carried by the wind, the loss of biodiverse indigenous varieties of both domesticated and wild foods could be as destructive to human and ecological health as the suppression of amaranth has been for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.