This is the fourth year in a row that I've participated in the Daily Kos blogathon to fight hunger in America. It's also the fourth year in a row that I've focused my efforts specifically on the concept of food justice in Indian Country.
This year, I have the honor of introducing you to a Native-founded, Native-run organization that works specifically to ensure food justice, and food sovereignty, in Native communities.
My predecessors in this year's blogathon have done an excellent job of explaining what we mean by "food justice." I want to expand the understanding of that concept in the context of specific cultural and historical traditions and ethnic health variations. For our peoples, this is nothing less than an existential issue: Traditional Native foods and foodways are inextricably linked with our cultural identities, but also with our very physical survival. Their near-destruction over the past ~200 years has jeopardized our peoples' survival — and for too many, the destruction is already complete. For we who remain, the risk likewise remains, manifested daily in staggering rates of obesity, diabetes, and other means of death.
Over the jump, I'll cover some of the statistics specific to American Indians; explain what we mean by "food sovereignty"; and introduce you to an organization in the vanguard of the Native food sovereignty and sustainability movement. But first, I want to provide some cultural context.
FOOD JUSTICE AS BIMAADIZIWIN, EVEN UNTO THE SEVENTH GENERATION
Last week, I was involved elsewhere in a brief discussion of the so-called "Seven Generations Prophecy." It's a concept that's been appropriated by the dominant culture, particularly in the environmental movement in a way that fundamentally misunderstands its very nature.
For starters, its not really a prophecy.
it's what we would call bimaadiziwin, a guide to conduct for living, a way of walking through life.
Versions of the concept of "seven generations" appear in the teachings of tribal nations all over the country. I've referred to it in the past:
When I was a child, my father used to tell me the old stories and lessons of the Anishinaabeg. No matter how far I wandered from my roots, one that remained with me is found in various versions among Native peoples the continent over, expressed as our responsibility to the future, "even unto the seventh generation."
Nowhere is this more true than with regard to our stewardship of Akii.
Ironically, the colonizers brought their own version of a seventh generation prophecy — flipped, inverted, a mirror image of ours. Where ours focused on doing good for those who come after us, the colonizers' version, predictably, obsessed over the bad: "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation."
Seeing it as prophecy rather than guide for daily living carries inherent risks: It circumscribes it, bounds it by time, when it's meant to be a cyclical, eternal dynamic. As I said last week:
[W]hat people don't understand about the "seven generations" thing was that it was never meant to be a defined amount, a one-off, or a "group" thing. It was a proscription, a charge to every single person to behave in such a way that everything s/he does will work to a good result for the next seven generations. And every single person in every single generation was expected to do so. It was an individual charge, meant to create a collective habitual way of living that would ensure a healthy society for eternity.
I'm not explaining this well, I know. If you haven't grown up with the concept, the nuances aren't obvious, and they don't necessarily translate well into the words of another culture entirely — particularly not the words of a colonialist culture that reveres the accumulation of wealth and power.
The dominant culture reads this as saying that if all of society behaves with regard to the sort of Earth it will leave its seventh generation into the future, we'll all be fine, and so will the next 140 years' worth or so of people.
But we all know that people don't — won't — naturally behave that way. Particularly not in this society: frenzied, frenetic, marked by deep political and cultural divisions and insurmountable gaps in resources and access to even the most fundamental things. Like enough food to eat. Healthy food to eat. We live in the culture of the Windigo, and it's a soul-sickness that reaches its cold and grasping fingers into every aspect of life.
The point of the precept of the seven generations is not that some members could be virtuous enough to fix a society-wide sickness. The point is that it must be a cultural manner of walking through life — for each and every person. Every person has an individual responsibility to conduct his or her life in a way that is so physically, socially, and spiritually healthy that those benefits will extend at least seven generations into the future — creating a collective, societal, cultural way of life that ensures that the cycle continues for eternity. In this way, the individual, as part of the collective, ensures that the society and the culture will always benefit from its manner of living. It means that our ancestors would have had all they needed, as would their Earth, and so will all of their — and our — descendants, in perpetuity.
Collectively, American culture has not done a good job of stewardship, unto the seventh generation, on any front. This all too tragically evident in the area of food and nutrition — or, as is the case for too many, hunger. In too much of Indian Country, hunger is less occasional threat than constant companion. Its handmaiden, malnutrition, is present even in hunger's absence.
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