Food sovereignty as decolonisation: Whyte, ‘Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance’, in A. Barnhill, T. Doggett, A. EganOxford Handbook on Food Ethics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017 | settler colonial studies blog

Food sovereignty as decolonisation: Whyte, ‘Food Sovereignty, Justice and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance’, in A. Barnhill, T. Doggett, A. EganOxford Handbook on Food Ethics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017

12Feb17

Excerpt: But how is it that conserving a particular food could be so closely entwined to collective self-determination? Is it not also the case that, philosophically, suggesting that certain foods define Indigenous collective self-determination freezes Indigenous peoples in time in ways that Indigenous leaders and scholars typically resist (Cornell & Kalt, 2000; Goeman & Denetdale, 2009; Lyons, 2010; Mihesuah, 2009)? I will argue that Indigenous peoples’ claims about the connections of particular foods to collective self-determination are much more complicated (Huambachano, 2015). The claims are more about how colonial domination, in contexts such as U.S. settler colonialism, is organized to undermine certain human institutions that are pivotal to Indigenous peoples’ capacities to exercise collective self-determination, food sovereignty being a significant part of that. Some food injustices against Indigenous peoples are best understood, I will show, as violations of Indigenous food sovereignty that colonial societies, such as the U.S., inflict on Indigenous peoples as strategies in the larger project of undermining Indigenous collective self-determination.

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