Watchlist: ‘Native American Food Sovereignty, Explained’

By Kamiah Koch

Social media/digital journalist

As the summer sun shines, plants like corn, berries and squash are growing and beginning to ripen here in the Willamette Valley. According to Mohawk and Mi’Kmaq Tribal member Tai LeClaire, Indigenous agricultural systems have contributed more than 60% of all the food that is consumed today. It includes foods like the corn, berries and squash in our gardens.

LeClaire is featured as the host of a segment called “Cooking with Tai” on PBS Origins, a YouTube channel that shares histories and content about different cultural groups. 

In a video published on June 25, LeClaire discusses Native food sovereignty. 

The video begins by discussing when Europeans landed in the Americas, they took advantage of the foods that had been cultivated by the Indigenous people since time immemorial. 

“While the whole world welcomed these ingredients with open arms, the people who had been using them for eons saw their food systems decimated and their populations wiped out through malnutrition and starvation,” LeClaire said.

This is known as a food apartheid, when one population is not given access to the same quality of food as other individuals. The near extinction of bison, which was featured in a previous Watchlist, is a step used by the colonizers to instill this food apartheid.

“The reasoning behind this catastrophic extinction of a species was that it was a source of food and other materials for Native American Tribes,” LeClaire says. “The logic was that if we kill the buffalo, the Natives will starve to death.”

And although there are written documents and treaties that were supposed to maintain Native peoples access to their food resources, they were rarely enforced. 

Choctaw Tribal member and professor of rural health Dr. Valerie Blue Bird Jernigan was interviewed by Tai in the video to answer how Tribes had to adapt to new food systems after being forced off their homelands. 

“It's really important to understand that we became dependent upon these government foods because we did not have the knowledge of these new environments,” Blue Bird Jernigan said. 

She references her Tribe’s reliance on river cane for shelter and food, but when the Tribe was moved to a reservation in Oklahoma, they were uprooted to a place that was entirely different and lacking the river cane they needed. 

“We were traditionally farmers, agriculturalist and our entire cultural and spiritual identities were based on that place,” she said.

As a result, Tribes became dependent on the government’s commodity supplemental foods program, which often came in canned or processed forms. This led to a dependency on unhealthy foods and some of the worse health rates in the country now. 

Studies have shown that reservations today also have limited access to fresh food supplies, categorized as a “food desert.”

Grand Ronde’s nearest grocery store is 20 miles away and according to a 2019 Smoke Signals story, the food desert in Grand Ronde is a major deterrent in Tribal members returning to the reservation. 

Tribes, including Grand Ronde, are trying to counter that. 

“We as Indigenous people conceptualize ourselves as part of that land,” Blue Bird Jernigan said. “We are here to reclaim our health in our traditions and our ways, not through the Western lens but through our practices.”

You can watch the entire video “Native American Food Sovereignty, Explained” for yourself on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LQD90ELcjI.