This blog post will explore the issues put forth by Whyte in his piece Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous People; an Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance”
To begin Whyte describes how indigenous people often claim that colonial powers violate their people’s collective self-determination over their food systems or their food sovereignty. One of the proposed solutions to protect their food sovereignty is to conserve particular foods such as salmon and wild rice. Whyte makes the argument that when indigenous people make these claims, this offers us an important contribution to understand how settler colonial domination is a form of injustice that undermines key relationships that support the Indigenous self collective and self determination (Whyte, 2018).
Two key topics in Whyte’s paper are food injustice and food sovereignty. He introduces a concept called food injustice. Whyte says, “Food injustice occurs when at least one human group systematically dominates one or more other human groups through their connections to and interactions with one another in local and global food systems.” He then goes on to define food sovereignty as “the right of peoples and governments to choose the way food is produced and consumed in order to respect livelihoods (La Via Campesina, 2009). Food sovereignty helps to defend the self-determination of some collective over their food systems (Whyte, 2018).
Foods can be connected to treaty rights. For example, salmon is an important resource. Billy Frank Jr. described his view on violations against against the treaty tribes of western Washington in the Pacific Northwest:
Through the treaties, we reserved that which is most important to us as a people: The right to harvest salmon in our traditional fishing areas. But today the salmon is disappearing because the [US] federal government is failing to protect salmon habitat. Without the salmon there is no treaty right. We kept our word when we ceded all of western Washington to the United States, and we expect the United States to keep its word.
(Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington 2011, 6, as cited by Whyte, 2018)
For the indigenous people something such as salmon is not just a food source. Food systems connect greatly to resiliency of people whose ancestors survived very difficult times. Salmon are important parts of the ecosystem and removing them from the ecosystem would have harmful and negative consequences. This is why indigenous people had people known as title holders who would make informed decisions about salmon conservation for their house. Title holders could even be removed if their knowledge was insufficient (Trosper 2009,50-80).
Having people such as title holders demonstrates that the indigenous people have knowledge and a great care to maintain ecosystems that they hunt and fish from. I also think that it is easier for the general public to accept salmon fishing traditions as being an important part of the Indigenous culture. However, there are indigenous groups who have more controversial hunting practices that can be harder to accept as an integral part of their identity. The example that I have in mind is seal hunting. I think a lot of people would be more willing to commit food injustice over the inuit people because the seal hunts upset them.
The Inuit community in Resolute Bay has faced a lot of hardship from animal activist groups protesting the seal hunts. In 1983- 1985 when the seal hunt ban went into effect the average income of an Inuit seal hunter declined severely. It from $54,000- 1,000. The region has one of the highest unemployment rates in Canada and the highest suicide rate in the world (Randawha, 2017).
A larger part of the controversy is the opening of a Toronto restaurant called Kū-kŭm Kitchen which sells seal meat.
Is this restaurant ethical? I think whether or not it is ethical can depend on which philosophical view you examine the issue from. If you look at it from an animal rights view such as Regan’s, he would say this is completely unacceptable and you can’t kill seals. He would be fundamentally opposed to the entire system (Regan, 1987). On the other hand if you looked at it from a utilitarian perspective, they would consider the happiness of the aggregate. Limiting the seal hunt is causing people to kill themselves, and people are facing terrible hardships.
I’m sure that Whyte would argue that banning the seal hunt and seal meat is another form of unacceptable food injustice. People have to do what they have to do to survive. Inuit people live in a harsh climate where it is difficult to survive. Another example of people who have to survive in a very harsh climate are the people who live in Omyakon Russia. This little hamlet can drop down to -60 in the winter. It is impossible to farm the frozen land so people survive off of a carnivorous diet. They eat reindeer meat, frozen fish, and horse blood. The 500 or so people here do not have much of a choice. These are the food sources which are available to them, and they can’t go vegan or vegetarian If a group tried to commit food injustice over the people in Omyakon, they would surely die.
As I conclude this blog post, I have some questions,
What do you think about food injustice and food sovereignty? Is food injustice something that needs to be avoided?
Is there a middle ground between food injustice and killing animals? Would there be a middle ground for indigenous people and vegans?
Works used
3.) Regan, T. (1987). The case for animal rights. In Advances in animal welfare science 1986/87 (pp. 179-189). Springer, Dordrecht.