American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the last three decades, tribes have initiated numerous food projects, including seed distribution, farmers' markets, cattle and bison ranching, and community and school gardens. These enterprises are steps towards achieving what many food activists refer to as “food sovereignty,” that is, tribal self-sufficiency and the ability to supply nutritious and affordable foods to tribal members. As many food activists have discovered, food production and distribution and maintaining healthy environments for farming, hunting, and gathering involve a complex meshing of social, political, religious, economic, and environmental concerns. Oklahoma is home to thirty-eight tribal nations. The state's multifaceted history, environmental issues, and current politics—including uneven food quality, poor indigenous health, intratribal factionalism, racism, and the glaring dichotomy of affluence and extreme poverty—presents opportunities for discussion about food initiatives. This paper discusses the meaning of “food sovereignty” and uses examples from Oklahoma to address some challenges of creating self-sufficient food systems and reconnecting tribal members with their traditional foodways.

Within the context of the broader food sovereignty literature, and with a specific focus on notions of America Indian sovereignty, this article explores how members of thirty-nine different Native American community farming and gardening projects in the United States describe and define food sovereignty, as both concept and method. This article further distinguishes how principles of food sovereignty are being operationalized in the broader goals of promoting community health, sustainability, and local economic systems, and of reclaiming and maintaining tribal culture.

Anishinaabe manoomin (wild rice) narratives maintain core aspects of Anishinaabe identity and epistemology, constituting Anishinaabe gikendaasowin (knowledge). Ranging from aadizokaanag to more contemporary dibaajimowinan, these narratives describe the close historical, spiritual, ecological, and material relationships between Anishinaabe communities and manoomin and demonstrate the importance to Anishinaabe self-determination of maintaining such connection. Manoomin feeds the people, and stories by Jim Northrup, Heid Erdrich, Linda LaGarde Grover, Gerald Vizenor, and Winona LaDuke, among others, propagate manoomin gikendaasowin, which supports Anishinaabe food sovereignty activism that seeks to protect and maintain manoomin and provide the nourishment that helps Anishinaabe communities to thrive.

Plants have nurtured Native communities' physical, spiritual, and social well-being for centuries, while people reciprocated by caring for plants not only as integral actors embedded in a wider ecosystem, but also as treasured children and cherished ancestors. With the encroachment of non-Native peoples, however, the web of relationships between people, plants, and the landscape came under threat, including indigenous seeds. Throughout these upheavals, some Native individuals fought to retain knowledge and to keep valued seeds viable by planting them. This paper explores how these relationships with seeds have been disrupted, and, as a means of repairing them today, weighs the potential of repatriating seeds held in banks. I argue that a repatriation initiative should consider the perspectives of Native peoples who first bred these seeds, work to ease their access to them, and articulate how to care for them.

Food sovereignty, the ability of communities and nations to determine their own food systems, is based on ecological relations between humans and our habitat. This article examines how human ecological relations with plants and animals contribute to the food sovereignty of indigenous communities in the Standing Rock Nation of the northern Great Plains. During the past one hundred and fifty years, the policies of the United States federal government have deliberately undermined these relations, including eradication of primary food sources, forced sedenterization on reservations, illegal land seizures, and compulsory reeducation of children at residential schools. The loss of food sovereignty has directly impacted the health of Standing Rock communities. Tribal government agencies, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations in Standing Rock are working to enhance food sovereignty by revitalizing relations with plants and animals used to prepare healthy traditional foods. Interviews with elders and other participants in these activities reveal that tradition and sustainability are important dimensions of indigenous food sovereignty.

In this essay, an indigenous scholar traces his thinking on how best to reveal the layers of knowledge encoded in American Indian thought in terms that can be understood by non-Native peoples. Recently, resilience theory, which seeks to understand the source and role of change, particularly the kinds of change that are transforming, lead to adaptive systems, and are sustainable, seems best suited for this task. Enrique Salmón reflects on the various ecological and sustainable innovations that contemporary American Indian communities are initiating that are helping them to remain resilient as well as the important lessons that others can draw from that can have significant impacts on the practices that can help to mitigate the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruptions, landscapes, and ecosystems. Among human communities, resilience results from periodic episodes when cultural capital has been built up. This cultural capital, the author explains, consists of indigenous people who still speak the language, the storytellers, the ritual singers, the farmers, and the wise elders, but also Native youth working to reorganize and develop new methods and practices based on centuries-old traditions that can be used to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge.