Sustainable Food Systems for US Native Lands: A Story Untold
Native Lands History: Untold
This is the story of the United States that you will not hear everywhere. Yet, its implications for implementing a sustainable and socially-just future for all are beyond imagination. This story starts a little before the arrival of western settlers.
This is the land western settlers found in 1492. Over 500 nations lived and shared land on what is now called the United States.
Modern History and Geography usually represents this country as one contiguous boundary extending from Canada to Mexico and from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.
1492 arguably marked the starting point of US settler colonialism. Empowered by the Doctrine of Discovery , European empires first took East and Western land stripes, and in the mid-1850s progressively filled the blanks to form the contemporary land base of the United States of America.
The myth of the "empty land" where Natives lived idly without making good use of the natural resources is persistent, and served as the primary base to justify taking lands away from tribes. Contrary to stereotypes, Native Agriculture was diverse and flourishing prior to settler colonialism.
From the North East to the South West, staple crops such as corn was grown, but also beans, squash, rice and so much more. In the Mississippi Valley around 1000-1200 AD, the large agriculture-based City of Cahokia flourished as a large trading center. Agriculture was much designed according to permaculture, with concepts such as plants companionships and sustainable irrigation models.
Land management for agriculture was present throughout the continent. Amazing agriculture innovation could be witnessed with the Chinampas in Mexico; a huge agriculture innovation that created connected floating islands to grow food to feed the 200,000 people of Tenochtitlan/Mexico.
For many tribes, land use also involved heavy reliance on gathering food and medicine according to the seasons. Far from being random, gathering implied a tremendous knowledge of seasonal cycles and sustainable resource management practices to ensure plants' yields over the years.
This is the official remaining land base of Native Peoples in the US today. These boundaries were defined through negotiating- though admittedly unfairly- the relocation of hundreds of thousands of its original inhabitants.
Over 370 treaties were signed between sovereign nations and the United States, establishing their legal jurisdiction as international law. Yet, the United States has not only designed but still manages part of the native land tenure system, affecting native people's sovereignty and potential to manage the land as they see fit.
History of Commodifying Native Agriculture
The Dawes Act of 1887 forcibly split communal tribal properties into 160-acres plots of land allocated to male heads of households, with the intention to make Native peoples adopt western notions such as individual property or farm-based agriculture.
Titles were first issued "held-in-trust" by the federal government, where people could use their land but not sell it. The land that remained after allotment was arbitrarily seized by the United States Government and sold to non-Native farmers and ranchers as "surplus land".
The protocol of allotment remains very blurry but it is clear that it intended to free up the best farm land to non-Natives. Out of the 150M acres originally agreed to be tribes' property, 90M acres was lost to non-Native farmers in this process.
A few years later, the Burke Act enabled the BIA to arbitrarily change people's land status to simple fee. This forced fee-patenting enabled the liquidation of another 4M acres until the Reorganization Act, which intended to put a hold on forced fee-patenting.
The results of the allotment and liquidation of surplus land opened the way for settlers looking for the land promised to them by the 1862 Homestead Act. These promises were founded on the violation of official legal engagements taken by the United States with Native nations.
The effects of the 1887 Dawes Act on the land are so profound that today, Native Americans still do not have full control and sovereignty over their land. Trust lands are still managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which also negotiates the price of rents collected by individual land owners. These policies have resulted in a highly segregated agricultural landscape.
This is why, among other things, about 90% of the agricultural revenue produced on native land is today collected by non-native farmers and ranchers.
From Land Theft back to Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty was defined by the 2002 declaration of Atitlan as: “The right of peoples to define their own policies and strategies for sustainable production, distribution, and consumption of food, with respect for their own cultures and their own systems of managing natural resources and rural areas, and is considered to be a precondition for food security.”
"I don't think we can call ourselves sovereign if we can't feed ourselves" ( Paul "Sugarbear" Smith , Oneida)
Source: Gordon, A., & Oddo, V. (2012). Addressing child hunger and obesity in Indian Country: Report to Congress. Mathematica Policy Research.
Yet, because of the land tenure issues stated above, and their forced relocation to arid non-arable land with no agency to manage these resources traditionally, most native communities currently live in food deserts.
"Contrary to popular belief, the genocide of indigenous peoples did not occur simply because of their inability to resist European pathogens and American military aggression, but also because invading populations destroyed their food systems, leading to starvation, ecological disruption, and devastation" ( Indianz ).
Solutions to this problem are not easy. While recent Acts enable tribes to take over control of their own land's management and development, they still need to make a case to the BIA to get comprehensive plans approved.
Additionally, when tribes engage in defining these management plans with the BIA to free up their own management capacity, they often lack access to the appropriate data required by these plans.
Following a long pattern of withholding information from Natives about their own land, the BIA remains in possession of and does not fully disclose land tenure data to tribes, and the process to retrieve the information is tedious.
In order to truly exercise sovereignty and for land planning, tribes need appropriate access to data. To this day, the only nationally available data to measure progress in native agriculture is the USDA census of agriculture for American Indian Reservations.
On top of being questionably accurate, this data is framed through a western commodity agriculture lens. This has the affect of steering tribes away from food systems that mirror their cultural values.
The Food-System Transition Index
As a humble contribution, the Native Lands Advocacy Project sought to develop more appropriate nationwide tools to support tribal land sovereign food-systems. This was the beginning of the Food-System Transition Index for US Native Lands.
The Food-System Transition Index was built from the Native Lands Information System (NLIS): an online repository for land use, sustainable agricultural and climate planning data for US native lands.
In the NLIS, data is published in single data dashboards, each presenting different information to support native land planning and advocacy work. The Index aimed to transform this data into a land planning tool.
The final outputs compiles this information and more into a single dashboard to provide baseline scores on key variables of a healthy sustainable and climate resilient food-system.
DISCLAIMER: We wish to highlight that the FSTI's accuracy and representativity of native food-systems is highly impeached by the data constraints brought forth by currently available data nationally. We therefore think of the FSTI as a work in progress that aims to stir the conversation around access of appropriate data for native land planning, and we hope to be able to refine this tool for accurate planning from multiple feedbacks and the evolution of data availability. It currently does, however, provide a more nuanced picture of native food-systems than the USDA Census of Agriculture.
Phase 1 of this project first gathered the native scholarship and practitioners' knowledge to define working principles of food sovereignty to build a theoretical foundation to build appropriate indicators for US Native Lands, because the definitions and operating principles present great variations from western definitions of food sovereignty.
This work was very complex because Native Food Sovereignty is multidimensional, and available data is often very limited to fully represent these nuances. However, as described in this graph, most definitions share patterns that are specific to colonial contexts with history of land theft, genocide and ethnocide.
We built the Index with a critical lens on western commodified agriculture while incorporating dimensions of native food sovereignty. However, we were heavily constrained by existing and available data, because of the lack of reliable and representative data and confidentiality issues. For instance, we are fully aware that native food sovereignty cannot manifest without these dimensions which are hard to measure and present in an Index:
1) Sacred meaning of Food
2) Self-determination
3) Policy-making
We still managed to produce an Index which measures aspects of culturally-relevant and sustainable healthy native food-systems. The Food-System Transition Index (FSTI) was born!
But keep in mind that it is only a starting point to support tribes' transition towards data-driven models that fully encompass native food sovereignty.
The FSTI is made up of 20 standardized indicators and 4 subscores: 1) Sustainable Food Production, 2) Biodiversity and Climate Change, 3) Sovereign Energy and 4) Cultural and Physical Health
The FSTI provides standardized scores to serve as baseline for tribes to measure policy progress and support the identification of areas of strength and most needs. Any tribe can get their personalized report and compare it with other native lands. We also hope that the FSTI can stimulate intertribal collaboration to design sustainable food-systems.
Moving forward: Building IRMPs to empower tribal sovereignty and healthy food-systems
Empowering tribes to design healthy food-systems serves a local need, but it can also impact global sustainable design. While Indigenous Peoples control less than 20% of the world's resources, they contain 80% of the world's biodiversity . Indigenous knowledge and management strategies are key to fit within the 30% conservation by 2030 goal set by the UN to help mitigate climate change.
Native Food-Systems are struggling but full of resilience. Despite all the challenges set forth by colonization and western commodified agriculture, native nations have worked hard to retain and continue to revitalize their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)
With fully sovereign land management systems, native nations can lead the world into more sustainable food-systems.
Integrated Resource Management Plans (IRMPs) are powerful tools to restore and empower tribal sovereignty
The AIARMA Act (25 USC § 3703(11)) defines an IRMP as a “plan developed pursuant to the process used by tribal governments to assess available resources and to provide identified holistic management objectives that include quality of life, production goals, and landscape descriptions of all designated resources that may include (but not be limited to) water, fish, wildlife, forestry, agriculture, minerals, and recreation, as well as community and municipal resources, and may include any previously adopted tribal codes and plans related to such resources.”
The FSTI is evolving into a fully support toolkit to help tribes fulfill the BIA requirements for Integrated Resource Management Plans (IRMPs) and their agricultural, climate and forest extensions.
Keep an ear out for our upcoming dedicated IRMPs planning portals!
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