Each Wednesday you will turn in a reflection memo, with your personal reactions to the course material. You should use this exercise as an opportuni

Indigenous Food Systems, Environmental Justice, and Settler-Industrial States Kyle Powys Whyte

2015. In Global Food, Global Justice: Essays on Eating under Globalization. Edited by M. Rawlinson & C. Ward, 143-156, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Abstract Environmental injustices impacting Indigenous peoples across the globe are often described as wrongful disruptions of Indigenous food systems imposed by settler-industrial states such as the U.S. I will discuss how focusing on Indigenous food systems suggests a conception of the structure of environmental injustice as interference in Indigenous peoples’ collective capacities to self- determine how they adapt to metascale forces, from climate change to economic transitions. This conception of environmental justice can be contrasted to conceptions focusing on wrongfully disproportionate allocations of environmental hazards. I conclude by making a connection between environmental justice, the movements of global settler-industrial states, and the food and environmental justice issues of other populations, such as African- Americans in the Detroit, Michigan area.

Introduction

Indigenous peoples are the roughly 400 million people in the world who exercise cultural and political self-determination in territories dominated by occupying newcomer nations, such as the U.S. or Ecuador (Anaya 2004; de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Niezen 2003; Sanders 1977). Indigenous peoples are among the populations who struggle against environmental injustice, which generally refers to the grave moral problem of how environmental hazards—from dirty water to indoor air pollution—tend to burden already vulnerable populations, including people of color, women, poor

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people, and people with disabilities (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2002; Shrader-Frechette 2002; Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009; Brulle and Pellow 2006). In the U.S., for example, studies have demonstrated time and again that communities of color tend to be located nearer than white communities to hazardous facilities such as waste incinerators. Communities of color in the U.S. also have relatively less social and economic capital and fewer legal resources to resist these siting decisions and to reform environmental policy on their behalf. Similar patterns of injustice have been detected in other parts of the world (Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009; Bowen 2002; Shrader-Frechette 2002; Pellow 2007). According to the view of injustice just outlined, the structure of environmental injustice involves institutional arrangements in a society that systematically limit the access of communities of color to the minimally decent levels of clean, healthy, and safe environments that privileged populations take for granted. By “structure of injustice,” then, I mean the particular institutional arrangements that work systematically to inflict hazards on and deny goods (e.g., clean air, green spaces, etc.) to certain populations.

Indigenous peoples usually endure structures of environmental injustice tied to the unmitigated violence of European and Asian colonial and settler invasions, capitalist exploitation of resources, and the anti-Indigenous territorial dominance nation states and subnational governmental units (e.g. municipalties, provinces). Military aggression and the degradation of large landscapes— through deforestation and commodity agriculture, planned flooding (e.g., dams), mining, industrial air, water and soil pollution, and nuclear energy and weapons development—engendered multiple environmental hazards for which Indigenous peoples are particularly at risk relative to privileged colonial and settler populations (Weaver 1996; Grinde and Johansen 1995; Whyte 2011; Coates 2004). For example, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the Great Lakes region has about 850 members and is within 25 kilometers of 62 major industrial facilities, from oil refineries to manufacturing (the region is often called “Chemical Valley” and is near Sarnia,

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Ontario). The resulting air quality issues affect First Nation members disproportionately, as some 40% of Aamjiwnaang residents must use inhalers and asthma affects approximately 22% of children and 17% of adults. Chemical contamination have also “interfered with the community’s cultural life, affecting hunting, fishing, medicine gathering, and ceremonial activities” (Hoover et al. 2012, 1646; MacDonald and Rang 2007). The environmental destruction in Chemical Valley and elsewhere benefited colonial and settler societies at the expense of aspects of Indigenous peoples’ quality of life including their health, cultural integrity and freedom to exercise self-determination.

The problem of environmental hazards to Indigenous food systems is a striking theme in advocacy and scholarship on Indigenous environmental injustice in territories dominated by what I will refer to as sustained settler-industrial campaigns. Briefly, settler-industrial campaigns refer to global waves of settlers, such as those forming the U.S. or Canadian nations, who continue to deploy strategic tools and weapons to establish permanent roots in Indigenous territories with the hopes of inscribing homelands for themselves in those territories (LaDuke 1999; Allen 1992; Chrystos 1995; Tuck 2013; Kauanui 2008; Maracle 1996; Morgensen 2011; Rifkin 2011; Ross 1998; Smith 2005; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006; Hoogeveen 2014; Simpson 2014). As a means of carving out settler homelands from Indigenous homelands, waves of settlers harnessed industrial means, from military technologies to large-scale mineral and fossil fuel extraction operations to sweeping landscape- transforming regimes of commodity agriculture. Settler-industrial states are the corresponding polities, from federal nation state governments to local municipalities and subnational provincial governments, that create and enforce laws, policies, and jurisprudence that serve to protect and incubate the homeland- inscribing process from Indigenous resistance and resurgence in such territories. Besides the U.S. and Canada, the literature on settler- colonialism typically includes others as what I am calling settler-

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industrial states, including New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia (Veracini 2010).

In the context of relations between settler-industrial states and Indigenous peoples, the structure of environmental injustice is rarely discussed as the moral failure of states’ allocation of environmental hazards and goods; instead, the structure is tied to notions of wrongful disruption of Indigenous food systems. As is well known through groups such as Honor the Earth and actions such as the Declaration of Nyéléni on food sovereignty, Indigenous environmental justice advocacy is inseparable from the resurgence of Indigenous food systems (Adamson 2011; LaDuke 1999; Via Campesina 2007). In this essay, I put forward some of my own broad thoughts about the structure of environmental injustice in cases occurring at the intersection of Indigenous food systems and global settler-industrial campaigns. In these cases, the structure of injustice does not so much turn on the issue of institutional arrangements promoting biased allocations of environmental hazards, but rather on the issue of settler-industrial interference with Indigenous collective capacities to self-determine how Indigenous peoples will adapt to metascale forces such as climate change and economic transition.

I will begin with a discussion of environmental injustice and Indigenous food systems, referring to cases of Indigenous struggles against settler-industrial states. From there, I will offer some thoughts on how the structure of environmental injustice concerns disruptions of collective capacities to adapt to metascale forces. The conclusion section will connect these thoughts to other communities beyond Indigenous peoples who face “seemingly” different concerns about injustice. Though in the bulk of my published work I focus primarily on Indigenous forward-looking advocacy, institution- building, and tactics for resurgence, in this essay, I will home in exclusively on identifying structures of injustice. Where I can, I will reference the implications of this essay for Indigenous resistance and resurgence. As with all of my work, I write primarily from one Potawatomi and North American perspective, though I will

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reference other Indigenous peoples and locations around the globe. So readers should see my ideas as suggestive and not in any way authoritative—even with respect to Potawatomi and other Anishinaabe peoples.

Environmental Justice and Indigenous Food Systems Environmental Justice and Food

Food and environmental quality are quite obviously connected in a number of ways, as environmental hazards can affect the quality, abundance, and price of food, among other impacts. Yet environmental justice does not always emphasize food as an explicit theme. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” EPA sees justice as “achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work” (Environmental Protection Agency 2013). The Principles of Environmental Justice refer to food once, in principle 4: “Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food” (Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit 1991). Shrader-Frechette’s comprehensive book describes environmental justice as requiring “both a more equitable distribution of environmental goods and bads and greater public participation in evaluating and apportioning these goods and bads” (Shrader-Frechette 2002, 2). Food is not singled out in any way. Bryner’s catalogue of approaches to environmental justice assessment, including “civil rights,” “distributive justice and ethics,”

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“public participation,” “social justice,” and “ecological sustainability,” does not reference the presence of food in the more detailed descriptions of each approach (Bryner 2002).

Scholars have noted this apparent separation of food and environmental justice. Gottlieb and Fisher, for example, discuss how “community food security and environmental justice continue to remain separate movements, despite parallel goals, a potential common language, and intersecting agendas” (Gottlieb and Fisher 1996, 23). Joni Adamson claims that it is rarely recognized that Indigenous environmental justice movements have little interest for 1960s environmentalist concepts, such as wilderness, and instead emphasize “concepts connected to Indigenous agroecological farming traditions” (Adamson 2011, 214). I raise the lack of explicit thematic reference to food not to suggest that environmental justice definitions need to be all things to all relevant themes. Rather, I simply seek to indicate that many of the more visible theories of environmental justice have not explicitly referenced the relationship between food and environmental justice. Indigenous Food Systems and Collective Capacities

For Indigenous peoples, an informal review of environmental justice advocacy and scholarship reveals quite a bit about food and the environment in terms of Indigenous food systems. Before I discuss a sample of this advocacy and scholarship in the next subsection, I will supply some definitions of what I will mean by the concepts in this essay. To begin with, food systems are complex chains of food production, distribution, consumption, and the recirculation of food refuse. The environment figures prominently in food systems at each of these stages, from soil and other growing conditions that affect the nutritional and taste profiles of foods, to weather conditions that increase transportation costs, to pollution that affects the safety of foods harvested from fresh and salt water bodies. Indigenous food systems refer to specific collective capacities of particular Indigenous peoples to cultivate and tend, produce,

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distribute, and consume their own foods, recirculate refuse, and acquire trusted foods and ingredients from other populations.

Here, the concept of collective capacities aims to describe an ecology, i.e. an ecological system, of interacting humans, nonhuman beings (animals, plants, etc.) and entities (spiritual, inanimate, etc.), and landscapes (climate regions, boreal zones, etc.) that are conceptualized and operate purposefully to facilitate a collective’s (such as an Indigenous people’s) adaptation to metascale forces (see also Figueroa 2006 on “environmental heritage” and Werkheiser 2015 on “community capacities”). Metascale forces refer to disruptions and perturbations to systems that require those systems to adapt and adjust. They may be associated with rising or declining average temperatures or changes in patterns of preciptation (i.e. climate change) to transcontinental trade with or invasions by other populations that can radically transform quality of life. They may be human-induced (anthropogenic) or based on complex earth systems over which humans have little influence (e.g., the medieval warm period). Like most conceptions of ecology (including agroecology) today, I use the term ecology not to designate a system always seeking to bounce back toward some equilibrium. Rather, an ecology refers to systems that are organized in ways that reflect more or less suitable adaptations to various metascale forces over previous time (and what counts as suitable depends on perspective). In many cases these systems have evolved so that they are resilient to many of the challenges they have faced over time. But newer challenges that fall outside that range, including global environmental change and the intervention of other human groups, may interfere with, perturb or degrade the ability of the traditional system to provide valued aspects of a collective’s quality of life, such as cultural integrity, freedom, food security, public health, among many other potential aspects. From various human perspectives, we can think about the suitability of the collective capacities of our societies to adapt to certain metascale forces in ways that enhance or hinder our quality of life. From now on, I will refer to collective

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capacities and ecologies interchangeably since collective capacities— such as Indigenous food systems—are really ecological systems. Collective capacities are related to justice in at least one key respect. They often represent unique, hard to replace means through which collectives can exercise self-determination in adapting to disruptive metascale forces. Self-determination refers to a collective’s having the option to control how its constituent members adapt so as to protect the valued aspects of the members’ quality of life as much as is feasible given some metascale forces may be rather overwhelming. The means are unique in the sense that they are tailored to the needs and aspirations of populations living in particular environments. The means are hard to replace because having to adopt new means or the means of another collective in too rapid a fashion is often harmful. Consider Indigenous peoples in the 19th century U.S. sphere who were forced to relocate to regions far away from their homelands. They literally had to change their food systems, or collective capacities, “overnight.” The rapidity of the change of ecology exacerbated hunger, malnutrition, poor health, poverty, and increasing dependence on the U.S. settler state. Though at the time, many peoples in North America were adapting to dramatic demographic and economic shifts, Indigenous peoples’ option to self-determine how to adapt was curtailed when the U.S. imposed its own control over Indigenous adaptation. In the long term, many of these same Indigenous populations suffered and continue to suffer from relatively higher average rates of diabetes, poverty and other harms to quality of life than members of the U.S. settler society. Indigenous food systems, then, are collective capacities for Indigenous peoples to self-determine how they adapt to metascale forces. Indigenous food systems do not necessarily offer “perfect” adaptations to metascale forces; however, when other collectives are involved, those collectives can disrupt Indigenous food systems in ways that inflict preventable harms, as in forced relocation. Environmental Justice and Indigenous Food Systems

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Consider a number of representative and well-known cases of environmental injustice in relation to Indigenous food systems (conceived as collective capacities). The Mohawk Indian Territory of Akwesasne (straddling the U.S. and Canada) has for years faced exposures to toxicants, from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to dioxins, because the territory is downriver from major industrial facilities permitted by U.S. and Canadian settler-industrial states (Hoover 2013). Tribal environmental professionals and community members have criticized outsiders who only see the impacts as environmental when in fact the pollution disrupts Mohawk food systems. In one piece, a group of Mohawk employees and community members, including Mary Arquette and Maxine Cole, discuss how, “when traditional foods such as fish are no longer eaten, alternative diets are consumed that are often high in fat and calories and low in vitamins and nutrients. This type of dietary change has been linked to many health problems such as type II diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, and obesity. Consequently, serious health problems can result when, in the case of Akwesasne, traditional foods are no longer consumed, even if there is little or no exposure to toxic substances” (Arquette et al. 2002, 261). Environmental injustice is experienced as environmental hazards that disrupt Indigenous food systems, encouraging dependency on settler-industrial foods to which adaptation is difficult without incurring harms.

Offshore oil drilling is a major environmental justice issue in the arctic because accidents and leaks can produce environmental hazards that would normally not occur. In one case I recently read about, drilling threatens the Inupiat peoples’ longstanding food systems, in which whale hunting figures as a prominent activity, along with hunting walruses and seals. Yet the Inupiat community also depends on jobs from the oil industry, and onshore jobs are declining. The article quotes Edward Itta, a former Inupiat mayor, who describes this dilemma. He said his community initially rejected offshore drilling because it could damage their food systems. However, as a leader he ultimately had to support offshore

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drilling, stating: “My biggest responsibility was maintaining the economic well-being of the borough, and that largely has to do with maintaining oil in the pipeline.” The stakes are high, though. Itta sees whaling as not just important for distribution of food, “We have a culture that has survived one of the harshest environments on earth for thousands of years, and that culture is really what’s at stake[…] No one person can catch a whale. It takes a whole community. Because of the whale, we share, we are very close, we come together. Without it, our way of life—what we pass on to our kids and grandkids—would be diminished” (Birger 2012). Injustice here, too, is experienced as a settler-industrial induced disruption to food systems that serve as collective capacities of Inupiat peoples to self-determine how they adapt to metascale forces such as the convergence of global industries on Alaska.

The environmental issues Māori face with the New Zealand settler state are sometimes discussed in terms of disruptions to subsistence food systems. Coombes discusses environmental justice issues in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi. “Agents of the Queen of England and chiefs from most iwi (tribes) signed the treaty in 1840, protecting Māori rights to retain and manage their resources. The Treaty provides a template for justice and legitimacy in environmental management, but discrepancies in the English and Māori versions and discords between its three articles weaken its protective mechanisms. The Māori text of Article II upholds Māori rangatiratanga (chieftainship) over their lands, resources, and food gathering spaces. Conversely, the English text of Article I transferred sovereignty to the Queen of England, even though the Māori version forfeited only kawanatanga or limited governance. This noncorrespondence between Crown kawanatanga (Article I) and Māori rangatiratanga (Article II) leads to tension in the implementation of Treaty provisions” (Coombes and Hill 2005, 139). One junior scholar interprets the results of land grab precipitated by this interpretative issue as Māori ending up with either too little land or land not suitable for subsistence food

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production: Shirley writes that “…traditional food had been intensive to procure, but other foods like flour, pork, and potatoes were easier to cultivate. This innutritious diet increased [Māori] susceptibility to disease, which often led to death—indeed, there was a clear link between land dispossession and health related death rates in this period.” Shirley goes on to discuss urban relocation and “the proliferation of European methods of intensive farming, which also reduced employment opportunities. New urban lifestyles meant the Māori diet had to change[…] This coincided with a new reliance on fast food chains and supermarkets, creating even more problems for Māori health […] and overeating. Issues of being underweight were quickly replaced with issues of obesity” (Shirley 2013, 58-60). Coombes, in another work focusing on cities, explores the compound issue of how pan Māori urban communities are perceived as having weaker treaty rights to clean up pollution to restore and engender subsistence fishing because they are perceived as being “out of place” by contrast to Māori who live in rural areas (Coombes 2013). In the case of Māori peoples, then, a key way of understanding environmental injustice is as harms to their food systems, or collective capacities to exercise self-determination.

It is widely known that the Navajo territory has struggled with environmental injustice stemming from energy and weapons industries, from health effects on Navajos working in uranium mines to the current dependence on the Navajo Generating Station for jobs. Tactically in the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. settler-industrial campaign “established” a nontraditional governmental procedure in the Navajo Nation that could sign energy and other extraction leases without the free, prior and informed consent of community members. As Powell points out: “A decade later, federal agents mandated a calculated livestock reduction among Navajo herders, revealing another energy story.” She goes on to discuss how due to fear of soil erosion affecting power generation of the Hoover Dam, “federal agents decimated entire herds of Navajo sheep, crippling Navajo families[…] Moreover, as signifiers of Navajo identity, sheep

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literally embodied energy—through their flesh as sustenance, their wool as warmth, and the practice of herding as a central livelihood activity. The political ecology of livestock reduction and the near destruction of a way of life was, in the end, intimately tied to power generation for the growing urban Southwest” (Powell 2015, 60-61). For Navajo today, the continued dependence on hazardous energy production represents a bind they are in because the U.S. has effectively destroyed the other options they have, one of which was the sheep-centered economy. The Diné Policy Institute (DPI) at the Navajo Nation in a recent report discusses many more forms of environmental justice centered around food. The report describes a “general trend” in the “decline of indigenous Diné foods and the increase of non-native and highly processed, high calorie foods in the Dine Diet. This decline has been so substantial that in the contemporary Navajo Diet, the only “traditional” foods consumed on a daily basis are tortillas and/or fry-bread, which only became part of the Diné Diet with the forced removal to Fort Sumner. Even sheep, the symbol of Navajo culture for the past century are facing considerable decline in the Navajo Diet in the 21st century. In addition to dietary changes, the shift in Diné life and society also include the breakdown of self-sufficiency, Diné knowledge, family and community, and detachment from land. These changes did not occur by chance, but were fostered by a series of American interventions and policies (the process of colonization); namely forced removal, the livestock reduction, boarding schools, relocation, and food distribution programs, along with the change from subsistence lifestyles to wage based society and integration into American capitalism” (Diné Policy Institute 2014, 51). For Powell and DPI, environmental issues, from health issues associated with uranium mining to relocation, are associated with disruptions of Navajo food systems.

Many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest region of North America have been struggling to rekindle fish populations damaged in a large part due to industrial dams, such as those on the Columbia River. For example, Indigenous peoples in the Pacific

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Northwest used to be dependent on the Columbia River and its tributaries for fishing species such as salmon. Not only did they consume the salmon, but they also traded fish for other goods from other parts of North America with other Indigenous peoples. Some of fisheries along the Columbia River are known to have supported Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, as well as being some of the best fisheries ever to have existed in North America. Katrine Barber writes that the area around the falls got busy during the “spring and fall salmon runs. Entire bands from throughout the Northwest traveled to the mid-Columbia to trade, socialize, and fish with local residents. Both women and men traded goods and strengthened their relations with neighboring tribes[…] From the south came obsidian […] from the north, dentalia, blankets, and beads; the east, pipestone, buffalo meat, and horses; and, hailing from the west, wappato, an important root food; central to this network was the abundance of salmon” (Barber 2005, 22-23). When the Cold War started, the U.S. federal government considered dam projects as a possible source of energy for expanding agriculture and industry. The Columbia River was a prime location for large-scale dams (White 1995), which led to the creation of the Dalles Dam whose reservoir inundated the ancient fishery at Celilo Falls. In this case, Indigenous peoples affected by the environmental destruction caused by damming lost trusted populations for trade alongside the loss of some of the food sources themselves.

The above referenced examples are well-known. Furthermore, any grey or peer reviewed resource on Indigenous environmental injustice often includes robust discussions of disruptions of Indigenous food systems. Energy development and mineral extraction through mining in the Great Lakes region is perceived as a threat primarily to hunting, fishing, and gathering rights that Indigenous peoples in the territory made sure were protected by the treaties they made with the U.S. (Smith 1996; Robyn and Camacho 1998; Perry and Robyn 2005). Gwich’in in the arctic report finding long-range pollutants, arriving from as far away as South Africa and

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from local industrial activities, getting into their food chain, leading to high levels of PCBs, DDT, mercury, and radioactive waste. Similar to Akwesasne, Norma Kassi, speaking of her Gwich’in community, says: “We cannot, however, simply change our diet. If we were to change suddenly and start eating store-bought foods more, then disease would increase and our rate of death would be higher, because it would be too rapid a change, too much of a shock to our systems” (Kassi 1996, 80). Hydroelectric development affected the James Bay Cree’s hunting, fishing, and trapping systems (Sam-Cromarty 1996; Gedicks 1993). The Klamath Tribe was restricted by the U.S. Forest Service in its use of fire, which was a collective capacity for cultivating landscapes for food production (Norgaard 2014;

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