Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the Arctic

Berry picking.

Photo by Chris Arend. D r. Dalee Sambo Dorough (Iñupiat) is the International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. C arolina Behe is the Indigenous Knowledge and Science Advisor for the Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska. Cultural Survival Indigenous Rights Radio Producer, Shaldon Ferris, (KhoiSan) recently s poke with Behe and Dorough.

Cultural Survival: How do you define food security? What are the threats and challenges to maintaining it among Inuit communities?

Carolina Behe: Quite a few years ago, Inuit in Alaska defined food security themselves. In that definition, it’s really clear that food security is characterized by a healthy environment and is made up of six different dimensions: accessibility, availability, stability, Inuit culture, health and wellness, and decision making power and management. Those six dimensions need tools to support them, and those tools are policies, knowledge sources (meaning both Indigenous knowledge and modern science), and true co-management. We visualize all of that in a drum. The handle of the drum is food sovereignty. Without food sovereignty, we cannot have food security. We have to understand the relationship between all of these pieces and that if even one piece is out of balance or not there, we will not have a healthy environment—we will not have food security.

Dalee Sambo Dorough: There are multiple threats to the food security of our communities, including climate change and pollution. These issues are compounded by the lack of understanding that the rest of the world, including our respective governments across the Arctic, have about the important and profound relationship that we have with the environment and all of the animals that we harvest, hunt, and fish. Inuit rely upon the marine environment; we are also one of the species within our Arctic environment. Our perspective of living in harmony, having a healthy relationship with the environment, is now facing multiple threats, making it difficult to briefly answer these questions because there are so many different things that are adversely impacting us and our food systems, our food security, and our food sovereignty.

CS: How is food sovereignty linked to self-governance?

DSD: Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, first and foremost affirms the right of all Peoples to self-determination, which is recognized as a prerequisite for the exercise and enjoyment of all other rights. Included in Article 1 is a very important, sweeping sentence: “In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.” If you think about that in the context of Inuit food security, it’s directly and intimately linked with our right of self-government and our right of self-determination.

Self-determination, our role in policymaking and decision making, is directly tied to our food security. This is one of the significant conclusions of the work that the Inuit Circumpolar Council has done. Everything that we manifest in terms of our distinct cultural identity, our language, our customs, our practices, our food sources, our sense of intergenerational responsibilities—everything. It’s clear that there is a direct and intimate relationship. CB : The very first sentence of the definition for food security that Inuit in Alaska developed says Alaska Inuit food security is the natural right of all Inuit to be part of the ecosystem, to access food, and caretake, protect, and respect all of life, land, water, and air. There’s a right to that responsibility. Inuit have been here for thousands of years, successfully being part of this environment and holding their relationships within that environment. There’s a real contrast between Inuit approaches and the way that the federal or state government approaches that relationship within the environment. Federal and state policy often center on control and siloed approaches, such as single species management. For Inuit, all of it is interconnected and values help shape the relationships held. For example, you don’t try to control the weather, you respond to it. All of this stresses the need to understand the interconnections

—to understand that the health of the whale depends on the health of the hunter just as much as the health of the hunter depends on the health of the whale.

CS: What supports or impedes Inuit food sovereignty?

CB : A large part goes back to Inuit management practices. Throughout Inuit homelands, people share food with each other. If there’s a place here in Alaska that is having trouble with being able to collect food one year, other Inuit communities around Alaska quickly share food with them. Within a community, people take care of each other. That’s something that strongly maintains food security. Values from Inuit management practices, like basing decisions on an understanding of cumulative impacts and respect for everything within that ecosystem, requires an understanding of connections across social, cultural, biological, and physical pieces of the world. There is a need for systemic change at the national international level, at international forums for the equitable engagement and inclusion of Indigenous knowledge in order to inform more holistic and adaptive decision making.

CS: What are some positive case studies of Indigenous food solutions?

DSD: One of the most important positive examples is that we’re still here; the fact that Inuit have the ingenuity to adapt to this environment where no other humans have been able to survive. As our founder, Eben Hopson, has stated, “Our language contains intricate knowledge of the ice that we’ve seen no others demonstrate.” We have been able to maintain ourselves out there on the land and on the coastal seas in a sustainable fashion, in a way that has allowed us to continue and to renew ourselves season after season after season. At the core of all of this is our knowledge, knowledge that has been accumulated over centuries and is still being accumulated by the individual hunters and through their relationships with others and also their sharing with others throughout the Inuit world. Indigenous knowledge has really become a record of our customs, our values, our practices, and our expressions of our relationships with the environment around us, which has generated the kind of food security that we seek to protect and that we seek to continue to have within our communities.

CS: What is the role of Inuit Peoples in managing Arctic marine resources?

DSD: As distinct Peoples reliant upon the ocean and coastal seas, we should be playing a central role in the management of the marine environment across the whole of the Arctic. In Alaska, the United States government’s treatment of the rights of Alaska Natives was misguided and misinformed. The result was the adoption of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Implicit in that act was a promise that they would deal with what they refer to as Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights. In my view, to date, they have not dealt squarely with Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights or more specifically the harvesting rights of Inuit. In our particular case, they’ve chosen to work within a framework that is imposed by Westerners and not to embrace the distinct and inherent rights of Inuit in Alaska to be secure in their own means of subsistence.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act has been one of the biggest burdens that not only Alaskan Inuit have faced,

but all Alaska Native people have faced by virtue of the imposition of the provisions of our so-called land claims agreement in 1971. We’re still dealing with this because the government has not explicitly affirmed our rights to hunting, fishing, and other harvesting activities. This fundamental challenge has to be overcome.

CB : In Alaska there is no true co-management. There are cooperative agreements. This differs from a co-management structure in which both groups are at the table to collectively make decisions together; to have both Indigenous knowledge and science equitably engaged; to have Indigenous values and management practices at the forefront. Within Alaska, the state and federal management practices are often single species-oriented, which lacks a holistic understanding of how everything is interconnected. That creates quite a conflict. Even the fact that we refer to them as species becomes a way of objectifying the parts of the environment that people have relationships with. This siloed approach is further emphasized by the multiple agencies involved in managing different animals and habitats, managed under different mandates, and/or under different interpretations of the same laws.

CS: What does the future of Indigenous food sovereignty look like in the Arctic?

CB : In the food security conceptual framework, the drum, remember that all of the pieces are interconnected and needed. In Alaska, it was clear that what is really unstable is the lack of decision making power and management—and that directly links to food sovereignty. That is what led us to our current project. We’re doing a comparison within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of Canada and Alaska to look at what impedes or supports Inuit food sovereignty. Within Alaska, it’s very clear that that lack of co-management, the lack of decision making power is at the height of it.

W hether it’s climate change, conflict of interest, or the burden of conservation, all come back to decision making and looking at whose values are being put at the forefront when making those decisions within Inuit homelands. Within Alaska and internationally, it is often a dominant culture, economically driven, and people far from the Arctic making decisions and policy recommendations based on information and values that do not reflect Inuit, the Arctic, or a holistic understanding of the world.

The Food Sovereignty and Self-Governance report and resources on the food security framework can be accessed at iccalaska.org.

Processing seal meat.

Photo by Jacki Cleveland.

L–R: Maya Harjo holding teosinte, ancestor to corn. Planting Coastal Live Oak acorns with Mauricio. Rowen White holding blue corn. The Cultural Conservancy team weeding and teaching in cornfields. Photo by Maya Harjo

From Soil to Sky

Mending the Circle of O ur Native Food Systems

Melissa K. Nelson and Maya Harjo

At an autumn Learning Lodge in Coast Miwok, Southern Pomo Territory, Elder Leroy Little Bear (Blackfeet) shared with us a powerful teaching: as Native Peoples, “we find our cultural resilience in the medicine of the land.” As a place-based, Indigenousled intertribal organization, The Cultural Conservancy takes this teaching to heart. It is a reminder that when things are difficult, we can look to the medicines of the land to strengthen us, and in times of disease or hunger, they are our blessings. Food is medicine. So how do we, as Native communities, best cultivate the medicines of the land and honor the resilience o f our cultures?

H ere in Coast Miwok Territory on the flanks of Mount Tamalpais in mid-summer, many medicines are revealing themselves: bay nuts, acorns, thimbleberries, manzanita, a nd madrone berries are all ripening with the long days and summer heat. We recognize the Native foods of this land a nd the First Peoples who have millennia-long relations with these plant and animal relatives, which they harvest for food, medicine, craft, tools, and historically, most of their material culture. While the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo (represented by the sovereign nation of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) have the first rights to harvest and utilize these medicines, many of these Native foods are locked up on private property or protected areas where harvesting rights are off limits.

Thanks to the global Indigenous movement and national struggles and victories like Standing Rock, the Buffalo Treaty, the recent recognition of Muscogee Creek land rights in Oklahoma, mascot name changes, and the Black Lives Matter movement (to name a few), there is a growing awareness in mainstream society about the importance of respecting the sovereignty of Native Americans and their lands. For Indigenous Peoples the world over, the right to our lands and foods is primary. Food sovereignty is political and cultural, nutritional, and cosmological. It is about honoring the Indigenous foods that give us life—whether plants, animals, fungi, salt, or other place-based gifts from the land. As we have learned from relatives David and Wendy Bray (Seneca), the Haudenosaunee calls these foods “our life sustainers.”

The Cultural Conservancy has been supporting and advocating for Food Sovereignty since we supported the restoration of a Victory Garden in the Presidio National Park with native seeds in the late 1990s, followed by our participation in a historic Native American delegation to Slow Food Terra Madre in 2006, and through urban gardens, workshops, and cultural demonstrations with intertribal and global I ndigenous communities over the past 25 years. The Cultural Conservancy supports Indigenous food sovereignty through local farms, a growing Native Foodways Program, national and international networks, a podcast series, and global grantmaking. Our long term commitment is to mend the circle of Indigenous health and wellness through the revitalization of Native agriculture and foodways, from seed to plate, soil t o sky, song to recipe, and ancestors to future generations.

Local Farms

Today, we are grateful to be a partner at the Indian Valley Or ganic Farm and Garden at the College of Marin in Novato, California, where we have grown a large variety of heirloom Native foods since 2012. We were originally invited to become a farm partner by one of the farm’s founders, Wendy Johnson, a Zen farmer and educator. We uplift this invitation as an important example of the kind of land rematriation work that needs to happen more—a non-Indigenous managed farm prioritizing sharing space and turning over fertile land to Native Food Sovereignty work. On less than half an acre, we grow native foods and medicines, save rare heirloom seeds, and revitalize California native plants, improving local Native communities’ access to the land, food, and seeds that foster deeper connections to cultural traditions.

From origin stories to family histories, each resilient seed we grow at the farm has an ancestral story to tell. We are guided by the seed-keepers before us whose stewardship cared for the seeds, such as the Bray Family from Seneca Nation, who gifted us the responsibility to take care of Onëo-gen, the sacred eight-row Seneca white corn that we have been growing for more than seven years. This year, our fields are full of Chimayo chile peppers, Lakota squash, Hopi purple beans, Tohono O’odham tepary beans, Cherokee purple tomatoes, and many more heirloom varieties from Native communities across Turtle Island, each carrying thousands of years of knowledge and story.

The Cultural Conservancy’s Foodways Program

The farm in Marin County is stewarded by our Native Foodways Program, a 12-year-old program that supports the Food Sovereignty of the Bay Area Native community through the revitalization of traditional Native foodways. From Indigenous agriculture to cultural land stewardship, we support a spiritual and reciprocal relationship to ancestral lands. This is especially needed in the Bay Area, where intertribal urban communities and displaced California Indian Peoples have been economically, politically, and culturally dispossessed of ancestral land and place-based traditions.

By providing community access to our farm and the foods it produces, our work mends the broken circle of traditional lifeways by offering opportunities for Native communities to reconnect with their ancestral knowledge systems, practices, foods, and seeds. Our programming includes a robust food distribution program, a Native seed library, Native youth internships and apprenticeships, educational events, workshops, and demonstrations on Indigenous agriculture, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Native sciences, and more. This work ultimately aims to heal historical trauma and return physical, mental, and spiritual health to Native community—all based in loving, reciprocal relationships with the land and her many gifts.

Branching Out

Food is a community endeavor. To cultivate and feast good food, we need community: farmers, seed-keepers, fishers, gatherers, knowledge holders, chefs, basketweavers, hunters, and more. We are grateful to be part of the Native American food movement through a series of networks and have supported the creation of the Slow Food Turtle Island Association. After years of informal networking and collaboration with each other and the Slow Food movement, Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe) spearheaded this effort to bring us together in a historic meeting in Taos, New Mexico in 2016 to formalize our Native American food network. We are organized as an association directly linked to Slow Food International in Bra, Italy. Slow Food Turtle Island Association represents diverse intertribal communities in the U.S. and Canada concerned with health and well being, land use and farming, food policy, and the protection and revitalization of rare, heirloom food varieties and associated cultural practices. The Slow Food Turtle Island Association supports the general ethos of Slow Food to promote good, clean, fair food for all, with a focus on the First Foods of the Native Peoples of Turtle Island.

The Slow Food Turtle Island Association is also linked directly to the Indigenous Terra Madre Network, which defin es itself as a network of Indigenous communities, partners, and organizations. It was born out of the wider Terra Madre network to bring Indigenous Peoples’ voices to the forefront of the debate on food and culture, to institutionalize Indigenous Peoples’ participation in the Slow Food movement and its projects, as well as to develop both regional a nd global networks. There have been three Indigenous Terra Madre global conferences, with the last one hosted by the Ainu of Japan in Hokkaido in the fall of 2019.

Nationally, we are also honored to collaborate with the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance and its Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, led by the dynamic R owen White (Mohawk). Together, we document rare seeds and seed rematriation work and produce short videos about protecting and sharing heirloom Indigenous seeds and plants. Similarly, we have collaborated with Braiding the Sacred, a hemispheric network focused on Indigenous corn growers working to preserve and perpetuate traditional varieties o f sacred corn.

The Native Seed Pod

The Cultural Conservancy sees a direct link between Food Sovereignty and Indigenous media, as we are traditional storytellers and artists who love to share the beauty, sights, sounds, and stories of our Indigenous foods in embodied ways. Audio and video recordings are powerful mediums through which we tell our stories, share our work locally and globally, decolonize media, and animate our Indigenous voices. To recognize the extraordinary wisdom and Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Indigenous farmers and food activists, we started the Native Seed Pod podcast series in 2018 to serve as “an antidote to the monoculture.” Sixteen episodes (and counting) of in-depth conversations with h unters, farmers, seed-keepers, chefs, and more can be f ound at nativeseedpod.org.

Sharing Good Water: The Mino-Niibi Fund

The Cultural Conservancy’s Mino-Niibi (“good water” in Ojibwe) Fund for Indigenous Cultures provides small grants through re-granting to Indigenous-led organizations in Turtle Island, Abya Yala (Central and South America), and Moananuiakea (Pacific Oceania). We support grassroots Native organizations working to revitalize their cultures, traditions, lands and livelihoods, most of whom are concerned with Food Sovereignty given climate disruptions and other uncertainties. To address these concerns, we have supported Aymara quinoa growers’ agrobiodiversity projects on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia; Maya corn farmers in Guatemala; cultural exchanges between Pueblo, Mayan, and Zapotec youth learning about traditional agriculture; Hawaiian orchard stewards and traditional fishermen on Big Island; and young Inuit hunters in Nunavut.

Th e Cultural Conservancy’s Native basket of food projects extend from the local to the global, from the wild to the cultivated, from individuals to networks, and from kitchens to soundwaves. We strive to enact Indigenous food justice and cultivate health and well being at many levels. By weaving traditional foods and cultural foodways into all of our programs and activities, we elevate the medicines of the land and our sacred responsibility to protect and care for them.

— Melissa K. Nelson, Ph.D. (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is a Native ecologist, writer, media-maker and Indigenous scholar-activist, and the president and CEO of The Cultural Conservancy. Maya Harjo (Quapaw, Shawnee, Muscogee Creek, Seminole) is a farmer and educator, and the Native Foodways Director at The Cultural Conservancy.

For more information, visit www.nativeland.org and www.nativeseedpod.org.

Te Koa nga

A Tim e f or Pla nting in Aotea roa

Awatea Organics is a research and training farm specializing in growing heritage organic food, seed, and medicine at Te Rewarewa Ma –ori land in Whangarei, New Zealand.

Photo by Te Tui Shortland.

Te Tui Shortland

This year and at this time, more than ever, we give thanks to Ranginui (Sky Father) for the life

giving rain and the celestial beings who signal to us the time to plant, of what the climate will be, and our harvest for the year. To our Papatuanuku (Earth Mother) for the richness of the soil, the respect that it teaches us, the clay that provides nutrients, the millennia of soil life. And Tane Mahuta (Māori god of the forest), the web of life giving and medicinal plants, the superorganism we know as the forest; the blossoming trees and our bird companions who tell us the time to gather kaimoana (shellfish/seafood) and the warmth of the coming seasons.

W e acknowledge Haumietiketike (god of wild foods) for the fern root that replenishes the soil for our sacred potato. Tawhirimatea (god of weather) for the cleansing winds and the soft, caressing winds that teach plants to stand tall and be strong. To Rongo-mā-Tāne (god of peace and cultivations) for the spiritual relationship embodied by our daily work in our maara (cultivations), for the plant companions we have co-evolved with across continents to Aotearoa, the flavorsome and nutrient rich foods. For the pollinators who teach us community. And for the seed.

The f ourth lunar month, September, is named after the Goddess of Spring, Mahuru. She re-emerges as the days grow longer, land begins to warm, and the trees blossom. The kōwhai (small-leaved trees with yellow flowers) begin to bloom and it is time to plant kūmara (sweet potato) for sprouting in T e Tai Tokerau Northland region. A spring day in the maara is a day of all seasons; the wind blows, the rains shower down, and some mornings the mist sits over the land until the sun is high in the sky. Rainbows are a common daily blessing. The frosts and the floods of winter have passed. Tama-nui-te-rā (the sun) emerges from the watery underworld of winter to fertilize the earth.

As the land warms, it is the time to observe our surroundings, to plant seeds and watch through their revolutions through the seasons. Te Koanga (Spring) is the perfect time to observe the plants cycling through the rise and the fall of the moon. As the energy waxes and wanes through the three months of spring, life on the land responds. The plants speak to us every day about the season and the climate. Growing in an Indigenous agroecological way follows organic practices, which means the soil and water cycles must be at their o ptimum to avoid disease and pests.

Through the moon, we observe the water cycle, the ideal times for sowing, transplanting, nourishing, and harvesting. At equinox, we recognize the turning point of the waxing powers of spring. It is a time to grow heritage foods that hold the memories of our ancestors and to build a loving relationship with our plant companions.

Te Rewarewa Maara Cultivations

Defined by the boundary markers of Wharekiri stream, M angakowharo, Puketatua, Te Toko, and the Harbour edge, Te Wiwi, and Te Putahi, the Te Rewarewa ancestral lands are four kilometers from the central business district of Whangarei, New Zealand. It is a 165-acre land block administered by an Incorporated Society.

Cameron Sowter (Te Mahurehure) and I run the maara at Te Rewarewa with a purpose of reconnecting people to the land and supplying tasty, nutritious heritage organic food to the local community. When you visit you get a sense of peace, a chance to commune with yourself and rediscover your roots through food. There are biodynamic kitchen gardens, rows with heritage companion planting, and terraced gardens with a mix of Haumietiketike species.

O ur business, Awatea Organics, specializes in growing heritage organic food, seed, and medicine, as well as cultivating farmers. Reviving ancestral seed guardians and responding t o the seed famine in Aotearoa is our mission. We co-evolve our maara with Rongo-mā-Tāne, the plants, and insects. W e follow the ancient principles of mimicking nature, establishing biodiverse resilient ecosystems of delicious a nd nutritious food.

At Awatea Organics, we believe the future of food is c ulture. Hand raised and hand harvested heritage produce reconnects people to their ancestors and follows Indigenous practices with an intergenerational focus. We grow supporting harmony amongst diversity, observing and responding to how plants and insects thrive together. Mimicking nature is an Indigenous way of cultivating food. Since establishing the Te Rewarewa cultivations, we have brought back pollinator species and bird life to the area. As Indigenous organic farmers, we ensure harmony amongst diversity. We ensure balance amongst the predators and pests, that soil health and the c ycle of return is at an optimum, and that the water cycle is fostered. It is time to reclaim the role of plants and trees in the water cycle, in the climatic balance of the Earth and the value of the farmer; to protect and enhance natural ecosystems, protect and improve rural livelihoods, and foster t he resilience of people, communities, and ecosystems.

A l arge part of our efforts is in “growing out” heritage seed. This is when a farmer grows and saves seeds each harvest, such as peruperu (potato), to the point of security of supply. We started this initiative after hearing so many stories of lost heritage seed and receiving heritage seed with very low integrity. The seed is the cycle, the past, the future, the connection to soil, the memories of all time. If we look after the Earth, we can grow food for the next 100 years.

I t is also imperative, now more than ever, that we share seeds across our generations with other Indigenous farmers following Indigenous practices, acknowledging the genealogy of the seed and one another. We have co-evolved with our diverse potato seeds over centuries and across continents. Seed freedom represents abundance, protection of Indigenous food systems, nutrition for the community, and the promotion and protections of indigenous seed innovations. By using o rganic practices to build resilience in our seed and adjust to the local climatic conditions, we ensure the future sustainability of the harvest. Seed is not a commodity; it is the source of life. Gardens and forests are seed sanctuaries. When you respect the seed, you are connected to the sacred thread t hat connects us all.

W e grow native greens, which are a staple to the Indigenous daily diet: Ruruhau, a native brassica; puha, a variety of milk thistle; kokihi, a native spinach; and ku –mara vine greens. We grow the native squash kamokamo, which is speckled green when picked and eventually turns bright orange when hardened. They are delicious boiled with butter. We save seed and we nurture the soil to pass on to future generations.

The maara is a place where people are rediscovering their roots through food. The COVID lockdowns have been a wake up call to how people cannot access healthy food due to the unhealthy food system. Providing food and medicine to communities concerned for the life and dignity of the farmer and Mother Earth is our mission. Hand raised and hand harvested food is the future of an ethical and ecological economy.

— Te Tui Shortland (Ngati Hine, Ngapuhi, Ngati Raukawa ki te Tonga) is founder of Awatea Organics, director of Te Kopu, Pacific Indigenous & Local Knowledge Centre of Distinction, and a Cultural Survival board member.

Polynesian ancestors of Ma –ori brought ku –mara (sweet potato) with them when they arrived in New Zealand in the 13th century.

Photo by Te Tui Shortland.