Food Sovereignty And Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty is the assertion that people have the right to define their own food systems, with respect for their own cultures and resource management systems. This idea emerged in the context of the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, and is therefore situated in the context of the global agrarian crisis as an alternative way to think about food security (McMichael 2014). Food sovereignty is radical and counter-hegemonic in the sense that it puts those who produce, distribute, and consume food at the center of decisions in their own food systems. Otherwise, the demands of the market and global corporations would regulate the food system. Yet, food sovereignty has been transposed into a variety of new contexts since the 1980s that have created alternate arguments and benefits for thinking about food sovereignty, including its use as a force of community independence and a “continuation of anti-colonial struggles” (Grey and Patel 2015). Here, I seek to explore food sovereignty and it’s aims in the localized context of North American indigenous rights movements. Such a discussion requires a review of how colonization affected the prior food system of North America’s indigenous population, an understanding of how food sovereignty can mobilizes political arguments addressing tribal sovereignty,

Early on, there was clear recognition that traditional foods are a pillar of native life, and not only feed the bodies of indigenous people but their culture as well. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas have developed distinct harvesting strategies and accumulated ecological knowledge over thousands of years to match the local abundance of traditional foods in their territories. Only recently has the global movement toward indigenous rights begun to understand this process, and the intimacy between food independence and community