Food Systems Literacy Series, March Edition - Indigenous Food Systems
Indigenous Peoples pre-colonization created incredible, resilient and abundant food systems, and now many Nations are working to revitalize these culturally rich traditions. Our team recently heard a talk with Diné (Navajo) and Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) musician and researcher Dr. Lyla June for the Four Seasons of Learning online course on Indigenous education for reconciliation. You can watch her Tedx talk here: 3000-year-old solutions to modern problems | Lyla June | TEDxKC.
She explains that, in our current era, humans are often represented as a virus that is harmful to ecosystems and other creatures, yet for Indigenous civilizations for millennia, humans acted as a keystone species. These civilizations supported and augmented the natural systems that give abundant food sources to whole ecosystems. In the examples from her talk, we heard about how West coast Indigenous Peoples planted kelp beds to enrich coastal food systems, how the buffalo followed the Diné as they managed grasslands with controlled burns, enriching soils for medicinal plants and expanding buffalo habitat South and East, and much more. In all the examples, she emphasized, Indigenous Civilizations increased the biodiversity of regions where they cultivated foods and made these areas so abundant that they could feed densely populated human villages and more-than-human animal relatives.
In our EcoCooks workshops, we share an example of this with students. This Tsimshian Nation food forest [insert the photo] remains a much more biodiverse stretch of forest even hundreds of years after colonization interrupted the Tsimshian cultural care for this Land.
More and more research shows the millennia-long histories of Indigenous Peoples cultivating the Land, which oral histories have long known, telling us that these Nations had their own cities and sophisticated food systems. This CBC article, for example, tells of how new research on chestnut tree species distribution points to a “civilization epicentre that few people really are aware of” in the Skeena River valley of BC.
What does this mean for food systems transformation? When we look at soil health, at biodiversity loss, at climate change, it is clear that our food systems have a major part to play in finding a healthy ecological balance for humans with the more-than-human world. This Food Tank story shares the idea that food systems sustainability requires us to embrace intercultural knowledge creation, meaning that Indigenous and Western food knowledges both contribute to solutions. The research from the Universidad Intercultural Maya found that agroecology and regenerative agriculture solutions did not succeed in helping Mayan farmers when they omitted local cultural knowledge.
“Through conversations with Yucatec Maya knowledge holders, the researchers learned that the Yucatec Maya food system includes several components, many dating back to pre-Hispanic times. These include: several gardens of staple foods, medicinal plants, beekeeping, forest collecting and several subsystems of edible animals. They also learned that the Yucatec Maya’s notion of food systems requires food security, food sufficiency, and food sovereignty.
The authors say that the path forward to transforming food systems requires ‘different ways of creating knowledge’ working together.”
What does this mean for us as food educators in Canada? When we are looking for sustainable solutions for present-day problems, we need to be in conversation with Indigenous histories and perspectives! We need to examine colonial assumptions about cultivating food and relationships with the land, and we can help students do this questioning too. For a food secure future, we need to learn from the land and learn from local Indigenous Nations.