Documentation:Case Study 1: Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Defining Food Sovereignty;
Who are indigenous people?; According to the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment, McGill University, ‘Indigenous people’ refers to a cultural group in a particular ecological area that developed a successful subsistence base from the natural resources available. The plural form, 'Indigenous Peoples', refers to more than one cultural group.; Indigenous Food Systems; Indigenous food systems include all of the land, soil, water, and air, as well as culturally important plant, fungi, and animal species that have sustained Indigenous peoples over thousands of years of participating in the natural world (Indigenous Food Systems Network 2017). Since the time of colonization, Indigenous communities have experienced a drastic decline in the health and integrity of their cultures, ecosystems, social structures and knowledge systems. Indigenous food related knowledge, values and wisdom were lost in the process and this has affected the ability of Indigenous communities to achieve adequate amounts of healthy foods (Reading and Wien 2009). Beyond health, what are the other impacts?; Indigenous Food Sovereignty; Indigenous food sovereignty refers to a reconnection to land-based food and political systems from a disconnected state often driven by colonization (Martens et al. 2014). It moves beyond access to food, and is grounded in the idea that people should self-determine their food systems and cultural traditions. La Via Campesina, a group of land-based peasants, farmers, and Indigenous people, devised the term food sovereignty in 1996 to protest the globalization of food systems (Wittman et al. 2009).

How to use this Case Study;
1. Read the introduction section. ; 2. Listen to the PODCAST by Wilson Mendes, which is based on a chapter from the Canada 150 Book, written by Dawn Morrison and Hannah Wittman.; 3. Read through one or more of the Pathways below. ; 4. Visit the site of the Reconciliation Pole. ; 5. Return to the pathways, read the material, and answer the questions. ;

Case Study 2: Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Case Study Details

Case study campus food asset: All of campus, which is on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people, more specifically, the Reconciliation Pole.
Case study location: Reconciliation Pole, Main Mall, between Agronomy Road and Thunderbird Boulevard on UBC’s Vancouver Campus.
Case study timeline: Publically accessible all hours of the day.
Case study topics: History, Information Science, Anthropology, Food, Nutrition and Health, Political Science, Law, Economics, Geography, International Relations, Human Relations

Podcast with Dawn Morrison and Hannah Wittman

INSERT PODCAST HERE

Case Study Introduction

At the University of British Columbia, we are encouraged to question our assumptions, beliefs, and values; to think deeply about the important issues of the day; to develop habits of mind that will allow the next generation of thinkers to address humanities most troubling causes.

But when are we asked to question the assumptions, beliefs and values of UBC itself?

This case study is one of those opportunities. Through an examination of food systems, land, ownership, control, colonialization, and indigenous food sovereignty issues, we learn to identify and understand the tensions, contradictions, and challenging ways forward towards truth and reconciliation. The geographic centre of this case study is the Reconciliation Pole; however, it is the campus itself, the land upon which UBC is situated (e.g. its buildings, parking lots, walkways, ornamental gardens, acres of lawn, and endowment), that should be centre-of-mind when engaging with the materials below. Further, it is important to keep in mind that components of this case study have significant overlap and similarity with indigenous struggles with colonialization across the province and beyond.

The UBC Vancouver campus is located on the traditional territory of the Musqueam community. In 2006, UBC and Musqueam formalized relations in the Memorandum of Affiliation. This memorandum is the formal base of relationship that UBC seeks to have with the Musqueam and other Aboriginal communities, and since then, a number of initiatives have been started.

On April 1, 2017, the Reconciliation Pole was installed at the UBC Vancouver campus, on the traditional lands of the Musqueam First Nation. The pole is one of two UBC initiatives that aim to capture the long trajectory of Indigenous and Canadian relations and to ensure that one part of that, the history of Canada’s Indian residential schools, will never be forgotten. The second is the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, which will house records and historical material and provide a place to discuss experiences, the history, and its effects and implications.

In the years leading up to the 150th Anniversary of Canadian/Confederation, Dawn Morrison and Dr. Hannah Wittman worked together on indigenous food sovereignty and social resiliency issues in British Columbia. Dawn Morrison hails from the Secwepemc community and is the founder of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (WGIFS). Dr. Hannah Wittman is the Academic Director of the UBC Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS).

Dr. Wittman and Ms. Morrison’s discussion explores the potential of addressing the social and environmental injustices of Indigenous peoples by going to the learning edges - between settler allies and Indigenous peoples. While many may see universities as research-producing institutions contributing to the public interest, academia can also be a tool of colonization, appropriation, and oppression (Aaron Lao, 2015). Ms. Morrison emphasizes the importance of settlers – namely academics - to not shy away from collaborations with Aboriginal communities. Respectful, mutually beneficial relationships can and should be fostered.

Attribution: Pole-diagram-full-size by UBC under CC BY 2.0

Pathway #1 - Documenting Traditional Uses

Subjects: History, Information Science, Anthropology, Food, Nutrition and Health

Foods from the natural environment that became included into the cultural food-use patterns of a group of Indigenous People are known as indigenous foods (FAO 1996). Just as there is great diversity in Canada’s Indigenous communities, there is there is a great variety of indigenous foods. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (1996):

“It is common knowledge that the collective wisdom of resource use in natural environments known to Indigenous People is disappearing in the face of "modernization and "technological development". Young people are no longer systematically taught by their elders to survive using only the natural environment. Hence, valuable information on these resources is being passed to fewer and fewer people, and gradually being lost from indigenous societies, as well as from collective human knowledge.”

In Canada, the loss of traditional Indigenous culture and knowledge did not only fall victim to modernization and technological development. Beginning in the 1880s, Aboriginal children across Canada were removed, often forcibly, from their homes and placed in Residential Schools. The Canadian government wanted Aboriginal peoples to abandon their traditional beliefs and adopt western-based values and religions (Partridge 2010). This has impacted generation after generation of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Today, many suffer from an uncertain identity due to the loss of language, knowledge systems, culture, and connection with family many years ago.

The Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment at McGill University developed a procedural manual for understanding and documenting the traditional food system of Indigenous People - Documenting Traditional Food Systems of Indigenous Peoples: International Case Studies. Nuxalk Nation from coastal BC is one of the groups included in this study. The most important foundation of this project is gathering traditional food data through key informants and focus groups. This tool could help reconnect Indigenous people to land-based food and political systems and work towards food sovereignty. The challenge lies in the fact that many people hoping to reconnect with their traditional food and practices are still in the process of healing from historical trauma.

Required reading:
Turner, N. J., et al. (2006). Indigenous Peoples’ food systems: Chapter 2: The Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program, coastal British Columbia, Canada: 1981-2006. Retrieved from ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/012/i0370e/i0370e03.pdf

The authors, working under the FAO, assess how a group of Indigenous Peoples from coastal British Columbia themselves researched their food diversity, cultural understanding of their food and the impacts of the environment on their food. The authors conclude 20 years after the programed ended, that the positive effects of the Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program are still evident.

Additional reading: Kuhnlein et al. (2013). The Legacy of the Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program for Food Security, Health and Well-being of Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/1494707455?pq-origsite=summon&accountid=14656

This article highlights the gaps of the Nuxalk Food and Nutrition Program in achieving food sovereignty. The authors argue that while improving the intake of nutritious food was successful according to several methods of evaluation, persistent food security exists due to the domination of industrial food products in diets, with local traditional foods play a supplemental role.

Questions:

What methods for collecting and analyzing data on traditional food uses might the federal and provincial governments want to prioritize? Which ones were most compatible with people and communities who are sensitive to the past?
What role could UBC and the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre play in the documentation of traditional foods?

Pathway #2 - Policy Implications and Learning

Subjects: Political Science, Law, and Economics

“Food sovereignty as a policy framework for an alternative to an international trade–driven, industrialized agriculture system is hostile to import and technological dependency precisely because that system condemns peasant agriculture to extinction.” (Suppan, 2008)

In British Columbia, wild salmon is considered a keystone species of coastal Indigenous people's diets and cultures (Garibaldi & Turner 2004). Due to their important role transferring nutrients from marine to terrestrial ecosystems, salmon is considered as an ecological keystone species (Helfield & Naiman, 2006). In the same vein, salmon exhibit a particularly large influence on social systems, and play a fundamental role in the diet, materials, medicine, and spiritual practices of Indigenous peoples, and considered a cultural keystone species (Garibaldi & Turner, 2004). Traditionally in British Columbia, wild salmon was harvested in large quantities and intensively managed for quality and productivity. Indigenous people saw a decline in the health and integrity of their cultures, ecosystems, social structures and knowledge systems, non-Aboriginal fishers took increasing control of the fishing industry.

Salmon has become an environmental and cultural policy issue in British Columbia. Decisions on fisheries in the province are driven by western science‐based knowledge systems and often exclude knowledge from non‐western based Indigenous sources (Fish-WIKS, 2017). Dawn Morrison offers the Indigenous regenerative model as a path towards a sustainable food system. This model is a departure from the productionist model of the food system that was necessary for colonial expansion (Morrison and Wittman, 2016). The regenerative model does not use productionist language and Dawn Morrison suggests: “instead of calling yourself a producer, call yourself a farmer; and instead of calling food a product, call it it’s actual name,” (Morrison and Wittman, 2016). To improve fisheries governance and management, Canadian legislation needs to consider indigenous knowledge as it can inform of a more sustainable system - environmentally and culturally.

Fisheries – Western and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Fish-WIKS) is a research project out of Dalhousie University in Halifax, that looks at understanding how Indigenous knowledge systems can enhance decision-making with regards to the Canadian fisheries policy. Fish-WIKS propose that western governance bureaucratic theoretical model seems at odds with the multiplicity of indigenous knowledge systems. Fish-WIKS and Dawn Morrison seek to incorporate knowledge systems rather than isolate the ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’ systems.

Required reading:
R. v. Sparrow [1990]. (2009). Retrieved from http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/sparrow_case/

This summary is of the 1990 Supreme Court decision which set out criteria to determine whether governmental infringement on Aboriginal rights was justifiable. The Sparrow Case was considered a victory as it affirmed Aboriginal rights, but no attention was paid to what was considered adequate consultation or compensation regarding rights infringement.

Additional reading:
Nesbitt, H. K. (2016). Species and population diversity in Pacific salmon fisheries underpin indigenous food security. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12717/full

This article examines how species and population diversity – key measures of biodiversity - influence the food security of indigenous fisheries for Pacific salmon. The findings show that population diversity, instead of species diversity, was associated with a higher catch stability. The authors suggest that the scale of environmental assessment needs to match the scale of the socio-ecological processes which will be affected by development.

Kirchhoff, D., Gardner, H. L., Tsuji, L. J. (2013). The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 and Associated Policy: Implications for Aboriginal Peoples. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 4(3). Retrieved from https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1139&context=iipj

The authors argue that Canada’s new Environmental Assessment Act (EAA 2012) weakens Aboriginal people’s capacity to participate in the resource development review process for undertakings that affect their lands. In response to this insufficient EA process, the authors note that strategic environmental assessment could serve as a better alternative as it ensures that free, prior and informed consent is given.

Questions:

What do you believe is a meaningful policy change that would support Indigenous Food Sovereignty? At what level would this best occur – local, provincial, or federal? Who are the relevant stakeholders?
Any infringement of Aboriginal or treaty right in Canada requires justification. Under what sort of circumstances might an infringement occur? How does the Canadian government achieve ‘meaningful engagement’?

Pathway #3 - Medicinal Ethnobotany

Subjects: Medicine, Kinesiology, Biology

Ethnobotanical and ethnomedicinal knowledge has been preserved through the ages in written or oral form. While some of this traditional knowledge (e.g., for herbal medicine) has been incorporated into Western medicine (Fakim, 2006) and research of plant resources in traditional medicine has intensified with the aim of finding new cures for different health conditions (Wachtel-Galor & Benzie, 2011), chemically synthesized drugs, in many parts of the world, have been prioritized as the main way to revolutionize health care.

Throughout history, Indigenous peoples were coerced into abandoning their cultural beliefs and practices in relation to health care upon the arrival of settlers. Their loss of control over the land base and all of its resources was a part of the plan to systematically destroy Aboriginal knowledge and culture systems (Obomsawin, 2007). It is only recently that there has come an increased recognition by the scientific establishment that traditional healers were highly gifted persons, subject to years of exhaustive training, and whose understanding of nature and the workings of the human body-mind complex surpassed that of western science (Coombs, 2007).

Today, the challenge lies in sharing traditional medicinal knowledge across cultures. Posey and Dutfield (1996) argue that the ethnobotanical literature (journal articles, databases, and field collections in particular) serves as a major source of information and ideas for researchers and industries with commercial objectives. End users of this information are often third parties who have had no direct contact with the indigenous communities whose knowledge they are appropriating (Barnett & Banister, 2000). To counterbalance this tendency, medical professional and Indigenous healers need to create a space for dialogue and knowledge sharing. At UBC, the Indigenous Research Partnerships (IRP) aims to further develop research and education on areas of shared priorities between the Indigenous community and the university. The support of knowledge synthesis, translation and exchange from an Indigenous lens can help to stimulate innovating research in the field of medicine.

Required Readings: Ellison, C. 2014. Indigenous Knowledge and Knowledge Synthesis, Translation and Exchange: National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health. Retrieved from http://www.nccah-ccnsa.ca/en/publications.aspx?sortcode=2.8.10&publication=127

This discussion paper examines the theory and practice of knowledge synthesis, translation and exchange (KSTE) within public health in Canada. The author acknowledges that Indigenous knowledge can work with existing methods and theories of knowledge translation, but also requires its own KSTE process.

Questions:

What are the costs and benefits of allowing knowledge of plants and their functional biomedical components to fall under intellectual property rights?
What alternative models or examples exist that acknowledge and properly attribute traditional knowledge in the development of new medicinal products?