Postcolonialism, Indigeneity and Struggles for Food Sovereignty

Alternative food networks in subaltern spaces

Marisa Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138920873
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317416111
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores connections between activist debates about food sovereignty and academic debates about alternative food networks. The ethnographic case studies demonstrate how divergent histories and geographies of people-in-place open up or close off possibilities for alternative/sovereign food spaces, illustrating the globally uneven and varied development of industrial capitalist food networks and of everyday forms of subversion and accommodation. How, for example, do relations between alternative food networks and mainstream industrial capitalist food networks differ in places with contrasting histories of land appropriation, trade, governance and consumer identities to those in Europe and non-indigenous spaces of New Zealand or the United States? How do indigenous populations negotiate between maintaining a sense of moral connectedness to their agri- and acqua-cultural landscapes and subverting, or indeed appropriating, industrial capitalist approaches to food? By delving into the histories, geographies and everyday worlds of (post)colonial peoples, the book shows how colonial power relations of the past and present create more opportunities for some alternative producer–consumer and state–market–civil society relations than others.

1 Rethinking ‘alternative’

Māori and food sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand

Carolyn Morris and Stephen FitzHerbert

The aim of this chapter is to consider what Māori struggles for food sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand reveal more generally about indigeneity and food sovereignty in a situation of postcoloniality. Through an exploration of Māori potatoes in contemporary Māori food sovereignty strategies, we question whether the term ‘food sovereignty’ necessarily goes with (or ought to go with) that of ‘alternative’, and raise the question of the politics that might be being performed by such an association. We show that many Māori do not necessarily make such a distinction, and argue that discourses and practices which reinscribe it may actually work against Māori sovereignty more broadly understood.

A core idea underpinning literatures on food sovereignty is that the capitalist food system will not deliver food sovereignty, if by sovereignty what is meant is the ability to have autonomy and control over the food you (as a group or individual) consume. Instead, sovereignty is imagined as emerging from spaces outside of the capitalist food system, spaces defined as ‘alternative’. Efforts to bring food sovereignty into being have taken the form of assembling new (or reinstantiating imagined ‘traditional’) modes of production, distribution and consumption. Food sovereignty is considered to be manifest in assemblages such as farmers’ markets, direct farmer/consumer linkages, gardening (individual and community), the Slow Food movement and so on. One of the sets of values that shape these assemblages are values of ‘tradition’, in which these practices are imagined as coming from (and therefore capable of reproducing) a better time, when food was wholesome, and people were connected rather than disconnected from each other and from the earth, and from knowledges of how to produce and cook food. A subset of this discourse of traditionalism is the indigenous imaginary.

The indigenous imaginary

In the indigenous imaginary (which has a very long and complex history) indigenous peoples are understood as being closer to nature than Western peoples. Being associated with nature rather than culture has, in the history of Western thought, generally been viewed as negative rather than positive as closer to nature has meant less developed, less civilized, less rational. However, in the field of alternative food, being closer to nature is valorized rather than denigrated. Being closer to nature means being in touch with what is authentic, original and uncontaminated (in particular by consumer capitalism). Constituted as the positive opposite of all that is wrong with the global capitalist food system, understood as possessing ecological and social wisdom and as having a spiritual connection with the land, indigenous peoples and their foodways are constituted as a reservoir of hope and knowledge from which an economically, socially, culturally and environmentally sustainable food system could be created. Bell (2014) draws attention to the pervasiveness of this imaginary in her discussion of the representation of the Na’vi in the film Avatar:

The construction of Na’vi culture draws on long-standing stereotypes of indigenous that contrast their values and way of life sharply with those of capitalist modernity. The Na’vi live in harmony with nature, in contrast to the destructiveness of the humans’ capitalist and technological engagement with the natural world. While the human society is driven by insatiable desires for more wealth, Na’vi society appears static, unchanging, maintaining balance with the natural world and connection with the spirits of their ancestors.

(Bell 2014: 1–2)

The film Avatar, Bell writes, ‘is testimony to the continuing power of the archetypes of noble, authentic indigeneity and rapacious modern, capitalist development’ (Bell 2014: 2).

A number of writers (for example, Hage 1997; Abarca 2004; Morris 2010, 2013) have drawn attention to the problems associated with the positive discourse of authenticity and tradition for minority ethnic groups in white-dominated societies, noting the ways in which it works to contain and limit those groups, through constituting them (and the things associated with them) as objects for consumption by the dominant group rather than as economic subjects or actors. Bell writes that ‘indigenous ways of life can only appear in modernity in the form of “tradition”, appropriate for symbolic and ceremonial occasions, but not appropriate to the management of economic life, the organisation of social relationships, or the practice of government’ (Bell 2014: 4). With regards to food this is not quite the case, as indigenous knowledges are imagined as a reservoir of desired, holistic wisdom, which can be drawn upon by the West to save itself and the planet.

In settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada the indigenous imaginary is complicated in interesting ways by the presence of actually existing indigenous people. Arguably, in societies lacking actual indigenous peoples, elements from the discourse of indigeneity (that is, traditional, natural, community) may be appropriated and deployed by food sovereignty activists to critique the existing capitalist food regime and to advocate a more sustainable future through the return to a more natural way of being and eating. In settler societies, however, the everyday presence of indigenous people complicates this process, as indigenous people repeatedly and consistently refuse to be contained by discourses of indigeneity which reflect the dominant groups’ understanding of them, what they should be and what they should do. They refuse to be the dominant group’s authentic ‘other’, however positively imagined, and instead insist that they can fully engage in the capitalist economy while also maintaining their traditional foodways. As Lambert writes:

Indigenous communities are not without agency in any economic space. Indigenous societies have opposed colonisation, attempted to subvert modernisation to their own purposes, and now – with the obvious hindsight of their previous experiences retained in social memory – continue to resist the marginal and passive status ascribed to them.

(Lambert 2008: 211)

Māori, like many indigenous peoples, insist on having their cake and eating it too (as well as making a business out of it and selling it, if they feel like it) and refuse to see this position as contradictory or inconsistent (see also Ali and Vallianatos, Chapter 2).

In this chapter we explore one aspect of how Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, are working to achieve food sovereignty, focusing on the case of the Māori potato. We argue that linking ‘indigenous’ with ‘alternative’ in opposition to ‘mainstream’ and ‘capitalist market’ reproduces a particular set of binaries (coded positively and negatively), and that this discourse is neither useful for understanding Māori practices nor politically useful for furthering Māori sovereignty.

Position, politics and methods

First, however, a note on our position. Neither of the authors of this paper are Māori, but rather Pākehā, descendents of British colonial settlers, and therefore part of the dominant group. There are significant challenges and responsibilities connected to the politics of knowledge production and the politics of representation when studying Māori communities (Underhill-Sem and Lewis 2008; FitzHerbert and Lewis 2010); thus there is a complicated and contested politics to our work on potatoes, and writing ‘about’ Māori for our own ends (namely academic publication) is potentially problematic. As such, we keep to the surface and do not ask matauranga Māori questions, that is, questions refracted through Māori wisdom, or Māori ways of knowing; this is already being done by Māori writers (for example, Roskruge 1999, 2014; Lambert 2007, 2008; McFarlane 2007; Puketapu 2011). Our account is based upon two key sources of information: original ethnographic research by FitzHerbert and an interpretation of Māori voices in a variety of published literature about Māori potatoes. While none of this literature is directly concerned with concepts of food sovereignty, it speaks to the questions we wish to address, because of its focus on how Māori negotiate the articulation of diverse Māori economies and market economies (see, for example, Roskruge 1999; McFarlane 2007; Lambert 2008; Underhill-Sem and Lewis 2008; FitzHerbert 2009, 2016; FitzHerbert and Lewis 2010; Bargh 2012; Barr and Reid 2014). In drawing on this literature to describe contemporary Māori engagement with potatoes, we problematize Western categories which constitute indigenous economies as separate from, and opposed to, capitalist economies.

Colonialism and postcolonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand

An understanding of contemporary Māori food sovereignty practices, and of the place of the potato in those politics, requires an understanding of the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and the place of the potato in that history. What this history shows is that ‘Māori, like other indigenous societies, have never rejected innovation’ (Lambert 2008: 204; see also Millner, Chapter 4), but instead have worked to achieve ‘collaboration between two distinct knowledge bases: the globally fluid (if tensely negotiated) knowledge of horticultural production and marketing, and the locally fluid (and often equally tensely negotiated) practice of matauranga Māori [Māori ways of knowing]’ (Lambert 2008: 201). What Māori history shows is that the binary that opposes culture and tradition to modernity and development does not capture Māori strategic agency in the face of challenges presented by ongoing colonial engagement.

Following the initial ‘discovery’ of Aotearoa and its naming as New Zealand by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642, and its subsequent rediscovery by English explorer Captain James Cook in 1769, New Zealand, and Māori, were incorporated into Britain’s colonial empire. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, formalized the relationship between Māori and the British Crown. Precisely what Māori signed up for and ceded remains a subject of intense debate, primarily because of the linguistic slippages between the English and Māori versions of the Treaty. In return for the protection of the Crown, Māori ceded kawanatanga, now translated as ‘governance’, but in the English version of the Treaty this word was translated as ‘sovereignty’. Crucially, Māori did not cede rangitiratanga, which would have been a more correct translation of the English word sovereignty. The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi paved the way for mass migration from Britain, so that by 1858 Europeans outnumbered Māori. The resulting ‘land grab’ meant that by 1890 Māori, who had had undisputed possession of Aotearoa New Zealand, came to control only 40 per cent of the land, and that by the year 2000 Māori landholdings had been reduced to perhaps 4 per cent of the land mass. The loss of land that resulted from the Treaty of Waitangi ‘strongly influenced Māori peoples’ ability to have complete control over and direct self-determined, holistic development’ (McFarlane 2007: 10; see also Durie 1998), resulting in the exclusion of Māori from the dominant economic sphere.

Colonization transformed the world of the Māori in many of the same ways it did everywhere, instituting ‘political, technological and institutional changes that were overtly oppressive to Māori’ (Lambert 2008: 211; see also Durie 1998; Smith 1999). With the incorporation of the Māori economy into the British capitalist economy, the economic base of Māori society and culture was rapidly transformed, with predictably negative consequences. As a result, Māori are now over-represented in many negative statistics: high rates of poor health, high rates of imprisonment, lower life expectancy, poor educational outcomes, low income and so on. However, this story is not the only story that can be told about Māori and colonialism. Māori were never passive in the face of colonial expansion. Despite thei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: sovereign food spaces? Openings and closures
• 1 Rethinking ‘alternative’: Māori and food sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 2 Indigenous foodways in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: an alternative-additional food network
• 3 Justice for the salmon: indigenous ways of life as a critical resource in envisioning alternative futures
• 4 Food sovereignty, permaculture and the postcolonial politics of knowledge in El Salvador
• 5 Possibilities for alternative peasant trajectories through gendered food practices in the Office du Niger
• 6 Local food, imported food, and the failures of community gardening initiatives in Nauru
• 7 Cuban exceptionalism? A genealogy of postcolonial food networks in the Caribbean
• Afterword
• Index