Mushrooms foraged for and identified during a landscape harvesting workshop. L’Anse Indian Reservation, Fall 2019.
What is Food Sovereignty?
Food Sovereignty is broadly defined and specifically described in novel ways – it is place-based, people-based work that seeks to remedy the many impacts and disparities caused by modern food systems. Together, Food Sovereignty work has created a global movement encompassing unique histories, contemporaries, and future transformations of food systems worldwide.
Food Sovereignty is diversely complex. This is because food systems shape and are shaped by both human and natural systems at different scales, from local to global. Understanding Food Sovereignty is about getting to know food genealogies, food-human relations, food justice and ethics, Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty, as well as ecosystem sciences, market forces, public policy, technologies and more. In addition, it is about learning what communities are doing to restore and preserve their local economies, cultures, and wellbeing through Food Sovereignty actions.
“Food Sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems”
Local Food Sovereignty Resources
Plant care / reciprocity : Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (bookshop link)
Nutrient Deficiencies in beans and tomatoes (pdf)
Asemma (Tobacco) Teaching: Honor the Earth: Sacred Tobacco (pdf); Medicines Asemma Ojibwemowin Vocabulary (pdf);
How to use the foods we grow: Salsa Workshop Recipe Booklet (pdf)
Mushroom Explorations: Puhpohwee: A Narrative Account of Fungi Uses Among Anishinaabeg (pdf); Morels with Mint, Peas, and Shallots (recipe); Guidelines to Help Identify Mushrooms (pdf); Pity the Poor Puffball Poem by Dana Richter (doc)
Native Crabapple: Native Crabapple Recipes (pdf); Decolonization Diet Project (link)
Companion Planting: Companion Plant Chart (doc) Companion Plants Poster (doc)
Manidoosheg: Importance of Insects and their Arthropod Relatives (pdf); Common Bee Identification Guide (pdf)
Community Garden Orientation: Getting to Know the Soil in your Garden (slides)
2019 Western UP Food Summit (slides)
Miinagaawanzh (Blueberries) Delicious fruits of our homeland (slides)
Lichens (slides)
Orchids of the Keweenaw (slides)
Morels: Mushrooms to Celebrate Spring (slides)
Wetlands are the Keepers of our Modern Medicine (slides)
Shaping Enduring Relationships: Lessons from Native Plants and their Pollinators (slides)
“The communal love of place creates a different world of action. ”
“Food sovereignty asserts the need for sovereignty within sovereignty.”
“Food sovereignty means to exercise autonomy in all territorial spaces: countries, regions, cities and rural communities. Food sovereignty is only possible if it takes place at the same time as political sovereignty of all peoples.”