Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health ed. by Devon A. Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover (review)

Indigenous people today are dealing with numerous problems wrought on their lands and waters from capitalist practices, which frequently limited availability of traditional foods and led to Indigenous health issues. The critical role that foodstuffs play in the recovery of America's Indigenous peoples from severe health problems is the focus of an important new work, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States, edited by Devon Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover. Mihesuah and Hoover examine the meaning and importance of food sovereignty, the possibility of achieving it, and the challenge of sustaining it. They and their contributors encourage Indigenous people to return to food sovereignty by providing examples of modern projects that resist colonial food practices.

Passionate advocates of Indigenous communities regaining control over their food systems and thereby reversing the trend of poor health, Mihesuah and Hoover have gathered essays arguing that Indigenous peoples in the United States need to place as much emphasis on food sovereignty as political sovereignty. Contributors to this book include scholars and activists who are well known in the fields of federal Indian law, nutrition, history, ethnobotany, anthropology, marine environmentalism, biology, and insect ecology. Others who author chapters include Indigenous community activists, cooks, spearfishers, farmers, and seed savers and keepers.

Indigenous food sovereignty, Mihesuah and Hoover assert, involves Indigenous communities reestablishing a connection with "land-based" foodstuffs and political entities, and the striving to sustain revered obligations of cultivating relations with their native land, culture, and own spirituality. This book covers centuries of the ever-changing relationship that Indigenous communities have had with their traditional food systems, from the pre-contact period in which they had total control over their healthy foodstuffs through the subsequent decades in which human-made environmental changes led to widespread disruptions in Indigenous food intake to their push today in declaring that food sovereignty is a right. Those reading this book will begin to consider the interconnectivity that Indigenous peoples have with food and contemplate the role food plays in their own lives.

In arguing compellingly that Indigenous communities must enact food sovereignty initiatives, Mihesuah and Hoover—highly respected scholars of Indigenous health and environment—utilize contributors' arguments in a manner that covers various themes as each chapter highlights an Indigenous community-based project striving to provide healthy food for its people. Such themes are the decline in Indigenous health to plans that seek its recovery; the manner of becoming an activist for political, economic and social justice; the discovery and sharing of knowledge concerning pre-contact foods, seed saving, crop cultivation, hunting.

One major theme of this book is that health problems in Indigenous communities directly correlate with the lack of wholesome traditional foodstuffs or poor choices in lifestyle that are reversible with the appropriate changes made in diet. Hoover, writing on the Akwesasne Cultural Restoration Program (2013), demonstrates that poor health in this Mohawk community resulted from environmental contamination (1950s–1980s) and the goal is for the restoration of traditional foodways. Dena Livingston focuses on the creation of the Dine Community Advocacy Alliance (2012) to tackle the high incidences of diabetes and obesity, and other chronic health issues among the Navajos by promoting the idea that civic responsibility dictated the need to affect a health change. Mihesuah examines Comanche history and acknowledges that bad lifestyle decisions, the wholesale slaughter of bison, internment at Fort Still, and a lack of agricultural customs to revitalize food enterprises have led the Comanches to suffer from elevated levels of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and substance abuse. Yet, Mihesuah believes that the Comanches can integrate into their diets foods that they historically traded for or gathered as well as foods that are geographically native.

Another theme that receives extensive attention is the need for Indigenous people to become activists for economic, political, and social justice. Regarding Alaska Native...