Land Ownership, Theft, and Sovereignty
Food sovereignty and land sovereignty are intrinsically linked, as the most basic tenants of food sovereignty require people to have access to land on which to grow and/or source their own food systems. For Indigenous food sovereigntists, tribal food sovereignty necessitates a return of stolen homelands and the authority to restore traditional ecosystems and maintain biodiversity as the culturally important foods for many tribal nations are tied to their homelands. For Black food sovereigntists, food sovereignty requires an end to the forced displacement of Black people carrying on the agrarian tradition, especially in the American South, and an affirmation of the right for Black farmers to live on and work the same lands that their enslaved ancestors were forced to. It requires Black people all across the nation-state to have the right to form safe, nourishing communities without the constant risk of eviction, expulsion, hyper-surveillance, and structural fragmentation.
Trauger writes that food sovereignty in the United States “cannot proceed without fundamental change in political economic orientations toward migration and settler colonialism, dismantling monopoly control of agriculture, and shifts in property relations” (41). For people and communities thinking about land sovereignty, this entails a radical reimagining of land in line with Native American land philosophies, and a disavowal of Western understandings of land as property. Nearly all federally recognized Native nations in the landmass we call the United States have been subject to land treaties in some way, shape or form. And, as time and settler colonization progressed, nearly all of these treaties have been broken by settlers. Even if every land treaty between colonizers and Native peoples been upheld, however, the problem of land ownership would still exist, as the two groups of people involved in each treaty had fundamentally distinct understandings of land ownership.
For settlers, land is understood through Enlightenment constructions of property, and “by converting Indigenous lands into their private property, settler colonists acquired thereby the associated rights that such property carried with it, according to the legal system they brought with them and imposed upon North America − most notably, the right to exclude the prior occupants from the lands they would claim as their own” (Whitt and Clarke 45). Land, in the Enlightenment understanding of it as property, is a thing to be possessed, controlled, and dominated, because it belongs exclusively to the owner. But, as seen through the displacement and theft that has dramatically affected Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada today, “the protection of the right to possess for some is the foundational violence that underwrites and enables dispossession for others within the system of property relations” (property keyword).
But for the Native tribal nations that signed these treaties (either willingly or as a result of violent colonial force), land is not synonymous with property and cannot be owned. In the words of Winona LaDuke, “Native American teachings describe the relations all around—animals, fish, trees, and rocks—as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together” (LaDuke 2). Land is more than a thing to be lived on and to gather resources from, it is a member of our communities that interacts with us just as we interact with it. Land does not believe in possession, and cannot be possessed, only cared for. This is exhibited in intertribal understandings of borders—or lack thereof—,the ways multiple tribal nations have used the same land for different cultural purposes harmoniously, and the initial willingness to share land with white settlers.
The widespread implementation of Enlightenment-based property ideologies in how the average American understands land have widespread and devastating consequences and implications. The long history of land theft felt by Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada has had devastating environmental consequences, as settlers have used their understanding of land ownership to justify invasive industrial practices, dumping toxic waste, unsustainable resource extraction, and more. But because Native cultural traditions are often based in the understanding of land as an integral part of community, for tribal communities like White Earth, “there is a direct link in [their] community between the loss of biodiversity—the loss of animal and plant life—and the loss of the material and cultural wealth of the White Earth people” (5).
Furthermore, Enlightenment understandings of property not only allowed for the ownership and theft of American land, but also enabled the propertization of people, namely through the institution of chattel slavery. Much like the land is often viewed today, Enlightenment property ideology allowed Black people to be understood as a resource to be extracted and exhausted, resulting in overworking, horrific labor conditions, torture, extreme sexual violence, and premature death. The historied understanding of Black people as possessable through property ideology continues to endanger the lives and livelihoods of Black people in the present, who are subject to constant scrutiny, police and vigilante white supremacist violence, and governmental disregard and neglect.
Enlightenment understandings of property and possession, in which “ownership of something entails the ability to do with it what one wills,” have been exploited by greed through history, and have no upper limit. They invite a dangerously individualistic understanding of the world we live in, and prioritize domination over any other form of connection.
