Abstract
Excerpted From: Mariana Chilton, Sacred Nutrition: Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty and Rights of Women and Nature to Ensure the Right to Food in the United States, 31 University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review 49 (Fall, 2023) (116 Footnotes) (Full Document)
This Paper is a provocation to move beyond a standard human rights and right to food framework to encourage scholars, activists, and political leaders to engage in full throttle societal transformation. Ending hunger in the United States demands nothing less. The modern human rights framework is enshrined in the modern nation state system that is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and genocide. Three primary ways in which these roots took hold were through land theft, rape, and starvation. Hence, to assert that integrating the right to food and freedom from hunger into nation-state constitutions or into national plans to end hunger without significantly altering the structure of the nation state will be fundamentally ineffective. Nation states currently depend on keeping people hungry, especially women and children. If this is the case, then we ought to consider new ways of envisioning and devising a world in which all people are free from hunger and have good nutrition that supports human and more-than human flourishing. To do so demands we address food insecurity at its roots.
This Paper relies on twenty-five years of empirical research with Black women, Native communities, and other groups of color, as well as on the scholarship of Black and Native thinkers. In doing so, the Paper outlines how rape, colonization, racism, and gender discrimination continue to generate food insecurity and hunger, and how incorporating a broad view of the right to food to support rights of women, Indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, and the rural poor are integral to the right to food. Finally, this Paper shows that societal transformation can only be made possible through providing reparations to descendants of people who were enslaved, respecting and repairing treaty rights with Native nations, and changing human beings' relationship with the natural world from viewing food as commodity to revering food and the natural world as kin with equal standing to humans. In doing so, we can meet the challenges of the climate catastrophe and promote resilience of future generations.
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Finally, the fact that reducing hunger has been the first Sustainable Development Goal for the past twenty-three years, and the world has yet to effectively reduce hunger in war-torn impoverished places and in highly wealthy nation-states alike, suggests there is something deeply pathological and dangerous in our own understanding of humanity and how we economically, socially, culturally and politically organize ourselves around the globe.
The United Nations system, stemming from atrocities of war and genocide, is still a work in progress. The preamble to ICERD, asserts that the United Nations has “condemned colonialism and all practices of segregation and discrimination associated therewith ....” This suggests that many nations, including the U.S., are on shaky ground until they recognize and repair harms of colonialism and return stolen lands. It's important to remember that colonization is a global phenomenon, and almost all nation states are implicated in the legacies of rape and genocide. The modern nation state system is responsible for the impoverishment of women by rendering their labor and contributions invisible, unpaid, and undervalued. Nation states control women's sexuality, fertility, work capacity, and labor power. If women, and by extension the earth, were treated equally to men, then the modern economic system, and consequently, the current nation state system, would be wholly transformed. Therefore, there is a “structural contradiction” within the current human rights framework, where human rights are upheld by the modern nation state system, organized through the United Nations.” It is unclear if the right to food in its current understanding can be achieved without societal, spiritual, political, and economic transformation on a global scale.
A good place for the U.S. to start is to provide reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and generations of enslavement, return stolen lands, and express care, concern and reverence for women, children, and gender non-conforming people, as well as for all creatures, habitats, ecosystems, and for our food.
