By Scott Morgensen, Unsettling Ourselves
My presentation to the Dakota Decolonization class echoed my broader teaching and writing by centering the principles of Indigenous feminist thought and its ties to women of color and Third World feminism. Andrea Smith in her book Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005) writes that colonization and heteropatriarchy inherently interlink, so that opposition to one requires opposition to the other.
Check out this short essay by Scott Morgensen on settler desires for indigenous lands... he implicates permaculture, New Age spirituality, and other "alternative" settler cultures in the desire to appropriate indigenous land and cultures.
He also gets challenged by another settler, who argues for the importance of connecting to land and place. Morgensen's clarification: "If you practice your life in a directly accountable relationship to the Indigenous nation whose stolen land you occupy, then your effort to learn and live an indigenous relationship to that land may be in line with the work of Indigenous decolonization. You would only know if this is so if the people whose stolen lands you occupy tell you so. You can’t determine this for yourself, because you are the colonizer."
I've been working through these issues myself, especially now that I'm back in school researching food sovereignty and other alternative food movements in North America. I haven't gone very far yet, but what's immediately clear is the absolute lack of writing and thinking about the relationship between settler food movements and colonialism. There's some writing about indigenous food sovereignty, and writing about 'food justice' that addresses institutional racism, but very little (actually pretty much nothing) that I've read has sought to address the challenge that Morgensen is raising here to settler alternative food movements.
