Indigenous Food Systems: Home
Welcome
Welcome to the Indigenous Food Systems Resource Guide!
This site aims to start a dialogue and provide resources around Indigenization, anti-colonialism, and decolonization in the local food system.
Each tab moves through time and details aspects of Indigenous food systems, including contemporary actors and organizations, such as Indigenous producers, distributors, and capacity-building organizations.
This is a living document that will be continually updated with new information. The Indigenous Food System Resource Guide specifically focuses on tribes and organizations in Arizona, but branches out as these topics and issues extend beyond geo-political borders.
(Click on the images throughout the guide to be taken to the website source)
Land Acknowledgement
As many of us today are descendants of settlers, immigrants, or descendants of those forcefully brought to this continent, we must recognize and never forget that ASU’s campus occupies the unceded traditional and contemporary homelands of those Native American tribes that have inhabited this land for centuries, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) peoples.
We also have a responsibility to acknowledge the original stewards of the Land, as Land is a source of life, medicine, nourishment, and identity for Indigenous Peoples. Considering Indigenous knowledge is local, and Native voices have been marginalized in the local food movement, what does local food mean on settler-occupied land?
In this way, Indigenous knowledge and wisdom of the Land – with the seasonal cycles, plants, and animals that reside in it – must be centered. The memory that food holds as it’s planted, grown, and harvested situates who Indigenous peoples are, how communities position themselves, and what knowledge is passed down. In the persisting face of colonial processes and settler structures, Indigenous Peoples have continued upholding foodways to share the wisdom food brings, with no theory or politics motivating this action other than cultural tradition and ancestral roots.
This responsibility goes beyond Phoenix or Arizona, so if you’d like to learn more about Native Peoples, lands, languages, and territories, we encourage you to visit https://native-land.ca.
Intention
This resource guide was crafted by a group of ASU students - of settler and Native Hawaiian descent - alongside the guidance of Indigenous ASU faculty.
Created as part of the Indigenizing Food Systems Humanities Lab in Spring 2022, the guide aims to:
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Connect people with the history of this region and its peoples
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Highlight current Indigenous actors in the local food system
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Promote Indigenous Futurities
In particular, we hope this guide will call in people with settler privilege to acknowledge the historical to ongoing process of settler colonialism and uphold the responsibility to disrupt and dismantle these systems of oppression.
To support and review a LibGuide made by and for Indigenous Peoples, review the O’odham Meal Box Project.
The ASU Library acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University's four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today. ASU Library acknowledges the sovereignty of these nations and seeks to foster an environment of success and possibility for Native American students and patrons. We are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies within contemporary library practice. ASU Library welcomes members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh, and all Native nations to the Library.
