We often refer to ordinary citizens collectively asserting their rights as movements. In the food justice world, there are movements for food security, for farming rights, for inclusion and diversity, and countless other ones, all no doubt important.

Indigenous people speak of foodways and collective action through strengthening traditions and relationship with land and each other not as a movement, but as a responsibility given in the original agreements that granted humans permission to live in this world. The duty to exist in balance with one’s environment, to use resources as well as to regenerate them, and the journey to spiritual oneness through these activities have been realities since time immemorial. It is only in the context of contact and colonization that Indigenous people have needed to frame food systems in binary terms: of losses and gains; of allocating resources to some and not others; of working for individual survival and benefit rather than for the good of all; moving in one direction as opposed to another.

Indeed, that binary perspective drove colonial empires to extract land-based wealth to a degree never before seen.[…]