Sanjay Rawal: Honoring the native lands and farmworkers who feed us (ep283)
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Sanjay Rawal joins us in this episode to discuss:
the struggles of undocumented farmworkers in the U.S. seeking justice and better worker rights;
the relationship between our dominant, exploitative food system today and Native food sovereignty;
and more.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Johanna Warren (IG: @johahahanna, Spotify: Johanna Warren
“The midwest was once the third-largest carbon sink in the world—organized around the flow of the tens of millions of bison that roamed the U.S. Once the buffalo [were massacred], Native Americans were taken from the land, they died, they were forced to accept government rations, and it opened up their land to settlers.”
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Here’s Sanjay on the land theft that made our exploitive food system possible today:
“The Native American tribes were dug-in—they were very powerful. The U.S. military realized that war was not a solution and they had to actually destroy Native Americans’ ways of life and food.
A general famously said to the U.S. Senate in the 1860s, saying, ‘One dead buffalo is two dead Indians.’ That launched a federal campaign to destroy bison in the midwest.
The midwest was once the third-largest carbon sink in the world—organized around the flow of the tens of millions of bison that roamed the U.S. Once the buffalo [were massacred], Native Americans were taken from the land, they died, they were forced to accept government rations, and it opened up their land to settlers.
Ironically, that great carbon sink is now the poster child for bad agriculture—it's mono-cropped corn, also ironically an Indigenous crop.
Gather looks at the obverse of that coin of slavery and looks at the theft of land that makes our food system possible.”
About Sanjay Rawal:
Sanjay Rawal (@mrsanjayr) is the director of Gather (Instagram: @gatherfilm; Facebook: @gatherfilmproject), a documentary exploring the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their food sovereignty.
Gather, which is Sanjay's third feature film, picks up where his first documentary, the 2014 feature-length film Food Chains, left off. This film centered on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a group of migrant tomato pickers in Florida, and earned Sanjay numerous accolades, including a James Beard Award.
