Throughout the nineteenth century, American Indians were moved to reservations or restricted to a small portion of the land they could previously access, where set-tlers made efforts to “civilize” them via agriculture. The government, motivated by a belief that Indigenous peoples who became farmers would be able to better assimilate into white society, crafted policies to encourage agricultural work (Hurt 1987). The forced transition to agriculture by the Havasupai people illustrates the double bind for Indigenous peoples. As Philip Burnham notes, a lot of the traditional Havasupai hunting grounds were federally “protected” in 1893 as the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve. Deer hunting was forbidden for five years, which left the Havasupai peoples needing to recultivate the fields of recently deceased tribal members to have enough to eat (Burnham 2013, 75). We see in this example that food provisioning via agriculture, which we take for granted today, constituted an incursion against Indigenous food sovereignty when Indigenous peoples were left no other choice by virtue of the US government’s park regulation.
In many cases, national parks are built on Indigenous peoples’ hunger and food dependency. Thomas Jefferson endorsed putting American Indians on the dole— making them so desperate for food that they had no choice but to cede land from which they would otherwise not separate. This technique enabled the acquisition of the Indigenous peoples’ lands that would be transformed into national parks. By way of example, consider the Piegan nation in northwestern Montana, starved by the 1880s by the near extinction of buffalo, infertile treaty land, and unsuccessful efforts at cattle herding, as well as by extremely stingy Congressional allotments amounting to “less than one ounce of beef per day for each agency Indian” (Burn-ham 2013, 40). Hundreds died of starvation before the Tribe yielded its land to the government, and its people were finally supplied with adequate food (Burnham 2013, 41). Likewise, Crow nation members in northeastern Yellowstone struggled with diminished game stocks and the destruction of their key food-gathering sites by miners. By the early 1880s, they too were almost completely dependent on agency rations (Spence 1999, 52), before ceding part of their land and then moving away.
An agricultural agenda was pressed into service as the most palatable solution to these problems. This agenda stems, in part, from nostalgia for the benevolent gar-den of Judeo-Christian origins, updated for the dawn of the nineteenth century and tied to the Jeffersonian legacy of romanticizing people’s virtuous attachment to the land, which he believed gave them moral strength. Jefferson had in mind not the actual toilers but rather “farmer-landowners like himself, the pastoral gentlemen who owned and managed the American garden. Jefferson connected both moral virtue and political rights to land stewardship exercised by landowners” (Meeker 1973, 4). Against these settler visions, the nomadic way of life of most Indigenous peoples registered as entirely uncivilized to European immigrants with agrarian roots in the industrializing US. It was only agrarian life—settled, predictable, and tied to a specific plot of land—that was viewed as civilized (Burnham 2013, 17).
The insistence on agriculture in western reservation lands ill-suited to it destroyed the food traditions of many Indigenous peoples, to whom farming was culturally foreign anyway4:
Scorched-earth battle tactics utilized against Native people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries destroyed food supplies and the land from which they came in order to force Native people to become reliant on the American government. […] Federal policies encouraged Native people on many reservations to farm on marginal lands, despite their histories of successful fishing and gathering practices. While some tribal communities traditionally practiced farming, others did not (such as Plains tribes and other communities across North America). The US and Canadian governments introduced farming pro-jects to the latter in order to assimilate them, disrupt their hunting cultures, and expand the agricultural frontier—even as the best farmland was often usurped by non-Indians.
(Hoover and Mihesuah 2019, 5)
Agricultural efforts floundered, leaving American Indians dependent on the US government for the food rations that had been established as a stop-gap measure until the Indigenous people became self-sufficient farmers (US Department of State 1868; see also Rice 2022 for a more complex assessment of agricultural imperialism and Indian reservations). Not coincidentally, intensive agriculture has been cited as the most consequential invention in human history, with the fixed-harnessed plow cast as the technology with the most profoundly negative ecological impact (White 1967).5 Although agriculture has some pretty stiff competition for this mantle—writing, the telegraph, automobiles, and microchips are no slouches either—the point is well taken: agriculture shifted the relationship of humans and the natural world from one of coexistence to one of mastery and exploitation—a shift particularly poorly suited to American Indian tribes who regarded nature with humility, reverence, and respect, and imagined themselves as deeply connected to the natural world.
A number of health and social problems have emerged in American Indian com-munities as a result of the disruption of traditional food systems. But health is not the only issue: as the availability of foods declined, so too have the stories, languages, cultural practices, interpersonal relationships, and outdoor activities implicated in those food systems. A tribal community’s capacity for “collective continuance” and “comprehensive aims at robust living”’ are hindered when the relationships that are part of traditional food cultures and economies are disrupted.
(Hoover and Mihesuah 2019, 7)
Recent food sovereignty efforts seek to remediate the harms caused when Indigenous peoples were separated from their traditional foodways (sometimes including less intensive forms of agriculture) by European American settlers. Food sovereignty goes beyond just agriculture: it means, following the 2007 Declaration of Nyéléni, “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” It involves reviving food-centered economic and cultural life and is a tool for economic opportunity and self-sufficiency in poor communities (Mertens 2021). National park conservationists are likely to have something in common with Indigenous peoples, namely a belief that “capitalism’s treadmill of production and assumptions of endless resource extraction are incompatible with nature, harmony, and balance” (Lindholm 2019, 160). The concession system in the parks, explored more deeply in other chapters, seems incompatible with this perspective, in that it depends on corporate profit and resource extraction and is poorly aligned with nature. In Chapter 6, I explore different food futures for the US national parks that prioritize environmental conservation and the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples. Is a food future in the parks possible that balances regulation around health and safety with food sovereignty? How would issues of labor, scale, volume, and palate affect operational viability? What would Indigenous foodways presented in national parks look like in highly regulated spaces, and who is the presumed audience in this equation? What is at stake in advocating a system that involves Indigenous people presenting, selling, or monetizing their cultural traditions? How is cosmopolitan-ism, the means of self-making for middle-class white travelers explored in the Introduction, implicated in the demand for access to Indigenous people’s foodways in national parks? Is there a productive way forward?