Prior literature on Indigenous Food Sovereignty has delved into issues such as seed sovereignty, impacts of climate change, and the revival and protection of cultural lifeways worldwide. However, there is very little research on the impact of laws on food sovereignty. Join UO student Elyse Decker for a discussion of the impacts of laws at the international, national, and state level on subsistence food practices of Alaska Native communities.

Decker hypothesized that international laws and Alaska state laws would have only a slight impact on food sovereignty, and that United States federal law would exert the most control because of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The multi-methods research strongly supported half of this hypothesis. Through a literature review and semi-structured interviews with Food Sovereignty experts followed by qualitative analysis, Decker found that international laws, including the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, have very little influence on Alaska Native food sovereignty. United States federal law and Alaska state law greatly control subsistence living, commonly conflicting with each other, creating a complex and unwieldly system for Indigenous peoples. The presentation will conclude with recommendations for strengthening Indigenous food sovereignty.

Presented by the Oregon Humanities Center

Our world has become rife with peril and uncertainty. Indigenous writer Patty Krawec asks, “How do we survive everything that is happening? From climate change to polarizing politics to a seemingly endless cycle of displacement and erasure for modern-day land grabs, we live in a world that profits from instability and precarity. How do we survive? We survive not by drawing boundaries around ourselves and hoarding resources that must be expended to protect what will inevitably slip through our fingers. We survive by becoming kin. By remembering what it means to be related not only to each other but to the worlds around us. Revisiting our traditional stories, whatever those traditions may be, and re-imagining them in our contemporary world, can help us find new ways to see each other and forge the solidarities we need to survive.” 

As the 2024–25 Robert D. Clark lecturer Patty Krawec will give a talk titled “Surviving Together.”

Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to the Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory Canada. 

She is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa (we are all related) Foundation which challenges settlers to pay rent for living on Indigenous land and disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs.

In her book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (2022) Krawec critiques the harmful impact of European Christian settler colonialism on Indigenous Americans. She details Indigenous American history from the first humans to populate the Americas through the present and outlines ways in which descendants of European colonizers and Indigenous people can become ‘good relatives’. 

Krawec’s talk, part of this year’s “Re-imagine” series, is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed and recorded. Please register.