{"id":1566,"date":"2020-12-09T08:54:32","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T08:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=135914"},"modified":"2020-12-09T08:54:32","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T08:54:32","slug":"a-netflix-doc-wants-to-fix-our-food-system-with-capitalism-gather-argues-thats-how-it-broke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/09\/a-netflix-doc-wants-to-fix-our-food-system-with-capitalism-gather-argues-thats-how-it-broke\/","title":{"rendered":"A Netflix doc wants to fix our food system with capitalism. \u2018Gather\u2019 argues that\u2019s how it broke."},"content":{"rendered":"
This<\/em> story<\/em><\/a> was originally published by Mother Jones<\/a><\/em> and is reproduced here as part of the<\/em> Climate Desk<\/em><\/a> collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n Early on in Gather<\/em>,<\/strong> a new documentary about Native Americans searching for food sovereignty, we follow Nephi Craig on a tour of a former gas station on the White Mountain Apache Nation in eastern Arizona. Craig, a White Mountain Apache\/Navajo chef, points to an empty refrigerated case once stocked with energy drinks and packaged snacks. It will soon be full of fresh produce from the farm outside, he explains. The Coke machine on a nearby counter will make way for a cooking fire.<\/p>\n Craig was once trained as a classical French chef, but the journey \u201cwas shadowed by chemical dependency,\u201d addictions to drugs and alcohol. When he \u201ccrash-landed\u201d back on the Rez, he began to explore the universe of Native ingredients\u00ad\u2013agave, amaranth, squash, Anasazi beans. \u201cThat was one of the things that helped me get clean.\u201d<\/p>\n It also changed his sense of purpose in the kitchen. Atop the bones of the former gas station, he\u2019s now building a new kind of fueling station: Caf\u00e9 Gozh\u00f3\u00f3, a restaurant designed to \u201cnourish and celebrate our Ancestral Intelligence through fresh and local Western Apache cooking,\u201d its menu states, and a professional training ground for people in recovery to learn Indigenous cooking techniques. During the film, local forager Twila Cassadore pushes Craig to expand his palate, including by offering him a sample of a traditional Apache protein, boiled pack rat.<\/p>\n Craig had to postpone the restaurant\u2019s planned opening in the spring due to the coronavirus, which as of November has infected<\/a> a fifth of the tribe. But when he finally opens its doors to the public, he envisions Caf\u00e9 Gozh\u00f3\u00f3 (the Apache word for harmony\/beauty) helping those in the surrounding community break out of their food desert and its accompanying ills, such as high rates of diabetes.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have food sovereignty, you\u2019re free to be self-reliant, to grow your own food, to choose the foods you want to eat, to choose the foods you want to put in school systems, and really be self-sustaining,\u201d Craig explains. \u201cOur reservations across the United States are far away from being actually food sovereign.\u201d<\/p>\n Gather<\/em><\/a>, a beautifully shot film directed by Sanjay Rawal (Food Chains<\/em>, Why We Run<\/em>), traces three efforts by Native Americans to reclaim their ancestral foodways. These are not sentimental exercises, as Craig indicates. Food sovereignty is an act of resistance, a struggle against an agricultural production regime with violence at its root. Gather<\/em> never loses sight of the struggle or the violence, unlike its autumnal counterpart and accidental counterpoint, Netflix\u2019s celebrity-packed Kiss the Ground<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> Both documentaries raise questions about our food system, only from different perspectives and with different priorities. They make for a useful pair, with Gather<\/em> showing what\u2019s hiding in the white spaces of Kiss the Ground<\/em>.<\/p>\n The struggle to recover their hunting and farming systems presents special challenges for Native Americans, because for hundreds of years, they\u2019ve been blocked from doing so by a vicious campaign of colonial greed. European settlers obliterated their food supplies as a way of controlling them.<\/p>\n \u201cNorth America, Turtle Island, was colonized for its topsoil,\u201d Rawal explained to me during a conversation earlier this month, citing books like Dee Brown\u2019s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/em> and David Treuer\u2019s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee<\/em> throughout our conversation. By the mid-eighteenth century, colonial farmers had cultivated the East Coast to the point where soils were being rapidly depleted, and they wanted to move west of the Appalachian Mountains. But the British King George III forbade them with the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which identified land west of the Appalachians as Indian Reserve (some historians point to the proclamation as the real driver of the Revolutionary War).<\/p>\n Huge land grabs by presidents Thomas Jefferson and later Andrew Jackson pushed that line further and further west, kicking tribes off rich farmland and resettling them onto reservations. As Natives in the Great Plains were forced onto shabbier soil, they increasingly depended on bison to survive. When the railroad companies plotted supply chains going east to west, the buffalo and their migratory hunters \u201cwere a complete anathema to that,\u201d Rawal says. Political leaders looked the other way or encouraged settlers to \u201cKill every buffalo you can!\u201d as one colonel reportedly put it<\/a>, \u201cevery buffalo dead is an Indian gone.\u201d<\/p>\n In a letter<\/a> to Major-General Phillip Sheridan on May 10, 1868, General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote that so long as buffalo roamed Nebraska, \u201cIndians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all.\u201d A mass of beasts 30 to 60 million strong shrank to a few hundred by the end of the 19th century. The government later doled out canned chicken and powdered milk to the decimated tribes as a pitiful substitution.<\/p>\n Amid the mixed-grass prairie of South Dakota, Fred DuBray, a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and another one of Gather<\/em>\u2019s subjects, is trying to bring the buffalo back by raising the animals on his ranch. \u201cA lot of non-Indian people can understand the need to do that, and the good it can do for the land,\u201d DuBray says. \u201cWhereas they don\u2019t understand the need to bring the culture back,\u201d he adds. \u201cWe were almost wiped out, too. And we need to kind of grow back together. We can help each other.\u201d Conservationists recognize the animal\u2019s role in the ecosystem\u2014they increase biodiversity, and their dust-wallowing habits help with seed dispersal<\/a> and water retention, for instance.<\/p>\n The science doesn\u2019t stop there. DuBray\u2019s daughter Elsie, a high schooler when Gather<\/em> was filmed, theorizes that the bison meat her family raises and harvests offers more nutrients\u2014a higher proportion of healthy fats, and fewer saturated fats\u2014than its more popular counterpart, beef. She\u2019s out to prove it; the film\u2019s most suspenseful plotline traces her journey to a regional science fair, where her analysis of bison and beef lipids is scrutinized by a panel of judges. (Elsie\u2019s now at Stanford, where she continues to research Indigenous diets as a biology major.)<\/p>\n Gather<\/em>, which was co-produced by the nonprofit First Nations Development Institute, does not pretend to take a comprehensive look at the fight for better access to fresh food in Native communities across the country; rather, Rawal shapes the film around three portraits. It avoids lengthy testimonies by university scholars and legal experts, instead leaning on its main subjects to fill in the needed context. \u201cIt was important for us to tell the story, straight from the viewpoint of our characters,\u201d Rawal explains. If people want to do a deep dive into food sovereignty, they should read scholarly papers and books on the topic, he says. \u201cIf they want to get a snapshot of the emotion behind the movement right now, they could watch Gather<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n