savoy011

Asilo (Asylum). Lithograph tarp by J. Leigh Garcia, 2016  Moderator’s note:  Andrea Verschuyl (American Indian Studies, UW) presents two stories about how “indigenous peoples have long struggled against narratives that historicize them, marooning them in a distant past” and how one of the “great claim[s] of these discourses is that all Native peoples are dead.” Verschuyl continues: “In death, they are largely conceived of as a noble people whose erasure from the Earth was unfortunate … ” But we are still here; we endure; we are not ghosts of settler colonial and capitalist violence. Verschuyl’s essay goes beyond a mere critique of food “as a medium of insidious and destructive symbolic exchange … used by the state … to demand the deaths of Indigenous peoples asking for a better life. ”   She connects the experiences of indigenous transborder travelers avoiding death in the “weaponized landscape” of the Sonoran Desert and the hunger strike initiated in December, 2012 by At...

Chalchiuhtotolin (trickster god). Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Christmas dinner CUISINE AS CULTURE OR ACT OF VIOLENCE? Devon G. Peña | Shoreline, WA | December 25, 2013 Imagine food ends. I don’t mean the end of food in general, but your food; ends.  The food of your people ends because the crops are gone, replaced by plantations and then suburbs; the soil is washed and worn; the land has been robbed of all that makes it whole; the seeds were burned to waste and lost under the dusty rubble of the state of siege; and the earth split open and filled with shattered bone and the spilled blood of natives.   Imagine then the end of a culture and its places, the home lands now mute of origin myths. Imagine this happened not per chance from a recurring natural disaster that leads to famine. No. Imagine this was visited upon us by virtue of conquest, invasion, war, and concerted genocide.   Imagine then having to find a long, slow way back to yourself through your food. Relocatin...