Commodification in a Trumpian Era & Advancement Event Planning

Triggering Passages:

“Although I am trained as an Economist, I am not sure how to do it (full cost accounting). That is because I cannot account for the spiritual and cultural impacts of everything… Some economists describe this measure as unquantifiable” (LaDuke, 15)

“The intent is hyper-acceleration of resource extraction and development, and these are on indigenous territories, and the way to accelerate that process is to create legislation, and to have that legislation part of the instrument through which poverty is utilized. This is the old colonial model, which is having the veneer of consent. It is to manufacture it. To manufacture poverty and then manufacture consent.” (LaDuke, 137)

“Decades of depriving Native farmers of access to resources to capitalize their production formed many off the land, resulting in many non Indians having cheap access to tribal lands.” (LaDuke, 229)

“Cattle grew increasingly important in terms of food as the indigenous buffalo (or bison) that once ‘blackened the prairies’ quickly disappeared during the railroad’s westward expansion…. To gain land on which to build the railroads and graze cattle, it was deemed necessary to push out the Native Americans who lived on the land, and exterminating their primary food source- the buffalo- was considered a prime means to that end. With the buffalo gone, cattle assumed greater importance as a food supply.” (Newman, 96)

News Media Context:

“wildlife is being threatened. Last year it was reported that wild buffalo were being corralled and held behind razor wire fencing without food or water near DAPL, and that the construction company planned to kill the animals. Overall, the Standing Rock Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribes have believe that the pipeline and its construction threatens the tribe’s way of life including their water, people, and land.”

LaDuke’s words continuously stuck me with the feeling of an immense resentment toward the corrupt systems that benefit a greedy upper class, while enforcing systematic economic and social oppression. She exposes how these colonial strategies have sought to steal, deplete, and destroy natural resources that sustain indigenous communities. LaDuke presents a narrative that seeks to empower and give voice to indigenous activism. Her accounts of Native resistance and protest bolster the autonomy of Indian communities.

Although Newman touches on the histories which led to a colonizer economy based on commodity trading, her perspective seems out of touch with indigenous narratives. Newman glazes over how the extraction of indigenous resources affected native communities, and only provides a snapshot of  how westward expansion of capitalism coincides with the erasure indigenous food systems.

The systematic oppression that Newman is referencing is still very much present in current day capitalism. The Standing Rock Sioux and the Cheyenne River Sioux tribes are fighting a pipeline that threatens indigenous autonomy. A pipeline that will pollute and inevitably destroy resources that support and maintain indigenous life, as well as economic prosperity within these communities, is being built to make a few already very rich individuals much richer. The epitome of colonial capitalism.

Works Cited

LaDuke, Winona. Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice. Edited by Sean Aaron Cruz. 1st edition. Spotted Horse Press, 2016.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Why We Can’t Stop Standing With Standing Rock Now. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/why-we-cant-stop-standing-with-standing-rock-now/

Triggering Passages:

“…white appetite signifies unthinkable privilege and aggression, but it also represents the desire on which both white female citizenship and the future of the postemancipation republic rests. The text thus aligns the white reader with sentimentality’s political paradox: to empathize with the slave is to internalize her, but to do so is also to annihilate her subjectivity.” (Tompkins, 113)

“Despite an80-year attachment to a mascot, it’s just a mascot. It’s not like you had homeland buried under a dam project, or had your village burned by the military. And, the Lakota people and other native peoples deserve to be recognized as more than mascots.” (LaDuke, 105)

“The $100,000 complaint was filed against the Minneapolis theater and its star, actress Frankie Heath, charging that when the actress sang the song “Butter and Eggs,” she used “certain tones and gestures to convey that all dealers in butter and eggs were men of immoral and licentious character.” (Newman, 72)

 

These three passages examine themes of stereotyped bodies and the circumstances of degradation in white society in which these racial characters are produced to other and erase subjectivity. In the third chapter of Tompkins’ book, she highlights how black slave bodies were commodified as labor in the 19th century, thus othering them as inhuman and edible. She used the metaphor of ingestion to demonstrate how the erasure of black subjectivity reemerges to undermine the authority of social order, and how the kitchen, viewed as a “back of the house”(107) operation, transforms to become a space of resistance to this authority. Similarly, LaDuke speaks to how the Lakota and other native people have been offensively stereotyped by the “Red Skins” mascot. This caricature of a native person represents a violent history of bounty hunters literally skinning Indians to present their bloodied skin as a proof of the murder. This racist logo has been used to other native people and attempts to remove their selfhood by being portrayed as an obnoxious sports mascot. Lastly, my Newman quote stretches this idea that identities that oppose the dominant class are degraded. When actress Frankie Heath lyrically stereotyped “Butter and Egg men” as immoral and corrupt, she and the theater where she worked were charged and scrutinized for suggesting these men were inherently of a fraudulent nature. My guess is the same men who filed this complaint were conscious of the possibility of being exposed and possessing characteristics in which Frankie Heath stereotyped them as, and falling from their position of economic and social power.

Works Cited

LaDuke, Winona. Chronicles: Stories from the Front Lines in the Battle for Environmental Justice. Edited by Sean Aaron Cruz. 1st edition. Spotted Horse Press, 2016.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: NYU Press, 2012.

 

“The term ‘paradoxical Euro-American indigeneity’ here refers to the ways in which the United States, as a settler nation, both co-opted and erased the bodies of native peoples in order to naturalize the European claim to the land” (85, Tompkins)

“Corn was integral to the dietary system… Diets changed the most radically as populations growth reached its most accelerated pace to date. Growing urbanization spurred the separation of producer and consumers…. European growth relied on American plants.” (29, Newman)

 

“If Trump Builds the Wall, What Will Happen to our Food System?”

“The report found that stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants across the southern border—which currently accounts for between 50 and 70 percent of the agricultural workforce—would cause retail food prices to jump an average of five to six percent, and that ‘the quantity and variety of grocery store produce would diminish.’” (Modernfarmer.com, Barth)

In the third chapter of Tomkins’ book, we are introduced to Sylvester Graham, a man who was “among the most breathtakingly literary of the antimasturbation campaigners.”(53, Tompkins) Graham being one of America’s first nutritionists, claimed that dietary restrictions were essential to stopping an epidemic of youthful masturbation. He preached that through our pursuits for sexual stimulation as well as oral stimulation, the body becomes weakened and reproductive energies waste away through overstimulation.  This was crucial in an era where Western expansion and the development of a “Euro-American nation” depended on producing healthy offspring of European descent while erasing indigenous identities from the American landscape. Graham perpetuated his belief that the ideal American citizen adheres to a strict diet, while also bolstering the mentality that an ideal American citizen of the 19th century is a man of European descent, who is married and utilizing their sexual energies to reproduce more “American” offspring. Being coined as one of the first locavores in American food history, by Kyla Wazana Tompkins in an interview on BackStory Radio, he was a proponent of the consumption of crops that were transplanted into America from Europe. Idealizing wheat agriculture and including corn as an ideal “farinaceous” food, expansion into the west displaced Native nations who viewed corn a crucial piece of Native culture, and who were the first to cultivate it. Corn became a hugely traded commodity throughout the 19th century, and a staple in the American diet, shaping a dietic identity. It was the crop that helped to fuel European expansion while expelling Native peoples from their homelands. Throughout the conversation of corn in a period that sought to create a white supremacist diet we are now well into the 21st century currently facing down a white supremacist presidency. Donald Trump amped up crowds on his campaign trail with his plans to build a wall and has since made many more horrific statements on his proposal to build a wall along the 1,933-mile southern border of the United States and to deport immigrants. This would be detrimental to our food system in many ways, driving the cost of retail food up while decreasing quality and variety according to a multitude of studies done regarding his strategy.

 

Barth, Brian. “If Trump Builds the Wall, What Will Happen to Our Food System?” Modern Farmer. Modernfarmer.com, 13 Jan. 2017. Web. 31 Jan. 2017.

Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print

Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print