In February of 2021, a few of us on the Farmers To You team got together to start the Food Justice Committee. Our mission? To support the continued growth and learning of ourselves and our community as a whole, in order to be true agents of change in our regional food system.

A large part of our work has been facilitating monthly all-staff discussions. Our discussions are where reading group meets workshop: staff come having read, watched or listened to a few select resources, and together we talk about where our own organization might stretch and grow. Discussions have centered around decolonization and food sovereignty, justice for food and farmworkers, our relationship to major food holidays (like Thanksgiving), and more.

In this week’s post, we want to share a few resources that have been valuable to us. We hope you take them in, share them with your community, and talk about the questions and ideas that come up for you.

Our Recommendations

1. Do you know the real history of Thanksgiving? There was a harvest celebration involved, but historical accounts bear little resemblance to the mythology most of us were brought up with. For a short but highly informative overview, check out this book excerpt from historians Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker.
2. Our mission at Farmers To You is to reconnect families to their farmers and their food. But it’s critical to ask: what is the origin of that disconnect? And whose struggles to forge a reconnection have been made largely invisible? To learn more about the contemporary movement for Native food sovereignty, we recommend the film Gather—available on Netflix and for purchase online.
3. Finally, do you know whose land you’re on? Are you familiar with the history and present realities of those communities? This interactive Native land map is a great place to start answering those questions. (Side note: this is great information to process in community. Other questions might come up, like: what is my family’s history in this region? How did my ancestors relate to this place and the people around them? How have those histories shaped our present reality?)

For an even deeper dive…

Take a look at the Rethinking “Thanksgiving” Toolkit, crafted by the Indigenous Solidarity Network. There’s a lot of information so we suggest moving through the resources at a pace that’s right for you and honoring the time it takes to process.