“Everywhere I looked, we were hemorrhaging food,” said Tristram Stuart, English author and food waste activist, in a 2014 interview with National Geographic.

This is exactly what the reader discovers in Stuart’s book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal.  Published in 2009, Waste is an accessible and extremely relevant read, credited with galvanizing public awareness around the issue of food waste. In this comprehensive, well-developed and well-researched book, Stuart does not simply explain why food waste is a problem. He makes clear why food waste and its social, economic, and environmental consequences should concern us all. 

Globally, one third of the food we produce is wasted, even as one billion people face malnourishment. Research suggests that food waste from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union alone could feed those one billion people several times over. He does not use the term ‘scandal’ lightly, as wasted food and the processes that lead to it are unethical.

Most believe that consumers are the sole contributor to food waste. However, Stuart discovers that they are only a fraction of the problem; most food waste actually occurs along the supply chain. This is largely due to the lack of efficient storage facilities in the developing world, supermarkets’ overstocking policies, manufacturers’ sell-by and use-by dates as well as supermarkets’ unethical trading practices with manufacturers. 

Stuart paints supermarkets as being amoral. According to Stuart, many large supermarkets use their buying power to set profitable terms and conditions for themselves, with their suppliers getting the short end of the stick. Supermarket chains will intentionally forgo signing contracts with their manufacturers so that they will be able to retract what they offer to pay the manufacturer initially. Additionally, they will over order food and then only pay for a portion of that food, leaving the suppliers to deal with the leftovers. Usually, these leftovers are thrown away because the supplier is unable to sell them. 

What Stuart found was eye-opening; many large supermarkets (and even the smaller ones) in the UK were reluctant to provide him with information on how much food is wasted annually. These same stores were also unwilling to offer their surplus food to food banks and charities. Where Stuart couldn’t get statistics, he took pictures. In his book, he provides this visual evidence of the food that the supermarkets throw out, including photos where blue dye had been sprayed onto perfectly good food, so no one would be able to consume it. 

The dilemma isn’t limited to food waste,  Stuart points out. Food waste represents a colossal waste of resources. Seventy percent of freshwater consumption is used by the agricultural industry, but over forty percent of the fruits, vegetables, and grains produced are wasted. Food waste also has adverse environmental impacts; not only does food waste emit methane when it is landfilled, but inefficient production and overproduction lead to inefficient land use and worsens deforestation. This leads to habitat loss and in some cases,  ecosystem collapse.

This is a depressing portrait of the scale of food waste. However, sprinkled throughout Waste are glimmers of hope from around the world. In Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan there are strict food waste laws. Food recycling laws in Taiwan and South Korea prohibit food from any source ending up in landfills. Instead, food waste is either composted or fed to animals. In 2001, Japan passed the Food Waste Recycling Law, which requires food businesses to recycle forty-eight percent of their food waste by 2006. By 2005, Japanese businesses were leading the effort to mitigate food waste and recycled over sixty percent of their waste. As of 2019, Japan generated 6 million tons of food waste, only a tenth of the United States’ food waste. Recently, Japan also passed a new food waste reduction law that encourages businesses, governments and consumers to work together to curb the country’s food waste. It’s clear food waste reduction is of high priority for Japan. 

In addition to hope, Stuart offers practical solutions that both corporate-run supermarkets and governments can take to reduce food waste. He calls for supermarkets to “stop throwing away food” unnecessarily and to follow an enforced code of practice to shield suppliers from unfair practices. There is no code of practice in the United States, however there is one in the United Kingdom. The Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP) was introduced in 2009 to regulate the relationship between supermarkets and their suppliers. He suggests that governments establish mandatory food waste reduction targets on food companies (like in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan) and avoid farm subsidies based on production, which usually lead to an excess of food. 

In 2009, the shock value of Waste was high; however, the publication did little to stem the tide of excess food waste. The numbers have only gotten worse. 

By Jessica Ostfeld

Ever wonder how a whale named “killer” came to be loved by so many? Once targeted with machine guns by fishermen and the US military alike, the killer whale is now a symbol of pride and affection in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The answer to how this happened lies in something many now condemn – captivity. Jason M. Colby’s Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator explores how captivity, rooted in the Pacific Northwest, changed our understanding of and relationship with the powerful orca whale.

Colby’s story resonates with me. I remember going to Sea World in Southern California as a kid. My childish curiosity made me ripe with energy and affection for all of the animals at the park, but most of all Shamu, the orca whale. I remember trying to catch his eye across the crowd, looking for a connection. Reading this book sets that experience in a whole new context.

Colby starts by setting the scene. With elegant and simple prose, Colby introduces us to the inhabitants of the Old Northwest, lumberjacks and fishermen who relied on what the earth had to offer to feed their families. Here, killer whales were reviled and considered a threat to fish stocks and livelihoods. Fishermen would shoot at any orca they saw. The Canadian government even installed a machine gun off the coast of Vancouver Island to kill them off.

Then in the 1960s attitudes started to change. With nuance, Colby introduces us to the colorful cast of characters that hastened this transformation. We meet Paul Spong, a counterculture hippie biologist who first studied killer whales in captivity in 1967, but then became one of the most vocal critics of the industry. Then there’s Michael Bigg, regarded as the founder of the modern research of killer whales, but also the one who cut a painful notch in a killer whale’s dorsal fin for the sake of research.

But the heart of the book is Ted Griffin’s story. Griffin was a man who long dreamt of bonding with orcas and eventually succeeded in catching one. Not only was Namu the first orca to be displayed in captivity in Seattle, he also formed an indescribably deep bond with Griffin that swayed hearts and minds. Griffin was the first man to swim with an orca and even slept on his back from time to time. According to NOAA scientist Mark Keyes, “By the single act of going into the water with Namu, Ted Griffin contributed more to the conservation and appreciation of killer whales. . . than biologists and conservationists put together.”

The book is peppered with endearing stories of killer whales. We learn of a white killer whale who frequently bumped into the sides of her pool, unable to navigate her enclosure due to damaged echolocation. Researchers realized that she only survived in the wild because she had been cared for by her pod. We have learned that such compassion is far from unique amongst orcas. They will often share food with those unable to hunt. Colby also tells us of a captive orca who shared fish with a newly captured orca from a different pod in order to get her to eat. From this experience, researchers began to understand that different orca pods have different food cultures, some feeding on fish and others on marine mammals. Without the teachings of the other whale, she would have starved. Colby introduces us to the whales as individuals and as families, deepening the reader’s affection for them and showing the critical role captivity has played in understanding orca whales both scientifically and emotionally.

Colby also shows us that things are never as simple as they seem. Once lauded for capturing whales, Griffin became condemned. Namu died shortly after capture due to exposure to the polluted waters of the Puget Sound, and with him went a part of Ted Griffin. Still intent on sharing the beauty of orcas with the world, and with mounting interest in using the whales for display in oceanariums such as Sea World, Colby explains how Griffin and his crew came to corral over 80 whales in the Penn Cove Roundup of 1970. Though Griffin and his partners exercised restraint, taking only seven whales for captivity, five whales drowned during the violent operation that was easily in view of the public eye. Public opinion began to change. No longer was Griffin celebrated. Starting in the early 1970s, as environmental concerns and animal rights gained new attention, he and the capturing of killer whales became condemned.

As a Seattleite, this book captuers a history of the Pacific Northwest that is at risk of being forgotten. I know most of the places Colby speaks of, from Ivar’s Acres of Clams on the Seattle Waterfront to Sea World in SoCal. But many of the stories Colby relays were new. I didn’t know that the first captive orcas were captured in my backyard, that they had been displayed just down the hill from Pike Place Market, or even that orca whales were not always beloved but once hated. Learning this and knowing how dear the Southern Resident Orcas are to many in the Pacific Northwest, I was shocked.

Colby, however, brushes over one area much too briefly – the views of Pacific Northwest Indigenous groups. He takes only a few pages to describe the centuries-old relationships between orcas and the Indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest. To be fair, he is careful to distinguish between the views of different tribes before capture, acknowledging that some feared and others loved the orca. Given their long-shared histories with orcas, and the cultural value the whales hold in native communities, one would expect Indigenous groups held opinions on capture. Yet Colby gives this little attention.

Despite this oversight, with the lives of Southern Resident Orcas threatened due to declining fish stocks and other human impacts, it may do us well to reflect on how far our understanding of orcas has come and the men (I say men because there were legitimately no women central to in this story) who got us here.

Walking through grocery store, a $4.99 box of ripe strawberries calls to you with a good deal. You add them to your cart with the other fresh produce you’ve picked up along the way. But what are you paying for? Or, more importantly, what aren’t you paying for?

This question is what motivates anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes. As a professor in the Division of Society and Environment as well as Medical Anthropology and Public Health at the University of California Berkeley, he has devoted his work to social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the context of (im)migration, systems, and health care. For his graduate dissertation, Holmes researched the suffering of migrant farm workers in the U.S. After five years of delving into the legal, medical and social components of the migrant labor experience, Holmes has presented the transformative book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. It is a story about—or rather, the reality of—migrant laborers and in the U.S. farming industry.

Holmes transports his readers into the life of migrant laborers by joining them. He chronicles his experience living, working, and learning alongside them, from the village of Triqui in Oaxaca, Mexico to the berry fields of California and Washington. His encounters include the dangerous and harrowing experience of illegally traversing the U.S.-Mexico border—navigating rattlesnakes, cacti, intense heat, blinding darkness, robbers, and border-patrol who agents. Holmes and his cohort were caught by border patrol in Arizona and thrown in jail with little to no acknowledgement of their U.S.-given and basic human rights. He paid a fine. His companions were deported.

Posters at a Mexican outpost, just before the border, ask: “Is it worth risking your life?” The answer is yes, but the reasoning is anything but simple.

This book challenges the belief that migrant farm workers choose this life: the back-breaking manual work under the scorching sun, the perpetual risk of exploitation by government workers and farm owners, and the lack of equitable health care and livable wages. Often times, U.S. citizens believe that the only reason migrant labors gravitate to the U.S. is to make a living. While this is true, Holmes asks why and answers it by putting structural forces that drive the disparity between advantaged and disadvantaged communities—at local, national, and international scales—at the center of the conversation.

Holmes explains: “the reality of survival for my Triqui companions shows that it would be riskier to stay in San Miguel without work, money, food, or education. In this original context, crossing the border is not a choice to engage in a risk behavior but rather a process necessary to survive, to make life less risky.”

While life in the U.S. might be less risky for migrants, it is hardly easy. The political forces in the U.S.—ones that dictate who can and cannot cross the border legally, who is or is not allowed to work, and who does or doesn’t have a say in regulations and repercussions—have turned their back on the people who grow its food. Yet American agriculture would collapse without cheap migrant labor. These oddly clashing political and economic forces hinge on “the inability of the migrants…to influence the institutions that subordinate them to the other fractions of the labor force and to the employer.”

These structural flaws underpin what Holmes calls “an ethnicity-citizenship hierarchy” that dominates agricultural landscapes. This division between indigenous Mexicans, Mestizo Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and U.S. born among farm laborers, managers, and owners leads to a “highly structured hierarchy of ethnicity, citizenship, and suffering.” The structural and political violence manifests itself in illness. What’s more, migrant workers become invisible in health care system. The physical and mental strain put on farm laborer is ignored by the people who benefit, and the laborers are not afforded the opportunity nor the right to health care to treat or prevent it.

This book is a powerful call “to listen to migrant laborers, enact solidarity with their social movements, and work toward equality” from the fields of the U.S. to national and international policy arenas.

A combination of autobiography and ethnography, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies is a work that is full of powerful research, writing and storytelling that will make you, as a consumer, think of the hidden cost the next time you pick up that box of strawberries.

Since Euroamericans first descended the Sierra Nevada, California has cultivated a steady reputation for success despite countless undeniable failures. The present-day is no exception. The state birthed the green smoothie and poisoned the entire population of Chinook River salmon all in a single year. Fruits and nuts grow from the ground up as the ground itself sinks. When water runs dry, California turns on the sprinklers and churns out an ever-growing supply of nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Water is a finite resource that’s been treated like an infinite one. No wonder this contradiction of a state is hard to pin down. 

But Mark Arax, California native and author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Dust and Water Across California, does pin it down. It just takes him 577 pages to do so. In a vibrant and thorough tour up, down, across, above, and below the Central Valley, Arax dissects the agricultural history of the region from pre-colonial expansion to the present day. Holding water in one hand and a fistful of dust in the other, he’s our guide as we blaze through time and space, watching generations of Californians try to figure out how to make mud.

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California

The Dreamt Land reads like it’s written in verse. “What is gold but a vein. What is water but the blood that runs inside a vein”, Arax writes of the water-hungry California gold rush. Every town and every timeframe is spun with eloquence, a hint of lyrical flair, and a whole lot of drama. The Central Valley Water Project, for example, is a government-funded system of dams and canals designed to funnel water from the mountains in the northeast to the cities in the southwest, but Arax has dramatically rebranded it as “The killing of the San Joaquin River.” In this way, the narrative is propelled along, knocking on the doors of gold rushers, wheat ranchers, small fruit farmers, and today’s menacing “Big Ag.” Each of these characters has played a key role in pushing the region’s water supply beyond its natural limit. 

Arax is able to write with such spunk and passion because this is a deeply personal account. As the grandson of a raisin farmer, Arax is as much a product of the Central Valley as he is a journalist. He includes heart-wrenching anecdotes about the struggles of growing up as an Armenian American in the Fresno farming community, how the water crisis has affected his small family farm, and his father’s murder. He also includes some truly hilarious stories from his own days working on the farms. “I’ve done my time,” he writes of pulling weeds at a sugar beet farm as a teenager. “The weeder geese–a whole battalion of them– were our competition. Honking and hissing, the geese had no quit. Day after day, our defeat became a mockery… They were the perfect size to go right for our privates. When our 6 weeks of labor was finished, we’d been made better by the birds, or so we thought.” 

Arax has taken the history of agriculture in California and turned it into a bildungsroman: A tender coming-of-age story for water and soil and the ego of man. As naive little California stands at the precipice of adulthood, only just now realizing its own limitations and stricken by an outlook that is “half-environmental nightmare, half remarkable success story”, Arax looks back and says, “This is how we got here.” 

What is The Dreamt Land’s flaw? That he doesn’t leave anything out. To get to the point (something Arax did not), the book is too long. It’s a beautifully written, incredibly exhaustive account of everything that has ever happened in the history of Californian agriculture. It’s as if he took every source he ever read, every interview, every field note ever written, and somehow found a way to weave it into this book. He doesn’t write chronologically, and with such a broad focus and so much unfiltered information, the macroscopic organization quickly gets washed out by the abundance of microscopic details. As a result, The Dreamt Land lacks direction. At the end of the book, we have a close understanding of the seemingly infinite web of problems and contradictions that make up the California water crisis. But there is no real conclusion to be had, there is no call to action– only sprawling explanation. 

Despite this, Arax has undeniably crafted a masterpiece. With the prose of Joan Didion and the symbolism of John Steinbeck, Arax earns himself a spot amongst the great Californians who wrote vividly and personally about California. What Didion, Steinbeck, and Arax have in common is that they understand and write California as it is. A state, a resource, or a society this beautifully expressive and heart-wrenchingly tragic can only be captured by writing that is equally so. Arax’s The Dreamt Land characterizes California as both the glorious culmination of westward expansion, as manifest destiny realized, and where the earth runs out– a miserable, limiting dead end. Even though we’re left exhausted, with an unclear picture of what to do about it, we understand something transcendent nonetheless– and Arax’s ability to convey this understanding is a feat in itself.

What kind of city do people want to live in? What makes for a vibrant street life? What kind of city is safe and healthy for its citizens?

Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America has one answer to all these questions: walkability. Walkability, a score that ranges from 0-100, is defined as how accessible destinations are on foot. It is walkability, he argues, that can help city decision-makers answer those questions smartly. Think about all the ways in which you get around: walking, biking, taking public transport, or driving. In what places do you choose to walk? Where do you choose to drive?

Walkable Cities is an eye-opening journey in learning how our responses to these questions are not wholly our own, and this is completely intentional. These responses are the result of subtle nudging by designers and planners. He tells us what those nudges are.

First, let’s talk about why we should care about walkability. Walkability in cities is not only preferable but crucial in numerous ways: for health reasons, safety, and demographic shifts. Did you know that a shift in how different generations of Americans desire urban life can be explained by their TV shows? 70’s shows like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family portrayed cities and city life very differently from 90’s shows like Sex and the City and Friends: what was once dirty and dangerous in the American consciousness is now vibrant and interesting. People want to move to cities with energetic street life, and in order to attract them, we must improve walkability in cities.

The meat of Speck’s book details the 10 commandments of what he playfully terms “The General Theory of Walkability”. Each prescription is categorized into the useful walk, the safe walk, the comfortable walk, and the interesting walk. All four traits must be achieved in a city in order to successfully coax out what Speck calls the “extremely fragile species” of pedestrian.

If your city has ever been subject to road widenings, “Step 1: Put Cars in their Place” will explain how this comes about. Congestion is a universal problem for cities and towns of all sizes. You might think that because demand (drivers) outstrips supply (pavement), the simple solution would be to just increase the supply (more lanes). This, unfortunately, is not the answer, due to a something called induced demand: when roads are widened to alleviate congestion, the time cost of driving is reduced, which encourages more people drive, negating whatever benefits the new road was intended to create.

This chapter showcases Speck’s smart, sarcastic, and at times biting writing, like when he goes on a tirade on the uselessness and dog-headed profession of traffic engineers, who cannot seem to grasp this concept. Tradition, faulty computer models, and misplaced incentives ensure that engineers will always be in favor of more lanes and wider roads, resulting in narrowed sidewalks, fewer trees, and a less hospitable environment for the pedestrian.

Speck also has a knack for combining a bit of evolutionary psychology with architectural history and presenting them in a digestible way. For instance, he discusses how to create a comfortable walk for the pedestrian, by “shaping spaces”. What does he mean by comfortable walk? Animals require prospect and refuge when they travel: they need things to look forward to and places to feel safe in. For humans in cities, this means finding the balance enough open space and a sufficient sense of enclosure. Too much or too little of either discourages the driver from becoming the pedestrian. The next time you’re in a public space, look at where people gather. You won’t find them in exposed open spaces.

Many cities get this balance wrong, and Speck attributes this to the conceptual shift from figural space to figural object in modern city planning. Figural space is the attitude that buildings must accommodate the spaces in between them to facilitate civic life and create “outdoor living rooms”. Paris is a good example of this.

However, modern urbanism was founded on the “cult of the figural object”, which views buildings as sculptures, without regard for the space in between or the pedestrians who navigate them. Boston’s City Hall, a famously brutalist building, sits adjacent to a notoriously bleak and open plaza, lacking the comforting sense of enclosure that would attract wayfarers. (For a scathing review on City Hall, see Paul McMorrow’s Boston Globe column on why it should be torn down.)

Speck’s personality comes through in his writing, full of sharp wit and snark, making Walkable City an engaging read. The reader’s inner monologue will be constantly buzzing with a-ha moments that can be applicable to any built environment people find themselves in. I found myself hanging on to his words like they were spoken from a walkability Messiah, supplemented with just enough statistics and theory to convince and not overwhelm. Walkable City will get you to rethink your town or city in a whole new way. How does your city score?

Source image: https://www.businessdestinations.com/destinations/the-worlds-most-walkable-cities/

Imagine you are at a dinner party.  After what seems like hours of waiting, the host finally brings a steaming pot of stew to the table.  Impressed by the fusion of aromas of meat, herbs, and vegetables, you ask your friend for the recipe. “I’d be happy to tell you,” she replies.  “The meat was from a golden retriever, tenderized with a meat pounder and marinated before hours of simmering.” 

How would you react?  Would you continue eating?  

This is the thought experiment that Harvard-educated psychologist Dr. Melanie Joy poses to her reader in the opening chapter of her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism.  

The title of the book captures the fundamental question regarding the differential treatment of animals in American society (and many others).  The answer Dr. Joy provides is no less provocative than the question itself: “carnism”—an invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals and not others.  

What does that mean?  Dr. Joy explains carnism by comparing it to the film The Matrix.  In the movie, the brains of all humans were plugged into “an illusion, a virtual reality, fabricated by a computerized matrix…. [T]his matrix uses us as batteries … keeps us complacent by remaining invisible while generating the illusion of our freedom.”  Just like the protagonist in the movie has been deprived of the ability to think for himself, Dr. Joy suggests that an “invisible hand” has led consumers to accept meat eating as a given—to unknowingly participate in carnism.  

If the term “carnism” might sound preachy, rest assured that this book does not shame carnists—the term Dr. Joy uses to describe meat eaters.  Rather, it aims to deconstruct the entrenched, dominant, and violent system of carnism, under which eating meat has been normalized, naturalized, and necessitated.  Dr. Joy’s calls the society in which we live a “meatocracy.” In this “meatocracy,” we do not think of eating meat as a choice.  Rather, it is the default option, while being vegetarian or vegan is a choice that one needs to announce, defend, and even apologize for.  Barriers to choosing a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle abound—social norms, the false perception that chickens are stupid and pigs dirty, the widely held belief that eating meat is natural and necessary for our bodies, to list a few examples.  Having little incentive to question the normalized practice of meat eating, most of the public has remained shielded from witnessing the cruel operations in meat production.  

To bring to light the wrongdoing that has remained largely invisible and unknown and yet fills our bodies every day, Dr. Joy recounts many investigations at confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  Filled with graphic descriptions of obscene torture, chapter three shakes loose the belief that meat products could come from “happy cows” and “contented hens.” We learn how baby calves are castrated and that “‘the[ir] testicles are … grasped and extended one at a time … and pulled until the cord breaks.’”  We read excerpts from an undercover investigation at a chicken slaughter plant, where “chickens [fall on top of each other] with broken legs and wings, limbs sticking out in unnatural angles.” We learn of the stressful human working environment of CAFOs, where “‘[f]orklifts crash, saws overheat, workers drop knives, workers get cut, workers collapse and lie unconscious on the floor, as dripping carcasses sway past them and the chain keeps going.’”  

Such accounts make it clear that carnism depends on the invisibility of a system that has disconnected the experiences of eating animal products and the reality of their production.  To that end, Dr. Joy explains how language camouflage has also made its contribution. “Beef” and “eggs” simply do not tell the whole story of our food when they are in truth distorted body parts of animal carcasses and reproductive cells of hens.  

One of the most controversial arguments Dr. Joy makes in the book is equating carnism with other already identified ideologies and systems of oppression such as slavery, Nazism, and sexism.  She argues that at the basis of all is the construction of “‘natural hierarchy.’” In doing so, she makes a compelling case for change based on history. Just as people have often demanded change once they became aware of systemic injustice, she expects they will disavow carnism, too.  

These claims which have generated substantial debate and resistance will surely challenge some readers.  Anticipating the controversies that her arguments might raise, Dr. Joy explains that the reason we might feel offended or attacked by this comparison, and thus likely to resist the truth of carnism, is because this idea challenges our identity as human beings who have always felt “entitled to kill and consume animals.”  In other words, we are offended not by the question of who the victims are, but by who the perpetrators are. 

A compassionate and empathetic change agent, Dr. Joy reminds us of the importance of  “witnessing ourselves” while witnessing the truth of carnism as we have fallen—psychologically—individual victims of this social system and have internalized carnist ideologies as the default.  “[R]ecognizing ourselves as victims in a system that has led us down the path of least resistance,” we cannot be blamed for our conditioning. But once our blinders are removed, she argues, we become responsible for what we do.  In Dr. Joy’s words, witnessing is “staying mentally and emotionally open to the experience of oneself and others.” By expanding our empathy and compassion into the lives of our own kind—animals—we as human beings have nothing to lose and everything to gain.   

Now return to the thought experiment at the beginning and ask yourself: would you choose to continue eating the golden retriever?  Why or why not? What about a pig?

What makes someone Native American? Is it appearance, clothes, family, land? How about blood?

This question was brought to the forefront this month when Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a DNA test to claim Cherokee heritage. This DNA test found possible ancestry 6-10 generations ago. Citizens, the President, and even the Cherokee nation have voiced their disapproval of her claim—is DNA a marker of identity? Is heritage enough?

The newly released book Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy by Katherine Ellinghaus, examines this connection between descent and identity specific to Native allotment policy of the 1890s.

The Dawes Act of 1887 initiated Native land allotment. The U.S. government allotted land that was typically farm land, to help Native people assimilate into Western farm culture. Yet the government wanted to award land and special protections to Native people; they did not want to hand out benefits to someone claiming false heritage. Without any definite distinction between Native and non-Native, the U.S. government adopted distinction by blood.

This policy was known as blood quantum, referring to the amount of Native blood possessed by any person. Yet in the 1890s and early 1900s, there was no scientific capacity to accurately test Native blood. Government officials assigned blood status based on stereotypes of Native people; those who fit the physical and racial stereotypes were considered Native. The extent to which a Native person fit into these stereotypes arbitrarily determined blood status. Other officials used crude family trees to decide descent and blood, and some used racial pseudo-science (eugenics) to decide. While deeply subjective and problematic, blood quantum factored heavily into policy decisions.

Ellinghaus’ book uses case studies to demonstrate how allotment processes policed blood status and resulted in land loss. For example, in 1889, a commission in Minnesota began to work with the native Anishinaabe people to begin allotment under the Dawes Act. To receive allotment and government benefits, Anishinaabe people had to complete an application and be approved by the commission as truly Native. The application was confusing and arduous, with page after page of legal jargon that alienated the Anishinaabe—many did not speak English, few were educated enough to understand, and most did not even understand the concept of blood status. Anishinaabe identity was deeply rooted in culture and tradition, not descent and blood. Applications were denied by white lawmakers, who wanted to give less land to Natives in order to keep it for themselves. Many Anishinaabeg were left off official tribal rolls, breaking tribal nations into pieces. The government denied tribes the right to decide blood status themselves and in effect, nations lost official land, population, and sovereignty.

Throughout the book, Ellinghaus outlines common notions of Native identity held by white government officials that heavily shaped the allotment judgement process. Those believed to have ‘full’ Native blood were considered poor helpless victims, deserving the government’s help. Those thought to have ‘mixed’ Native blood were perceived as exploitative, cunning, and stealing from the government and the helpless ‘full-bloods’.

Based on such common misconceptions, Congress amended the Dawes Act to include ‘Competency’ in 1906. This claimed that ‘mixed-bloods’ were ‘competent’ enough to live without land protections and benefits—it also meant that ‘mixed’ people could sell or lease their land as any white citizen could. But many Indians were financially vulnerable and unprepared for lifted land regulations. Their land was seized, mortgaged, or sold out of desperation. Ellinghaus notes how this was a “clear instance of a settler nation using citizenship as a means of dispossession” (69). In Minnesota, Senator Moses Clapp used this amendment to force all ‘mixed’ blood people to be labeled competent without consent—rather than awarding Competency by choice as in other Nations. This amendment led to widespread fraudulent land transfers from the Anishinaabeg to white settlers. By 1909, 90% of the original Anishinaabeg tribal land was owned by settlers.

Other case studies in Blood Will Tell reveal similar stories of fraud, confusion, arbitrary policy, and most of all, bureaucratic failure.

In this book, Ellinghaus parses through the complex allotment policies and the consequential land loss very effectively. Yet the conclusion was underwhelming. In the mere 5-page conclusion, Ellinghaus brings up entirely new consequences of assimilation-driven policy, such as assimilation boarding schools for Native children and language bans. Determining which children would be taken from parents and sent to boarding schools was likely based on blood quantum, so why would this be left out of the larger narrative of the book? Social consequences alongside land loss would show how assimilation policy and blood quantum affected all parts of Native lives.

Overall, Ellinghaus successfully demonstrates the awful intricacies of Native assimilation policy. These turn-of-the-century decisions are still clearly affecting Native lives—the allotment era marked sovereignty, culture, and land forcibly taken from tribal nations across North America. Tribal nations still fight to gain back lost land and consolidate reservations, and the fight for Native identity still carries on.

Elizabeth Warren is a prime example of identity decisions made by the wrong people in the wrong ways. While she may have Native ancestry, that does not make her a Cherokee woman, and exploiting that heritage to make a point makes deeply cultural Native identities seem trivial. Native people need the right to define their own identities on their own terms.

Cover Photo:

Family Portrait by Maggie Thompson
Materials: Rayon, Wool
Technique: 8 Harness Floor Loom, Plain Weave, Tapestry
(Photo courtesy All My Relations Arts)

https://blogs.mprnews.org/state-of-the-arts/2014/03/maggie-thompson-weaves-together-her-indian-identity-in-where-i-fit/