Indigenous sovereignty is a political, cultural, nutritional, and cosmological movement that advocates for the right of Indigenous Peoples to have access to healthy and culturally significant foods, while they shape and define their own food systems. More specifically, Indigenous Sovereignty involves “control and stewardship of food resources, guards against biopiracy, protects against genertic modification, restores local food economies and trade networks, [ensures that] food is obtained ethically and is appropriate to the environment, focuses on cultural, physical, and spiritual nourishment, and [allows for] Indigenous Peoples to provide for Indigenous communities” (Arizona State University Library Guides, n.d.).
Indigenous sovereignty emphasizes the role of food as medicine and aligns closely with the holistic perspective of the Medicine Wheel. This traditional wheel consists of four interconnected parts: spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health. By embracing this approach, Indigenous Peoples can use natural remedies to support their well-being. For example, chokecherries offer both nourishment and medicinal benefits—jams from the fruit can support physical health, while the root can be used for healing purposes.
The process of food gathering is a collective and community-focused effort, involving farmers, seed-keepers, fishers, gatherers, chefs, basketweavers, hunters, and other knowledge holders (Melissa K. Nelson, Maya Harjo, n.d.). The act of gathering itself holds a deep sense of medicine, reinforced through communal participation and the prayers offered beforehand. This interconnected approach ensures that food and medicine go hand in hand, supporting overall health and well-being within Indigenous communities.
Check out this podcast on Indigenous food as medicine, featuring Dr. Daphne Miller from the University of California
The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) coined the term “pod” to describe the connections among individuals who seek support from one another in violent, harmful, and abusive situations. BATJC describes “Pods” as the following: “Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you’ve done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused” (BATJC, 2016).
Pod Mapping Activity
Keeping in mind that everyone’s pod looks differently, Mia Mingus created a Pod Mopping activity for BATJC, used for people to identify who is in their harm intervention pod. The following section is entirely adopted and licensed by BATJC, 2016. You can access their Pod Mapping sheet here.
Steps to Fill Out Your Pod Map:
- Write your name in the middle grey circle.
- The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as “my church group” or “my neighbors.”
- The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are “movable.” They are people that could be moved in to your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build more relationship or trust with them. Or maybe you’ve never had a conversation with them about prisons or sexual violence.
- The larger circles at the edge of the page are for networks, communities or groups that could be resources for you. It could be your local domestic violence direct service organization, or your cohort in nursing school, or your youth group, or a transformative justice group.
Your pod(s) may shift over time, as your needs or relationships shift or as people’s geographic location shift. We encourage people to have conversations with their pod people about pods and transformative justice, as well as to actively grow the number of people in their pod and support each other in doing so. Growing one’s pod is not easy and may take time. In pod work, we measure our successes by the quality of our relationships with one another and we invest in the time it takes to build things like trust, respect, vulnerability, accountability, care and love. We see building our pods as a concrete way to prepare and build resources for transformative justice in our communities.