FSTI Top 10 Native Lands

In order to build the profile for top 10 lands, we collected additional data from the tribes’ official websites and related online sources. The fields we collected include lands’ original native names, languages, and traditional modes of subsistence. They also include the names and years of the treaties that established the lands as federally-recognized. These years should not be mistaken for the length of times that these lands were occupied by particular tribes. In many cases, reservations were established on or near their ancestral homelands, which often overlapped with other tribes. In some cases such as for Isleta Pueblo or Zuni, the territories were actually sedentarily inhabited since the 14th century. In other cases, tribes were displaced far from their original homelands for political reasons and in direct violations of previous treaties.

The NLAP fully understand that these years and treaties do not reflect the history of land occupancy. However, they are a marker of two dialectical historical benchmarks: 1) the imprint of colonial expansion to build what is now the United States of America and 2) the documents that still establish to this day native sovereign rights to the land that they still have. This is why these benchmarks are useful to observe and understand native land use and the impact of land policies over time. 

Additionally, we also reported the major land cover category for each territory from our NLCD Land Cover dashboard, along with the population, land area and population density. Finally, we reported household mean income and unemployment rate from the Census ACS 2017-5YR. The rationale behind showing these variables was based on their usual influence in policy report and economic development initiatives. Even when it comes to food-systems, the mainstream classical economic idea that growth will inevitably leverage the field and create stronger food-systems remains dominant and impacts local policies and fundraising. However, the scientific relevance of these measures is widely questioned, as they only show the tip of the iceberg, and do not give much indications of community social wellbeing, education and health. But income measures are too often still taken as proxies to assess the impact of local planning, because the myth of income as being the absolute driver of positive community change is still so engrained worldwide as a byproduct of the developmentalist colonial narrative.

In native communities, we already know that high unemployment rates are mitigated by higher level of informal economy and barter. This does not mean that income does not play any part. In a monetary-based capitalist economy, consumption or the lack thereof does impact life chances and access to opportunities. But it cannot be used as a main proxy to assess the strength and resilience of local economies. Additionally, it does not give any indication of economic inputs/outputs flows and the level of economic self-sufficiency. Does a small reservation with a high-income due to a casino or lending enterprise necessarily build a stronger food-system? It might impact residents’ capacity to buy more and better food, but have virtually no impact on the capacity of the community to feed itself off sovereignly-managed land.

This pattern clearly shows among the top-10. The variance of income (and other variables) across all lands is suggesting that economic measures may not predict any successful outcomes for actual food sovereignty. These results are actually not surprising given the denseness of the FSTI. Here we have an Index which for the first time attempts to gather the complexity of resilient food-systems as advocated in the scientific literature: agricultural land control, the ecological footprint of agriculture, and soil organic carbon along with variables assessing languages, health and energy. 

The qualitative nuance of this Index is a real chance to question our assumptions about how to effectively build healthy and sovereign food-systems and use dedicated measures instead of proxies that continue to hurt communities’ efforts towards building stronger local economies with actual sustainable outcomes. What the top-10 ranking of the FSTI shows is that we need to modify general assumptions about what builds stronger food-systems and create the robust indicators that are truly needed to move towards climate-resilient sovereign economies that can feed local communities. What is needed is a bold shift in the way we conceive of and use data for planning.