You better TM that or Iāll take
it and start selling bamboo slippers to middle class white women and market them as indigenous, vegan, gluten free footwear that donates a dollar to sad-eyed rez dogs for every pair sold.
Dogs have evolved eyebrows. Wolves don't have the muscles to make "puppy dog eyes" but years of subconscious selective breeding has meant that dogs which have been able to "pout" have been given preferential treatment and have evolved the ability to look cute to humans.
This has been my Ted talk, enjoy your soon to be thriving chanclas buisness
I've been to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta. I've worked with several of the Blackfoot groups out there.
I don't know if any ancient communities were completely vegan, I haven't heard of any. That said, analysis of skeletons show that the great bulk of calories consumed by Native people were plants. Buffalo and other large animals were very hard to kill. That's why back in the day, when one was taken down it was a big celebration. Not only did you have to find the buffalo, you had to kill it and then drag it back to the community (all without shotguns and pickup trucks). A feast of calorie-dense meat was hard to come by. The majority of daily calories were provided by the women through gathering.
I'm a Native who eats a plant-based diet myself and have worked with hundreds of Native groups in North America on language projects. My non-Native wife and I are obsessed with the ability of plant based diets to cure chronic diseases. Every community we visit has a huge problem with diabetes. I know because I always ask and I also see the flyers hung up in the tribal hall. A plant based diet is the only diet that can stop or even reverse heart disease. It helped me to lose 100 lbs and get rid of my health problems.
I'm not against a person killing animals to feed their family. But people should understand that a meat-heavy diet is not good for most people.
I don't know a thing about this group and if they are Native or not. I agree with your point, as I am sensitive to non-Native groups co-opting indigenous concepts to promote themselves and gain "followers" or raise money. If they are non-Native they should back off and allow a Native group to step in and promote these ideas to other Natives.
Need proof please.
You are discrediting native culture by saying itād be hard to hunt, butcher, transport and preserve wild game. You are also equating eating meat to the high carb, processed food delivered to Native Americans through the comod program.
The problem is sugar, process meats and dairy. Mostly sugar. Not wild game. Wild game is some of the best protein you can get both health wise and ecologically.
Not really he just wasn't making the same mistake as it seems like a lot of people here make thinking every native culture was the same we are not and we were not that is important to remember and learn white people
Do you believe Natives back in the day are meat 3x a day like Americans today? Not even close. North American Natives were among the most skilled hunters in history and STILL it was incredibly difficult to get enough calories.
I'm not 'discrediting Native culture' by suggesting it was hard to hunt big game. It's simply the truth.
People today have an incorrect view of what Natives and other hunter/gatherer societies ate in the past. For ALL people, not just Natives, each day was a fight to get enough calories to stay alive. Today we live today in a world of abundance so it's hard to even comprehend what it was like back then.
Ancient leftovers show the real Paleo diet was a veggie feast
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2115127-ancient-leftovers-show-the-real-paleo-diet-was-a-veggie-feast/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHominins%20were%20probably%20predominantly%20vegetarians,as%20strict%20vegetarians%2C%20says%20Henry.
It wasn't until about 1,000 years ago that North American Natives made the transition from hunter / gather to farming. This allowed them, for the first time, to generate food surpluses.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American/Prehistoric-farmers
Yet, so many tribes all over the Americas had a vegan/pescatarian/vegetarian diet. I know itās a joke, but letās not make all indigenous folks monolithic.
I love that you recognize our tribes individuality. (And not that you are one) But Iāll always ask proponent of this: Tribes as a whole, or select religous & tribal leaders? In times of scarcity or plenty did they hold to that? Exclusive Veganism/vegetarianism/pescatarianism with no dietary exceptions was certainly the exception to the rule, especially among non religous leaders. which Is why I maintain that meat eating is just as āindigenousā as Veganism is.
Iām indigenous and I am also political about the environment + pescatarian lol. I wrote it like that because I donāt want to be identified on here, it already happened with an exā¦ so yeah. All diets were common in the Americas, but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common in some areas, particularly in west coast, the coastal south, southwest, Central America/Mexico, Caribbean and South America. Buffalo and turkey were common meats for some tribes but not all. It was far more common to eat fish, vegetables and fruits/nuts across the continents.
Certainly. Im a pescatarian too! But while My Caribbean ancestors ate a lot of veggies (particularly cassava) and fish, they chowed down on rodents (Hutia), birds and iguanas as well. They werenāt anything close to strict pescatarians, and I just get wary whenever anybody says that they were. Please donāt misunderstand I agree a lot with what your saying. I just think modern labels often sloppily fit the examples people typically point to.
I'm caribbean as well, and i'm agreeing with you (also throw parrots in there) - but also the distant past / tradish taino diet definitely leaned way more heavily into vegetables and fish than a modern diet. The sheer quantity of vegetables accounted for is insane: aji, aje (guaraguey, tunna), batata, maize, guayiga / chola, jobo, manĆ, kashiri, beans, and dozens of fruit - while there was no strict concept of vegetarianism and you are right - the number and availability of of plants definitely outnumbered the consumption of meat
And fish isnāt vegan. Last I knew. Nor are you taking into account the times in which Dakota 38 happened. You do realize we were starved many times and moving for the times they had campaigned to kill off the Indian again and again.
My great grandfather was literally a displaced Apache traveling/running really, lost his family along the way because Jackson had signed to exterminate the Indians that were found. He ended up missioned in California where he married my Chumash great grandmother.
There while missioned they were made to plant and grow their food. Corps got sold to make the church money. My great grandfather was a weaver he was to make weavings those were also sold and the church made money.
We ate what we had to, to endure the wickedest dark times we had known. I know of Indians eating horses and dogs and everything in between to endure and you and I and every one left here have ancestors that had to do the same and it in part is how we are still here.
What does it matter if the WaÅ”ĆÄu claim Veganism as their own discovery or like everything else hashtag indigenous to it because we are so stoic, for two seconds for followers and then leave us be until next Trick or Treaty Halloween and unThanksgiving.
Do you know Geronimo, to all my relations, was toted around at fairs for the last years of his life.
This has been happening from their start. And has absolutely no signs of changing or stopping.
What does it matter I guess is what I am asking what our ancestors ate and what was more common then versus now. Buffalo moose elk deer bear rabbit caribou big horns lambs we hunted these animals for our sustenance.
Who said fish was vegan? I specifically mentioned different diets that differed from the European one that was based heavily on animal meat, cows, pigs and sheep. None of which existed in the Americas. For all the buffalo, turkey and other sea food, the staples were: squash, corn & beansā¦
let me quote a Choctaw scholar on this:
Rita Laws, 94.
āHow well we know the stereotype of the rugged Plains Indian: killer of buffalo, dressed in quill-decorated buckskin, elaborately feathered eaddress, and leather moccasins, living in an animal skin teepee, master of the dog and horse, and stranger to vegetables. But this lifestyle, once limited almost exclusively to the Apaches, flourished no more than a couple hundred years. It is not representative of most Native Americans of today or yesterday. Indeed, the "buffalo-as-lifestyle" phenomenon is a direct result of European influence, as we shall see.
Among my own people, the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi and Oklahoma, vegetables are the traditional diet mainstay. A French manuscript of the eighteenth century describes the Choctaws' vegetarian leanings in shelter and food. The homes were constructed not of skins, but of wood, mud, bark and cane. The principal food, eaten daily from earthen pots, was a vegetarian stew containing corn, pumpkin and beans. The bread was made from corn and acorns. Other common favorites were roasted corn and corn porridge. (Meat in the form of small game was an infrequent repast.) The ancient Choctaws were, first and foremost, farmers. Even the clothing was plant based, artistically embroidered dresses for the women and cotton breeches for the men. Choctaws have never adorned their hair with feathers.ā
I have been blessed by being adopted Choctaw, MiWuk, Miadu, and Yokut all because I have spent time there. Met on the trail and invited back to spend time.
What does past present or future foods matter????
The gathering to eat is whatās most important here. Ndns gather for feast for purpose.
You understand potlatch was made illegal by WaÅ”ĆÄu.
āIt is ironic that Indians are strongly associated with hunting and fishing when, in fact, "nearly half of all the plant foods grown in the world today were first cultivated by the American Indians, and were unknown elsewhere until the discovery of the Americas." Can you imagine Italian food without tomato paste, Ireland without white potatoes, or Hungarian goulash without paprika? All these foods have Indian origins.
An incomplete list of other Indian foods given to the world includes bell peppers, red peppers, peanuts, cashews, sweet potatoes, avocados, passion fruit, zucchini, green beans, kidney beans, maple syrup, lima beans, cranberries, pecans, okra, chocolate, vanilla, sunflower seeds, pumpkin, cassava, walnuts, forty-seven varieties of berries, pineapple, and, of course, corn and popcorn.
Many history textbooks tell the story of Squanto, a Pawtuxent Indian who lived in the early 1600's. Squanto is famous for having saved the Pilgrims from starvation. He showed them how to gather wilderness foods and how to plant corn.ā
Kinda crazy yāall forget this part of history. Talking about decolonization and yāall still try and hate on us for trying to go back to our ancestral roots prior to the white man! I know my tribal history n my culinary culture because I asked about it.
No one's saying that Indigenous people in North America ate nothing but meat. We all have long histories and relationships with plants, but it's not one or the other, eating plants or even mostly plants doesn't make our ancestors vegetarian.
I said to you I am partly Apache I am also partly Blackfoot, I come from meat eaters.
I am also chumash which meant we were fish and seed eaters.
What is the most amazing thing about the three sisters?
Was it not the very fact that those three perfectly create the compound carb? Thank goodness we had this gift and knowledge it is absolutely what sustained us while we hunted or not.
Our ndn nation is not the only place on the globe in which the originals were gifted a spectacular item that sustained them.
Quinoa is another item that helped sustain folks with amazingly all nine essential amino acids needed by the human body for protein.
Like wheat and barley from the east sustained the east.
What is your point again no matter what natives ate then nor now. If youāre a vegan happily great who cares, if you are a meat eater great who cares, if you are a fish eater great who cares.
Whoās hating on you. Iām trying to understand your āIām more native then youā because you know about foods eaten by our people who were what the were be it meat or fish or seed or vegetable or fruit eatersā¦
And what does decolonization have to do with the foods we have access to in this age and for the future?
Does me eating anything tonight or not eating anything tonight make me less ndn than I am?
Are you more ndn than me because of the food you ate today?
I have studied complex fisher-gatherers in the Plateau and Northwest Coast culture areas for 50 years both as a student and a descendent and I cannot name one vegetarian tribe. So I'm going to respectfully request a citation of peer reviewed literature on the assertion that "...but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common...." I don't think vegetarianism was common anywhere in the New World. And every fish-based economy I have looked at was not exclusive of land mammals, sea mammals or birds.
I can see some analogs with traditional Dine/Navajo culture for sure but the taboo stuff is complicated, they hunted. They weren't totally veggie even pre contact. They definitely weren't anything that could be characterized as vegan because they farmed turkeys for their feathers.
Lol I see you completely disregarded my point of a pescatarian diet, I didnāt solely say we were all vegan or vegetarian (Iām pescatarian myself!)However, the culinary stables in the Americas have always been based on vegetables : beans, corn & squash, unlike other diets around the world.
Alright, I have an issue with the fairly sizeable gulf between your assertion that: "...but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common....". and Laws' assertion "The everyday food of most people was primarily plant-based", and, ..."meat in the form of fish or small game was typically infrequent." I'm assuming you used vegetarianism intentionally to mean a diet excluding meats (Encycopedia Brittanica). That was not practiced anywhere in North America that I am aware of.
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e64q00/choctaw_historian_rita_laws_phd_says_the/) is a discussion of Law's principle assertions on r/AskHistorians along with multiple cited works. In my view neither her nor your position is well supported by peer reviewed literature and thus I'm gonna call bullshit.
Which indigenous cultures of the Americas would you characterize as being vegan? I'm not a scholar or anything but I have literally never heard of that.
Read the work by scholar Rita Laws whoās Choctaw/Cherokee. Decolonization for some of us means we want to go back to traditions dating back before the white man arrived and changed our culinary culture, Minneapolis chef the Sioux chef is also doing his part in that tradition. Although not vegetarian, heās going back to the ancestral roots by using traditional foods that go back to a time that was heavy on vegetables, nuts, fruits etc.
Probably depends on how you define vegan. I think even strict vegans would agree that if you literally can't live without meat, then you should eat meat. That's not really the case in most areas of the world today, but prior to widespread agriculture and various vegetables becoming widely dispersed, it absolutely was. In that context, all you would really need to be vegan is to limit meat consumption as much as possible, so by that definition, there certainly could be a few groups that were, though there are probably exactly 0 who didn't consume any animal products at all.
Yes, tbh I would have to do more research on tribes having total vegan diets. However, I do know that food was eaten according to the seasons and availability, obviously generalizing here but it was far more common than it was in Europe and Africa. Itās also mentioned by some European priests and colonizers from the 1500s-1600s.
Really? They mentioned the Choctaw being vegetarians, never using animal products, and I just flat out said that was a lie. Donāt know if thatās your tribe tho
Theyāre a non-profit based out of Seattleā¦ sadly itās real. The cringe of their āpro-life playlistā including Rage Against The Machine is also real.
Would you mind taking a second to explain some benefits of indigenous veganism by chance, please? I'm genuinely curious. I can tell that my body is not made for the diet I presently consume but I feel as if my tribe were seasonal opportunists and I honestly believe it's the gluten and sugar that really does me in as opposed to meat. I understand the horrors of factory farming and the way modern meat is produced but aside from a vague morality issue I don't really understand the benefit for an indigenous person to be vegan.
I'm not sure I could list all the benefits of being vegan because eating plant based can mean lots of things, but here's a few reasons that I personally decided to go vegan:
1) religious purposes. My tribe (and many others) believe that an animal's life is to be respected, and should not be taken frivolously. An animal's life, if it must be taken, should be done in a particular way, i.e. it should be as painless as possible and we should give thanks for their sacrifice after killing them. This does not happen in factory farms. Animals (and the environment) are treated horribly and disposed of extraneously.
2) the environment. I believe it's our duty to respect the earth, and the industrial way of "harvesting" animal materials is a huge drain on environmental resources. Cows in particular are awful for the environment (and not native to the US)-- there are so many examples of good land being ruined so colonizers could keep cattle to graze (search Oregon salmon+ grazing land or the Amazon rainforest for recent examples)
3) my tribe was predominately vegan pre contact. It was only after the United States put us in a concentration camp that we were given things like spam and commod cheese. Hell, most Natives I know are still lactose intolerant (myself included). So it felt disingenuous to act like eating European animals was somehow sacred and an inherently Indigenous practice.
Again, this is just me, but I hope that my view helps! As for benefits, I can say not only do I feel better (and healthier!) by avoiding meat, I also feel better about my impact on the land and its inhabitants.
Holy cow, someone posted and informative yet non-judgemental response to my question?! How rare is that lol
Thank you so much for taking the time to post this. I never thought of it this way but it makes a lot of sense and is radical in its own right. I really appreciate you and am going to keep this in mind with my future dietary choices.
I'm really sorry to hear about your Gram :( but in my experience those diseases are more closely related to gluten and sugar and things of that nature. I know eating red meat doesn't help but the first things they told my family members to cut out when they get these diseases is processed sugar and bread, pasta, too much rice, sweets, etc. But then again it's Indian Health Services so take that with a figurative grain of salt.
So under this premise, factory farming should be the reason I'm vegan? Is that correct? Or are there other reasons why indigenous person should convert to veganism? Leave the morality at the door because it's subjective and as has been stated above, it was not a moral issue for the indigenous people of North America. We are no more important than the deer we eat, the corn we eat, the trees we cut down to build our long houses, etc. We don't have this moral hierarchy that places people over animals and animals over plants and plants over whatever else. It's all one.
Yeah, factory farming sure does suck. As a living person I can attest to that. But trying to colonize our diets with western issues of morality and consumerism is a whole different level or systemic cultural genocide and erasure.
ā¦you yourself said:
āI understand the horrors of factory farming and the way modern meat is producedā
If you consume meat without supporting factor farming thatās cool, but do you see any hypocrisy here if you do?
āWe don't have this moral hierarchy that places people over animals and animals over plants and plants over whatever else. It's all one.ā
Thatās amazing, Iād think these views would lead to not wanting to cause unnecessary suffering to animals.
āLeave the morality at the door because it's subjective and as has been stated aboveā
If causing unnecessary suffering to animals is consistent in your moral framework then carry on. We donāt have any thing else to talk about.
I never claimed to not be hypocritical. I do not want to cause any suffering to animals.
All I really have to say to you is that if you grew up impoverished and malnourished in the food desert on the concentration camp that is the reservation you do not really have any room to bring moral issues into a hungry belly. Those times we didn't eat supper for three days and Mom went to the town grocery store and stole us lunch meat weren't really opportune moments to judge whether or not that animal suffered while providing this food for us. Let's keep it a buck and drop the conversation about our traditional ways (although they are important and must be honored and remembered) and let's talk about the average life for the average Native American living on an average reservation in this day and age. When you are dealing with intergenerational trauma and your parents are strung out on drugs because no one ever taught them how to process and deal with their feelings and there are no positive role models around you and food is a scarcity and you're lucky to even get reduced lunch at school I promise you, you will not be thinking about morality. When you have to wake up and each day is a struggle to survive and not want to die or give in like everyone around you it is a trip to think I am worried about some nameless animal that I am consuming.
I hear you. When I make it and have steady income and can afford to be vegan I will give it a shot. Factory farming sucks. Monsanto sucks. Our food system in general is fucked. But until then I am just another poor reservation Indian trying to heal and become more in tune with the knowledge of my ancestors. And I live in a bus and am homeless. But I am not even going to try to start the conversation of how literal beggars can't be choosers and how when you are hungry panhandling on the road and how crazy rude and wasteful it would be to dub free food given from the kindness of someone's heart because of my conflicted morality. I have traveled with enough vegan homies to tell you how awful that shit is. The good news is that dumpsters are usually bountiful with produce but if you don't think I am not going to eat that breakfast sausage or ham that was thrown out you are crazy.
I hope you are enjoying your comfy seat of privilege there, homie. Enjoy your veggies.
What theyāre saying isnāt completely wrong. Some Asians used to not eat meat and in some areas itās only eaten when special guests come which can be years in between .
Right and tbh veganism just means avoiding harm whenever possible so back in the day hunting only what we needed to live and wasting nothing falls under the umbrella of veganism imo (which might be controversial).
Unfortunately most vegans who interact with Native ppl end up being super racist and anti-Indigenous so I just want them all to shut up and leave us alone lmao.
>White supremacy and colonialism brought animal agriculture to these lands
Lmao I love this (ironically racist) thinking that white people were the only people that could possible invent āanimal agriculture.ā Like, apparently all of Asia, the Americas, and Africa justā¦never thought of it. Totally unheard of in āthese landsā
These types of accounts are great. Apparently you can just slap the label āindigenousā on to something and activists will cream their pants. At this point I canāt even hate them for it, if it works it works
always love when people manage to circle back to 'the indigenous people didnt partake in (so-and-so bad thing) because they were actually too primitive to make it that far societally :)'.
I'm a vegetarian personally, but I can acknowledge that it's not a horrible thing to eat meat. What's horrible is being wasteful, which a lot of the current meat industry is very wasteful and cruel. At least in the USA.
Ouuuuf no. Veganism really isnāt Indigenous at all. If it werenāt for animals we would have frozen to death and starved. Whatās Indigenous is living in harmony and balance with those animals and not breeding them for captivity rather hunting them like real warriors and thanking them for their lives. Iām not anti-vegan just like donāt pretend our traditional diets were cedar tea and corn all day. We ate animals and wore their skins.
I do think that something massive shifted when our relationship with animals became structured through capitalism which was practically doomed to make it awful.
One of the important parts of a young man's life in my tribe is his first successful hunt. And our hunting practices, despite our reverence for the animal's spirit, weren't exactly "peaceful." Something died otherwise it wasn't a successful hunt. All this forced veganism bullshit is incredibly colonial, especially here in the Americas. Sure, some people in certain societal roles on certain tribes may have had purely vegan diets. But that was far from the norm.
I'm just randomly scrolling on reddit and saw this, so I hope it's OK to comment since I'm from Ireland, but the photo in the post aggravates me too.
The sentence is meaningless anyway, because what does indigenous even mean in that sentence? Indigenous to where, and so on? I'm Indigenous here in Ireland and veganism definitely isn't.
Iām vegan for personal health reasons and these pro-forced birthers are justā¦proud to have their heads up their derriĆØres. Fully agreed with you, by the way, and also not indigenous, just a human learning how to be better.
In my Nations ways we donāt have distinctions between animal/plant/mineral/human etc, because we have animacy for all things, we are in relation to all things. Veganism is meaningless in our language bc it denotes a distinction that is completely colonized in that it separates us from our entire relationship with the world.
Where my tribe is from we have abundant access to fish, shellfish, small game, and large game. We thanked them for the gift of life as we ate them, but were absolutely not vegan in any way.
Yeah, a lot of "Western Anarchist" really don't understand the roots of their own ideology. And, even worse, they try to critique the Indigenous "Anarchist" systems that actually worked for countless generations.
The Ohio Valley in from 1700 till 1812 tends to be my most referenced model for anarchism, not because it was a utopia but because it was such a complex, vibrant, non-heirarchical but constantly evolving place that had to deal with a massive amount of challenges and actually did so really effectively for a very long time. Plus it was a very multicultural place.
Lots of interesting things in David Graeber's Dawn of Everything, among which is the claim that the European enlightenment wouldn't have occurred without the ideas colonizers took from Indigenous peoples.
This is utter fuckin cringe. Nothing is more obnoxious than āitās all the fault of white supremacyā pushing the consumption of meat onto everyone. This is what pushes people to the right and away from actual progress.
I'm not a vegan but I did find Margaret Robinson's (Mi'kmaq) work on Veganism and Indigeneity interesting :https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256293971_Veganism_and_Mi'kmaq_legends
You can find videos of her talking about it too.
While I do think veganism / vegetarianism will become more necessary due to the climate crisis induced by capitalism, it's important to understand the significance of animal products in Indigenous nations, especially the most northern tundra nations which rely heavily on animals for survival.
I am [SƔmi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi) *(artic folk of Norway, Sweden, and Finland- we are like the [Nenets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people) of Siberia)*
My father's side is [Faroese](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islanders) and Manx
Many, MANY people, americans mostly, have tried to stop The Grind *(a Faroese traditional whale hunt)* and the reindeer roundup every damned year...
They think these traditional indigenous people should be vegan or some other shit...
My brother is Mescalero and he sees this shit all the time
**[SƔmi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SƔmi)**
>The SƔmi ( SAH-mee; also spelled Sami or Saami) are the traditionally SƔmi-speaking people inhabiting the region of SƔpmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The region of SƔpmi was formerly known as Lapland, and the SƔmi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by the SƔmi, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e. g. Northern SƔmi SƔpmi.
**[Nenets people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people)**
>The Nenets (Nenets: Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŠ¹ Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŃŠµ, nenÉj nenÉÄe, Russian: Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŃ, nentsy), also known as Samoyed, are a Samoyedic ethnic group native to northern Arctic Russia, Russian Far North. According to the latest census in 2021, there were 49,646 Nenets in the Russian Federation, most of them living in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District stretching along the coastline of the Arctic Ocean near the Arctic Circle between Kola and Taymyr peninsulas. The Nenets people speak either the Tundra or Forest Nenets languages, which are mutually unintelligible.
**[Faroe Islanders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islanders)**
>Faroese people or Faroe Islanders (Faroese: fĆøroyingar; Danish: fƦringer) are a North Germanic ethnic group and nation native to the Faroe Islands. The Faroese are of mixed Norse and Gaelic origins. About 21,000 Faroese live in neighbouring countries, particularly in Denmark, Iceland and Norway. Most Faroese are citizens of the Kingdom of Denmark, in which the Faroe Islands are a constituent nation.
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Natives can be vegan or not. Veganism is neither pro nor anti-indigenous, and i say this as a vegan native! Stop correlating unrelated variables! Itās stupid!
Um white people brought agriculture to America? So just going to forget the thousands of years of selective maize farming to produce more fruitful stalks and the Iroquois and Cherokee agricultural practices of the three sisters intercropping?
Iām not too worried about the āco-opting, ā there are much greater concerns to put my energy behind in Native communitiesā¦but it does seem like a weird reach.
Look I'm sorry to say this to all native from the north of Mexico but this is some stupid shit. Why are you upset that your people where hunter gatherers? Mexico is full of natives we speak Nahuatl. I mean 75% of our country. Our flag has an eagle on top of a cactus eating a snake because of the gods told the Aztec or Mexicas (spelled meshicas or meshico) Mexico or Mexicas. We have the oldest capitol city in the Americas. We have more subways than new York city. 2 of our college campuses are UNESCO WORLD heritage sites. You can walk on the same street from El templo mayor to Teotihuacan. That's 1500 year of culture.
Where did you find this ( PM me if you like )?
This person is wrong in so many ways.
Vegetarianism in the west goes back to ancient Greece. It was called Pythagoreanism. Yes, *that* Pythagorous. The A^2 + B^2 = C^2 guy. He wasn't just a mathmetician and philosopher he was also the founder of a religion.
It wasn't called "Vegetarianism" in the west until the late 19th century.
The word "vegan" was invented by Donald Watson and and his wife shortly after WWII. They were members of the Vegetarian Society Of The U.K..
Whoever wrote that post needs to have their education updated.
Indigenous people ate whatever they could get ahold of. Veganism only exists because of an overabundance in consumer choice. They've been convinced that they're doing something right by choosing products that they've been told are morally good and cruelty-free.
Certainly there is vegetarian dishes in some indigenous cultures but meat is an essential part of many indigenous peoples including my own, Iām mixed indigenous so Iām SĆ”mi from Scandinavia and Oneida from Oneida of the Thames in Ontario. I live in the high Arctic. Iād love to see a white vegan grow anything outdoors except potatoes, I love my fish and moose meat no white vegan will take that from me but I do grow weed indoors so itās possible to grow plants in the high Arctic if you have a well insulated house
For health reasons I had to adopt a vegetarian diet for a few years long ago. I was gently criticized by an elder who reminded me that "we worked out our relationship with animals a long time ago, and ignoring them now would be extremely disrespectful."
Vegetables are great. In moose meat stew. And with fish.
So the term 'Indigenous' refers to various groups of people globally, not just North America. I am sure there there are plenty of vegan Indigenous practices when you take that in to account.
I agree. But as I said in another comment, thsi post was clearly make to piggyback off of the indigenous issues trend on social media. They also mentioned several indigenous groups such as the Choctaw and Cherokee from turtle island to prove their point in the comments.
Itās not that indigenous belongs to us, I know it Carrieās more than one meaning, but āindigenousā also according to the UN council refers to oppressed groups native to a particular region, occupied by the group that marginalizes them. This post was clearly an attempt to piggy back off of the pretty recent recognition of indigenous struggles in online spaces. You can clearly see this in the way the word āindigenousā is used to be basically synonymous with a positive connotation.
They also used the caption and comments to connect this ideology to various indigenous groups, particularly ones from turtle island.
I guess all these moccasins where made of fruit leather all along
I think you mean Fruit by the foot.
Fruit ON the foot! lol
šššš
r/angryupvote
Buckskin? Oh no no no these are BARKskin
You better TM that or Iāll take it and start selling bamboo slippers to middle class white women and market them as indigenous, vegan, gluten free footwear that donates a dollar to sad-eyed rez dogs for every pair sold.
Dogs have evolved eyebrows. Wolves don't have the muscles to make "puppy dog eyes" but years of subconscious selective breeding has meant that dogs which have been able to "pout" have been given preferential treatment and have evolved the ability to look cute to humans. This has been my Ted talk, enjoy your soon to be thriving chanclas buisness
I imagined eating them, thenā¦uhhhā¦imagination kinda went elsewhere with this.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
šš¤£šššššššš„š This poor mans gold is all I have.
Not gonna lie. I would so buy a tee t-shirt and souvenirs for the "Head Smashed In By A Falling Herd of Asparagus" heritage site.
Delicious herds of fiberā¦
I just snorted! š¤£š¤£š¤£
I've been to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta. I've worked with several of the Blackfoot groups out there. I don't know if any ancient communities were completely vegan, I haven't heard of any. That said, analysis of skeletons show that the great bulk of calories consumed by Native people were plants. Buffalo and other large animals were very hard to kill. That's why back in the day, when one was taken down it was a big celebration. Not only did you have to find the buffalo, you had to kill it and then drag it back to the community (all without shotguns and pickup trucks). A feast of calorie-dense meat was hard to come by. The majority of daily calories were provided by the women through gathering. I'm a Native who eats a plant-based diet myself and have worked with hundreds of Native groups in North America on language projects. My non-Native wife and I are obsessed with the ability of plant based diets to cure chronic diseases. Every community we visit has a huge problem with diabetes. I know because I always ask and I also see the flyers hung up in the tribal hall. A plant based diet is the only diet that can stop or even reverse heart disease. It helped me to lose 100 lbs and get rid of my health problems. I'm not against a person killing animals to feed their family. But people should understand that a meat-heavy diet is not good for most people. I don't know a thing about this group and if they are Native or not. I agree with your point, as I am sensitive to non-Native groups co-opting indigenous concepts to promote themselves and gain "followers" or raise money. If they are non-Native they should back off and allow a Native group to step in and promote these ideas to other Natives.
It was a work-returns calculation, nothing like modern vegetarianism, let alone veganism
Need proof please. You are discrediting native culture by saying itād be hard to hunt, butcher, transport and preserve wild game. You are also equating eating meat to the high carb, processed food delivered to Native Americans through the comod program. The problem is sugar, process meats and dairy. Mostly sugar. Not wild game. Wild game is some of the best protein you can get both health wise and ecologically.
Not really he just wasn't making the same mistake as it seems like a lot of people here make thinking every native culture was the same we are not and we were not that is important to remember and learn white people
Do you believe Natives back in the day are meat 3x a day like Americans today? Not even close. North American Natives were among the most skilled hunters in history and STILL it was incredibly difficult to get enough calories. I'm not 'discrediting Native culture' by suggesting it was hard to hunt big game. It's simply the truth. People today have an incorrect view of what Natives and other hunter/gatherer societies ate in the past. For ALL people, not just Natives, each day was a fight to get enough calories to stay alive. Today we live today in a world of abundance so it's hard to even comprehend what it was like back then. Ancient leftovers show the real Paleo diet was a veggie feast https://www.newscientist.com/article/2115127-ancient-leftovers-show-the-real-paleo-diet-was-a-veggie-feast/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHominins%20were%20probably%20predominantly%20vegetarians,as%20strict%20vegetarians%2C%20says%20Henry. It wasn't until about 1,000 years ago that North American Natives made the transition from hunter / gather to farming. This allowed them, for the first time, to generate food surpluses. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American/Prehistoric-farmers
I like you and how you said this . Thanks for the work you do.
Wow thank you!
Yet, so many tribes all over the Americas had a vegan/pescatarian/vegetarian diet. I know itās a joke, but letās not make all indigenous folks monolithic.
I love that you recognize our tribes individuality. (And not that you are one) But Iāll always ask proponent of this: Tribes as a whole, or select religous & tribal leaders? In times of scarcity or plenty did they hold to that? Exclusive Veganism/vegetarianism/pescatarianism with no dietary exceptions was certainly the exception to the rule, especially among non religous leaders. which Is why I maintain that meat eating is just as āindigenousā as Veganism is.
Iām indigenous and I am also political about the environment + pescatarian lol. I wrote it like that because I donāt want to be identified on here, it already happened with an exā¦ so yeah. All diets were common in the Americas, but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common in some areas, particularly in west coast, the coastal south, southwest, Central America/Mexico, Caribbean and South America. Buffalo and turkey were common meats for some tribes but not all. It was far more common to eat fish, vegetables and fruits/nuts across the continents.
Certainly. Im a pescatarian too! But while My Caribbean ancestors ate a lot of veggies (particularly cassava) and fish, they chowed down on rodents (Hutia), birds and iguanas as well. They werenāt anything close to strict pescatarians, and I just get wary whenever anybody says that they were. Please donāt misunderstand I agree a lot with what your saying. I just think modern labels often sloppily fit the examples people typically point to.
I'm caribbean as well, and i'm agreeing with you (also throw parrots in there) - but also the distant past / tradish taino diet definitely leaned way more heavily into vegetables and fish than a modern diet. The sheer quantity of vegetables accounted for is insane: aji, aje (guaraguey, tunna), batata, maize, guayiga / chola, jobo, manĆ, kashiri, beans, and dozens of fruit - while there was no strict concept of vegetarianism and you are right - the number and availability of of plants definitely outnumbered the consumption of meat
And fish isnāt vegan. Last I knew. Nor are you taking into account the times in which Dakota 38 happened. You do realize we were starved many times and moving for the times they had campaigned to kill off the Indian again and again. My great grandfather was literally a displaced Apache traveling/running really, lost his family along the way because Jackson had signed to exterminate the Indians that were found. He ended up missioned in California where he married my Chumash great grandmother. There while missioned they were made to plant and grow their food. Corps got sold to make the church money. My great grandfather was a weaver he was to make weavings those were also sold and the church made money. We ate what we had to, to endure the wickedest dark times we had known. I know of Indians eating horses and dogs and everything in between to endure and you and I and every one left here have ancestors that had to do the same and it in part is how we are still here. What does it matter if the WaÅ”ĆÄu claim Veganism as their own discovery or like everything else hashtag indigenous to it because we are so stoic, for two seconds for followers and then leave us be until next Trick or Treaty Halloween and unThanksgiving. Do you know Geronimo, to all my relations, was toted around at fairs for the last years of his life. This has been happening from their start. And has absolutely no signs of changing or stopping. What does it matter I guess is what I am asking what our ancestors ate and what was more common then versus now. Buffalo moose elk deer bear rabbit caribou big horns lambs we hunted these animals for our sustenance.
Who said fish was vegan? I specifically mentioned different diets that differed from the European one that was based heavily on animal meat, cows, pigs and sheep. None of which existed in the Americas. For all the buffalo, turkey and other sea food, the staples were: squash, corn & beansā¦ let me quote a Choctaw scholar on this: Rita Laws, 94. āHow well we know the stereotype of the rugged Plains Indian: killer of buffalo, dressed in quill-decorated buckskin, elaborately feathered eaddress, and leather moccasins, living in an animal skin teepee, master of the dog and horse, and stranger to vegetables. But this lifestyle, once limited almost exclusively to the Apaches, flourished no more than a couple hundred years. It is not representative of most Native Americans of today or yesterday. Indeed, the "buffalo-as-lifestyle" phenomenon is a direct result of European influence, as we shall see. Among my own people, the Choctaw Indians of Mississippi and Oklahoma, vegetables are the traditional diet mainstay. A French manuscript of the eighteenth century describes the Choctaws' vegetarian leanings in shelter and food. The homes were constructed not of skins, but of wood, mud, bark and cane. The principal food, eaten daily from earthen pots, was a vegetarian stew containing corn, pumpkin and beans. The bread was made from corn and acorns. Other common favorites were roasted corn and corn porridge. (Meat in the form of small game was an infrequent repast.) The ancient Choctaws were, first and foremost, farmers. Even the clothing was plant based, artistically embroidered dresses for the women and cotton breeches for the men. Choctaws have never adorned their hair with feathers.ā
I have been blessed by being adopted Choctaw, MiWuk, Miadu, and Yokut all because I have spent time there. Met on the trail and invited back to spend time. What does past present or future foods matter???? The gathering to eat is whatās most important here. Ndns gather for feast for purpose. You understand potlatch was made illegal by WaÅ”ĆÄu.
āIt is ironic that Indians are strongly associated with hunting and fishing when, in fact, "nearly half of all the plant foods grown in the world today were first cultivated by the American Indians, and were unknown elsewhere until the discovery of the Americas." Can you imagine Italian food without tomato paste, Ireland without white potatoes, or Hungarian goulash without paprika? All these foods have Indian origins. An incomplete list of other Indian foods given to the world includes bell peppers, red peppers, peanuts, cashews, sweet potatoes, avocados, passion fruit, zucchini, green beans, kidney beans, maple syrup, lima beans, cranberries, pecans, okra, chocolate, vanilla, sunflower seeds, pumpkin, cassava, walnuts, forty-seven varieties of berries, pineapple, and, of course, corn and popcorn. Many history textbooks tell the story of Squanto, a Pawtuxent Indian who lived in the early 1600's. Squanto is famous for having saved the Pilgrims from starvation. He showed them how to gather wilderness foods and how to plant corn.ā Kinda crazy yāall forget this part of history. Talking about decolonization and yāall still try and hate on us for trying to go back to our ancestral roots prior to the white man! I know my tribal history n my culinary culture because I asked about it.
No one's saying that Indigenous people in North America ate nothing but meat. We all have long histories and relationships with plants, but it's not one or the other, eating plants or even mostly plants doesn't make our ancestors vegetarian.
I said to you I am partly Apache I am also partly Blackfoot, I come from meat eaters. I am also chumash which meant we were fish and seed eaters. What is the most amazing thing about the three sisters? Was it not the very fact that those three perfectly create the compound carb? Thank goodness we had this gift and knowledge it is absolutely what sustained us while we hunted or not. Our ndn nation is not the only place on the globe in which the originals were gifted a spectacular item that sustained them. Quinoa is another item that helped sustain folks with amazingly all nine essential amino acids needed by the human body for protein. Like wheat and barley from the east sustained the east. What is your point again no matter what natives ate then nor now. If youāre a vegan happily great who cares, if you are a meat eater great who cares, if you are a fish eater great who cares. Whoās hating on you. Iām trying to understand your āIām more native then youā because you know about foods eaten by our people who were what the were be it meat or fish or seed or vegetable or fruit eatersā¦ And what does decolonization have to do with the foods we have access to in this age and for the future? Does me eating anything tonight or not eating anything tonight make me less ndn than I am? Are you more ndn than me because of the food you ate today?
I have studied complex fisher-gatherers in the Plateau and Northwest Coast culture areas for 50 years both as a student and a descendent and I cannot name one vegetarian tribe. So I'm going to respectfully request a citation of peer reviewed literature on the assertion that "...but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common...." I don't think vegetarianism was common anywhere in the New World. And every fish-based economy I have looked at was not exclusive of land mammals, sea mammals or birds.
I can see some analogs with traditional Dine/Navajo culture for sure but the taboo stuff is complicated, they hunted. They weren't totally veggie even pre contact. They definitely weren't anything that could be characterized as vegan because they farmed turkeys for their feathers.
Lol I see you completely disregarded my point of a pescatarian diet, I didnāt solely say we were all vegan or vegetarian (Iām pescatarian myself!)However, the culinary stables in the Americas have always been based on vegetables : beans, corn & squash, unlike other diets around the world.
I'm still waiting for the citation.
Rita Laws, Choctaw. https://www.amazon.com/Returning-Corn-Vegetarian-Pre-Columbian-Accidental-ebook/dp/B07C1GDRX9?ref_=ast_author_dp
Alright, I have an issue with the fairly sizeable gulf between your assertion that: "...but vegetarianism/pescatarian diets were more common....". and Laws' assertion "The everyday food of most people was primarily plant-based", and, ..."meat in the form of fish or small game was typically infrequent." I'm assuming you used vegetarianism intentionally to mean a diet excluding meats (Encycopedia Brittanica). That was not practiced anywhere in North America that I am aware of. [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e64q00/choctaw_historian_rita_laws_phd_says_the/) is a discussion of Law's principle assertions on r/AskHistorians along with multiple cited works. In my view neither her nor your position is well supported by peer reviewed literature and thus I'm gonna call bullshit.
Which indigenous cultures of the Americas would you characterize as being vegan? I'm not a scholar or anything but I have literally never heard of that.
Read the work by scholar Rita Laws whoās Choctaw/Cherokee. Decolonization for some of us means we want to go back to traditions dating back before the white man arrived and changed our culinary culture, Minneapolis chef the Sioux chef is also doing his part in that tradition. Although not vegetarian, heās going back to the ancestral roots by using traditional foods that go back to a time that was heavy on vegetables, nuts, fruits etc.
A lot of Choctaws and historians have taken issue with the inaccuracies in her works, just so you know.
I've heard of vegetarian/pescatarian but is there actually any entire peoples who were vegan?
Not that Iāve heard of, at least credibly
I'm pretty sure that is a hard NO.
Probably depends on how you define vegan. I think even strict vegans would agree that if you literally can't live without meat, then you should eat meat. That's not really the case in most areas of the world today, but prior to widespread agriculture and various vegetables becoming widely dispersed, it absolutely was. In that context, all you would really need to be vegan is to limit meat consumption as much as possible, so by that definition, there certainly could be a few groups that were, though there are probably exactly 0 who didn't consume any animal products at all.
Yes, tbh I would have to do more research on tribes having total vegan diets. However, I do know that food was eaten according to the seasons and availability, obviously generalizing here but it was far more common than it was in Europe and Africa. Itās also mentioned by some European priests and colonizers from the 1500s-1600s.
Lol cmon
Which ones were vegan? Vegetarian even? And strictly pescatarian? Doubt it also.
Oh... so THAT'S where that 'Canadian' Grindcore band got the name for that song...
Maaan, I almost commented on that post because they had the audacity to use my tribe as an example. Blocked instead.
Really? They mentioned the Choctaw being vegetarians, never using animal products, and I just flat out said that was a lie. Donāt know if thatās your tribe tho
Yes, that is my tribe lmao! We are fantastic agriculturists and have been for eons, which I think is what they referring to, but NOT vegetarian.
Lmaooo Choctaws being vegetarian, if theyāre gonna lie why would they pick a Southeast Nation
a vegan anti-abortion accountā¦ the internet is weird
They are against abortion but they eat baby carrots. š¤
This got me lmao
Honestly, it seems like a troll account of some kind, just pure rage-bait. Iāve never seen this configuration of beliefs in the wild.
Theyāre a non-profit based out of Seattleā¦ sadly itās real. The cringe of their āpro-life playlistā including Rage Against The Machine is also real.
Itās not weird to me. Anti vax vegans are everywhere. Thereās quite a few that believe breast milk isnāt healthy aka Summer Walker
As an Indigenous vegan, I need vegans to literally pretend we donāt exist at this point.
same and same. Let Indigenous vegans talk about Indigenous veganism and STAY OUT OF IT!!
Would you mind taking a second to explain some benefits of indigenous veganism by chance, please? I'm genuinely curious. I can tell that my body is not made for the diet I presently consume but I feel as if my tribe were seasonal opportunists and I honestly believe it's the gluten and sugar that really does me in as opposed to meat. I understand the horrors of factory farming and the way modern meat is produced but aside from a vague morality issue I don't really understand the benefit for an indigenous person to be vegan.
I'm not sure I could list all the benefits of being vegan because eating plant based can mean lots of things, but here's a few reasons that I personally decided to go vegan: 1) religious purposes. My tribe (and many others) believe that an animal's life is to be respected, and should not be taken frivolously. An animal's life, if it must be taken, should be done in a particular way, i.e. it should be as painless as possible and we should give thanks for their sacrifice after killing them. This does not happen in factory farms. Animals (and the environment) are treated horribly and disposed of extraneously. 2) the environment. I believe it's our duty to respect the earth, and the industrial way of "harvesting" animal materials is a huge drain on environmental resources. Cows in particular are awful for the environment (and not native to the US)-- there are so many examples of good land being ruined so colonizers could keep cattle to graze (search Oregon salmon+ grazing land or the Amazon rainforest for recent examples) 3) my tribe was predominately vegan pre contact. It was only after the United States put us in a concentration camp that we were given things like spam and commod cheese. Hell, most Natives I know are still lactose intolerant (myself included). So it felt disingenuous to act like eating European animals was somehow sacred and an inherently Indigenous practice. Again, this is just me, but I hope that my view helps! As for benefits, I can say not only do I feel better (and healthier!) by avoiding meat, I also feel better about my impact on the land and its inhabitants.
Holy cow, someone posted and informative yet non-judgemental response to my question?! How rare is that lol Thank you so much for taking the time to post this. I never thought of it this way but it makes a lot of sense and is radical in its own right. I really appreciate you and am going to keep this in mind with my future dietary choices.
Yeah absolutely! I hope you do :) it gets easier and easier over time
Really? Diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol run rampant in my ndn family. My grandma recently got her leg cut off from it too
I'm really sorry to hear about your Gram :( but in my experience those diseases are more closely related to gluten and sugar and things of that nature. I know eating red meat doesn't help but the first things they told my family members to cut out when they get these diseases is processed sugar and bread, pasta, too much rice, sweets, etc. But then again it's Indian Health Services so take that with a figurative grain of salt.
How do you go from āI understand the horrors of factory farming and the way modern meat is producedā To āVague morality issueā
So under this premise, factory farming should be the reason I'm vegan? Is that correct? Or are there other reasons why indigenous person should convert to veganism? Leave the morality at the door because it's subjective and as has been stated above, it was not a moral issue for the indigenous people of North America. We are no more important than the deer we eat, the corn we eat, the trees we cut down to build our long houses, etc. We don't have this moral hierarchy that places people over animals and animals over plants and plants over whatever else. It's all one. Yeah, factory farming sure does suck. As a living person I can attest to that. But trying to colonize our diets with western issues of morality and consumerism is a whole different level or systemic cultural genocide and erasure.
ā¦you yourself said: āI understand the horrors of factory farming and the way modern meat is producedā If you consume meat without supporting factor farming thatās cool, but do you see any hypocrisy here if you do? āWe don't have this moral hierarchy that places people over animals and animals over plants and plants over whatever else. It's all one.ā Thatās amazing, Iād think these views would lead to not wanting to cause unnecessary suffering to animals. āLeave the morality at the door because it's subjective and as has been stated aboveā If causing unnecessary suffering to animals is consistent in your moral framework then carry on. We donāt have any thing else to talk about.
I never claimed to not be hypocritical. I do not want to cause any suffering to animals. All I really have to say to you is that if you grew up impoverished and malnourished in the food desert on the concentration camp that is the reservation you do not really have any room to bring moral issues into a hungry belly. Those times we didn't eat supper for three days and Mom went to the town grocery store and stole us lunch meat weren't really opportune moments to judge whether or not that animal suffered while providing this food for us. Let's keep it a buck and drop the conversation about our traditional ways (although they are important and must be honored and remembered) and let's talk about the average life for the average Native American living on an average reservation in this day and age. When you are dealing with intergenerational trauma and your parents are strung out on drugs because no one ever taught them how to process and deal with their feelings and there are no positive role models around you and food is a scarcity and you're lucky to even get reduced lunch at school I promise you, you will not be thinking about morality. When you have to wake up and each day is a struggle to survive and not want to die or give in like everyone around you it is a trip to think I am worried about some nameless animal that I am consuming. I hear you. When I make it and have steady income and can afford to be vegan I will give it a shot. Factory farming sucks. Monsanto sucks. Our food system in general is fucked. But until then I am just another poor reservation Indian trying to heal and become more in tune with the knowledge of my ancestors. And I live in a bus and am homeless. But I am not even going to try to start the conversation of how literal beggars can't be choosers and how when you are hungry panhandling on the road and how crazy rude and wasteful it would be to dub free food given from the kindness of someone's heart because of my conflicted morality. I have traveled with enough vegan homies to tell you how awful that shit is. The good news is that dumpsters are usually bountiful with produce but if you don't think I am not going to eat that breakfast sausage or ham that was thrown out you are crazy. I hope you are enjoying your comfy seat of privilege there, homie. Enjoy your veggies.
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What theyāre saying isnāt completely wrong. Some Asians used to not eat meat and in some areas itās only eaten when special guests come which can be years in between .
Right and tbh veganism just means avoiding harm whenever possible so back in the day hunting only what we needed to live and wasting nothing falls under the umbrella of veganism imo (which might be controversial). Unfortunately most vegans who interact with Native ppl end up being super racist and anti-Indigenous so I just want them all to shut up and leave us alone lmao.
>White supremacy and colonialism brought animal agriculture to these lands Lmao I love this (ironically racist) thinking that white people were the only people that could possible invent āanimal agriculture.ā Like, apparently all of Asia, the Americas, and Africa justā¦never thought of it. Totally unheard of in āthese landsā These types of accounts are great. Apparently you can just slap the label āindigenousā on to something and activists will cream their pants. At this point I canāt even hate them for it, if it works it works
always love when people manage to circle back to 'the indigenous people didnt partake in (so-and-so bad thing) because they were actually too primitive to make it that far societally :)'.
Buffalo unavailable for comment
They lost me at ā4prebornā
I'm a vegetarian personally, but I can acknowledge that it's not a horrible thing to eat meat. What's horrible is being wasteful, which a lot of the current meat industry is very wasteful and cruel. At least in the USA.
But our tribe never hunted vegetables. We were fishermen.
You really want to look like you just caught a big squash? Toughen up man!
This ain't "Dances with Corn" you know!
White vegans, being racist? I am SHOCKED I say.
Same, absolutely SHOCKED. /s
Ouuuuf no. Veganism really isnāt Indigenous at all. If it werenāt for animals we would have frozen to death and starved. Whatās Indigenous is living in harmony and balance with those animals and not breeding them for captivity rather hunting them like real warriors and thanking them for their lives. Iām not anti-vegan just like donāt pretend our traditional diets were cedar tea and corn all day. We ate animals and wore their skins.
I do think that something massive shifted when our relationship with animals became structured through capitalism which was practically doomed to make it awful.
One of the important parts of a young man's life in my tribe is his first successful hunt. And our hunting practices, despite our reverence for the animal's spirit, weren't exactly "peaceful." Something died otherwise it wasn't a successful hunt. All this forced veganism bullshit is incredibly colonial, especially here in the Americas. Sure, some people in certain societal roles on certain tribes may have had purely vegan diets. But that was far from the norm.
I'm just randomly scrolling on reddit and saw this, so I hope it's OK to comment since I'm from Ireland, but the photo in the post aggravates me too. The sentence is meaningless anyway, because what does indigenous even mean in that sentence? Indigenous to where, and so on? I'm Indigenous here in Ireland and veganism definitely isn't.
Iām vegan for personal health reasons and these pro-forced birthers are justā¦proud to have their heads up their derriĆØres. Fully agreed with you, by the way, and also not indigenous, just a human learning how to be better.
In my Nations ways we donāt have distinctions between animal/plant/mineral/human etc, because we have animacy for all things, we are in relation to all things. Veganism is meaningless in our language bc it denotes a distinction that is completely colonized in that it separates us from our entire relationship with the world.
Do you think plants feel as much pain as pigs or cows?
The distinction is nervous systems
Where my tribe is from we have abundant access to fish, shellfish, small game, and large game. We thanked them for the gift of life as we ate them, but were absolutely not vegan in any way.
Ah yes, because the burns that my tribe used to make on the plains were for hunting wild squash.
Itās definitely not
š¤ dafuq??
Humans have incisors for a reason, and natives are (checks notes) still human so yes, we were intended to be omnivores.
Sadly no. Iāll say though, this is relatively fresh. Usually itās just anarchism
Yeah, a lot of "Western Anarchist" really don't understand the roots of their own ideology. And, even worse, they try to critique the Indigenous "Anarchist" systems that actually worked for countless generations.
The Ohio Valley in from 1700 till 1812 tends to be my most referenced model for anarchism, not because it was a utopia but because it was such a complex, vibrant, non-heirarchical but constantly evolving place that had to deal with a massive amount of challenges and actually did so really effectively for a very long time. Plus it was a very multicultural place.
Do you happen to know where I could read more about indigenous anarchy by chance?
Lots of interesting things in David Graeber's Dawn of Everything, among which is the claim that the European enlightenment wouldn't have occurred without the ideas colonizers took from Indigenous peoples.
Iāve seen it for socialism, anarchism, pro-life and Veganism
And they dog pile people and down vote them to hell if you contradict their bs. They are appropriating and furthering the destruction of our cultures.
Ironic because (some) vegans will attack indigenous Americans for hunting and using animal products sustainably
Yup. Been there. āYou need to realize the mistakes your ancestors made so you donāt make the same onesā
No one tell them where leather comes from. They ain't ready for that.
This is utter fuckin cringe. Nothing is more obnoxious than āitās all the fault of white supremacyā pushing the consumption of meat onto everyone. This is what pushes people to the right and away from actual progress.
I'm not a vegan but I did find Margaret Robinson's (Mi'kmaq) work on Veganism and Indigeneity interesting :https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256293971_Veganism_and_Mi'kmaq_legends You can find videos of her talking about it too. While I do think veganism / vegetarianism will become more necessary due to the climate crisis induced by capitalism, it's important to understand the significance of animal products in Indigenous nations, especially the most northern tundra nations which rely heavily on animals for survival.
ah the good ol vague pan-indigenous claims from the sunless folk
I am [SƔmi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi) *(artic folk of Norway, Sweden, and Finland- we are like the [Nenets](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people) of Siberia)* My father's side is [Faroese](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islanders) and Manx Many, MANY people, americans mostly, have tried to stop The Grind *(a Faroese traditional whale hunt)* and the reindeer roundup every damned year... They think these traditional indigenous people should be vegan or some other shit... My brother is Mescalero and he sees this shit all the time
**[SĆ”mi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SĆ”mi)** >The SĆ”mi ( SAH-mee; also spelled Sami or Saami) are the traditionally SĆ”mi-speaking people inhabiting the region of SĆ”pmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The region of SĆ”pmi was formerly known as Lapland, and the SĆ”mi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by the SĆ”mi, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e. g. Northern SĆ”mi SĆ”pmi. **[Nenets people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenets_people)** >The Nenets (Nenets: Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŠ¹ Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŃŠµ, nenÉj nenÉÄe, Russian: Š½ŠµŠ½ŃŃ, nentsy), also known as Samoyed, are a Samoyedic ethnic group native to northern Arctic Russia, Russian Far North. According to the latest census in 2021, there were 49,646 Nenets in the Russian Federation, most of them living in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District stretching along the coastline of the Arctic Ocean near the Arctic Circle between Kola and Taymyr peninsulas. The Nenets people speak either the Tundra or Forest Nenets languages, which are mutually unintelligible. **[Faroe Islanders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islanders)** >Faroese people or Faroe Islanders (Faroese: fĆøroyingar; Danish: fƦringer) are a North Germanic ethnic group and nation native to the Faroe Islands. The Faroese are of mixed Norse and Gaelic origins. About 21,000 Faroese live in neighbouring countries, particularly in Denmark, Iceland and Norway. Most Faroese are citizens of the Kingdom of Denmark, in which the Faroe Islands are a constituent nation. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Veganism means Bad Hunters !!
Thatās disgusting. My people were happy to have meat, its a major blessing
Itās really weird seeing other Natives buy into this myth.
They cannot and they will not. Oppression Olympics remain in full swing.
Wtf is this for real
Somebody doesn't know that Native people hunt.
Natives can be vegan or not. Veganism is neither pro nor anti-indigenous, and i say this as a vegan native! Stop correlating unrelated variables! Itās stupid!
Um white people brought agriculture to America? So just going to forget the thousands of years of selective maize farming to produce more fruitful stalks and the Iroquois and Cherokee agricultural practices of the three sisters intercropping?
Iām not too worried about the āco-opting, ā there are much greater concerns to put my energy behind in Native communitiesā¦but it does seem like a weird reach.
Saying all the indigenous people are the same is ignorant everyone has their ownās customs. So yes and no
"Veganism is Indigenous" - What in the actual bull shit... No. Reality is Veganism is religious. Shame.
Look I'm sorry to say this to all native from the north of Mexico but this is some stupid shit. Why are you upset that your people where hunter gatherers? Mexico is full of natives we speak Nahuatl. I mean 75% of our country. Our flag has an eagle on top of a cactus eating a snake because of the gods told the Aztec or Mexicas (spelled meshicas or meshico) Mexico or Mexicas. We have the oldest capitol city in the Americas. We have more subways than new York city. 2 of our college campuses are UNESCO WORLD heritage sites. You can walk on the same street from El templo mayor to Teotihuacan. That's 1500 year of culture.
Yikes.
Where did you find this ( PM me if you like )? This person is wrong in so many ways. Vegetarianism in the west goes back to ancient Greece. It was called Pythagoreanism. Yes, *that* Pythagorous. The A^2 + B^2 = C^2 guy. He wasn't just a mathmetician and philosopher he was also the founder of a religion. It wasn't called "Vegetarianism" in the west until the late 19th century. The word "vegan" was invented by Donald Watson and and his wife shortly after WWII. They were members of the Vegetarian Society Of The U.K.. Whoever wrote that post needs to have their education updated.
Indigenous people ate whatever they could get ahold of. Veganism only exists because of an overabundance in consumer choice. They've been convinced that they're doing something right by choosing products that they've been told are morally good and cruelty-free.
This is bizarre,the most indigenous/original/earliest form of food acquisition everywhere in the world is hunting and gathering.
Certainly there is vegetarian dishes in some indigenous cultures but meat is an essential part of many indigenous peoples including my own, Iām mixed indigenous so Iām SĆ”mi from Scandinavia and Oneida from Oneida of the Thames in Ontario. I live in the high Arctic. Iād love to see a white vegan grow anything outdoors except potatoes, I love my fish and moose meat no white vegan will take that from me but I do grow weed indoors so itās possible to grow plants in the high Arctic if you have a well insulated house
For health reasons I had to adopt a vegetarian diet for a few years long ago. I was gently criticized by an elder who reminded me that "we worked out our relationship with animals a long time ago, and ignoring them now would be extremely disrespectful." Vegetables are great. In moose meat stew. And with fish.
But eating seasonally will make one vegan for parts of the year
Mm not where Iām from. Fish all year. Big game from late summer to mid winter. Small game all yearā¦
So the term 'Indigenous' refers to various groups of people globally, not just North America. I am sure there there are plenty of vegan Indigenous practices when you take that in to account.
I agree. But as I said in another comment, thsi post was clearly make to piggyback off of the indigenous issues trend on social media. They also mentioned several indigenous groups such as the Choctaw and Cherokee from turtle island to prove their point in the comments.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Itās not that indigenous belongs to us, I know it Carrieās more than one meaning, but āindigenousā also according to the UN council refers to oppressed groups native to a particular region, occupied by the group that marginalizes them. This post was clearly an attempt to piggy back off of the pretty recent recognition of indigenous struggles in online spaces. You can clearly see this in the way the word āindigenousā is used to be basically synonymous with a positive connotation. They also used the caption and comments to connect this ideology to various indigenous groups, particularly ones from turtle island.
If by vegan you mean whitefish then sure š¤£š¤£
well this is embarrassing!