Provoking question: What does it mean to be a farmer – an occupation defined by the settler-colonialist state as one who engages in the production of food for purposes of profit. How might ancestral ideas of farming that Asian American farmers have carried intergenerationally from their home countries intersect with the cruelties of climate change wrought in part from settler colonialism as well as the potential healing of Indigenous and Native North American knowledge and practices?
Farms sit at an uneasy nexus of sustainability and degradation, hope and despair. Farmers are caught at the crossroads, being defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as engaging in the production of food with intent to profit. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the United States as a nation of farmers. It is these farmers who till soil on lands taken from numerous Indigenous peoples, as a result of U.S. settler colonialism.
Asian Americans, as immigrant laborers who have benefited from the conjoining of corporate capitalism with settler colonialism, are complicit with the violence farms represent – a fact that sits in me queasily as an Asian American woman who farms. My justifications that I am feeding others, healing land, and teaching people to find connections with land, food, and spirituality by helping them get to know where and how the food they eat comes into being does little to ease that discomfort.
However, through comes an opportunity to think critically about our position not only as immigrants and settlers but also as allies. When we consider farms as sources of most food, globally and locally, we might consider how farmers can be resisters to the institutional definitions imposed upon them. They might be the key – and often overlooked – players in the development of a more sustainable future.