This important work was funded by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. This tool can be used for native food-systems assessments and planning, and lays out new potential for comprehensive and sustainable land and food-systems management. The Index brings together key dimensions of sovereign indigenous food-systems, previously identified from native food scholars and practitioners’ definitions. The Food-System Transition Index is an aggregate measure from 20 complementary indicators to support sustainable and healthy food-systems on US native lands. It is a work in progress towards a world where data will fully reflect the nuances, richness, diversity and vision of native food-systems. We recognize the limitations of this Index inherent to the unreliability of public datasets and their bias towards cash crop agriculture and the local specificities of native food-systems that cannot be narrowed down to a nationwide Index. The FSTI IS NOT an end measure of sustainable food-systems or food sovereignty. Additionally, this measure can be used for advocacy purposes and for analysis to identify what aspect of native land history and policies most impact food-systems today (for instance the impact of fee/trust status). The aggregated measure as presented here can be used by tribes as a baseline measure to identify policy priorities and needs and assess and measure progress. Each indicator will be further developed into individual dashboards to be most useful for tribal planning (stay tuned for our special IRMPs planning toolkit). While they cannot reflect the complexity of native food-systems, FSTI indicators deliver information important to healthy and sovereign native food-systems such as sustainable food production, climate change and biodiversity, renewable energy, culture and health (See Indicators wheel below). While we fully acknowledge these limitations, the FSTI accomplishes to process and bring together data in a way that starts to challenge the status quo.
project a compartmentalized vision of land use which is very colonial in essence. Datasets such as the Cropland Data Layer, the Census, SSURGO, etc. Most of the datasets used here, which are the only ones available at the national scale, reflect a version of agriculture which is very commodity-based and cash crop-oriented. This data comes from already published and publicly available datasets aggregated at the reservation level to make it accessible and useful to native users and support grassroots projects.
It is an ongoing research effort that is meant to evolve and change from users feedbacks and needs. The FSTI IS an exploratory aggregated measure meant to support native land planning by providing baseline information about the health of native food-systems and their transition towards sustainable and sovereign food production and land management practices.
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