A professor of the Comparative History of Ideas, María Elena García uses questions about the animal to expand existing intersectional research on labor, the environment, and race, with specific attention to how violence manifests at the level of the body. Presently studying the cultural capital of the Peruvian guinea pig, an animal with a strong indigenous legacy, García does work that is as much about settler colonial politics and multispecies relations as it is about Peru’s contemporary high-end fusion cuisine. In her interview García shares her abrupt transition to veganism, her thoughts on the additional lenses motherhood offers to research, and the challenges of weaving ethical commitments with familial traditions. We interviewed García in Edmonton, Alberta, on June 21, 2016.
SAMANTHA KING: Could we start with biography—where you were born and raised; your formative political, intellectual, cultural experiences; and how you came into the work you do?
MARÍA ELENA GARCÍA: I was born in Lima, Peru, in 1971, and was there until 1976, when my family and I had to leave the country. We lived in Venezuela for about a year, then in Puerto Rico for another year, and finally we made our way to Mexico City, where we stayed for about six years. Mexico was really important for me. It was the longest I had ever lived in one place; I was there from when I was eight to fourteen— formative years. I loved it; it was home. In 1985 my father, who had been working as an engineer for different telecommunications companies, came home one day and said, “We are moving to the United States in two weeks.” So in two weeks we moved from Mexico—our home—to Virginia. I mention that particular move for a few reasons. One, going to the United States as a Peruvian girl was particularly intense. Today, there are quite large Peruvian, Bolivian, Salvadoran, and Latinx communities in general in Virginia, but not at that time. While living in Puerto Rico was technically living in the U.S., it felt more like being in Latin America. And in Mexico, we were Peruvian but also part of the Latin American community. But starting high school in Virginia and facing people asking me, “Did you go to school on a donkey? Have you ever seen a building before? Did you live in grass huts?”—those kinds of things had a huge impact on me. I tell my students that I became Peruvian in Virginia because it forced me to reflect critically on my positionality: “Who am I? What are these labels people are throwing at me? Why are they asking me to label myself?”
This move also represented a radical shift because in the past we would fly to Lima every summer. My grandmother and I were especially close. She passed away a couple of years ago, but she was probably the most important person in my life. Going back to see her, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins was really important. I am not sure I knew how important it was until we could no longer travel there. That year, 1985, was when violence in Lima escalated because of the war between the state and the Shining Path—the Maoist organization that declared war on the Peruvian government in 1980. So in 1985 we left Mexico, arrived in Virginia, and my parents announced that we would not be returning to Peru until the violence ended. It was a very disruptive moment, and I think it had a huge impact on who I am. I wanted to know more about this violence, about why we couldn’t go back to Peru and what was happening there. As I learned more, especially about the disproportionate impact of this violence on Indigenous people, I became obsessed with my birth country. In one phone conversation with my grandmother, I learned that my grandfather was a Quechua miner from Ayacucho, something I had never heard until then. All these things came together in a particular way for me and eventually led me to think about anthropology. Even going to graduate school was something I never anticipated. I was the first woman in my family to go to grad school, and that was thanks to a great friend who was an archaeology professor in college who pushed me to think about that. Because of the expected year conducting fieldwork, I also saw anthropology as a discipline that would allow me to go home. Naïvely, I thought I could go home and figure out a way to work to prevent this kind of violence from happening.
SK: And when you were in university, did that coincide with the critiques within anthropology about colonial legacies?
MEG: Yes, it did. Some of the courses I took perpetuated essentialist representations of “others” and racist stereotypes—these are exactly the kinds of courses I teach against now. But there were a few people who were beginning to raise questions and consider decolonial approaches to teaching and research. Because of my own background, the questions I was asking resonated very much with those critiques. During my first years in grad school I began to think critically about this and read more about what had been written at that point. Some of my professors championed my own position and research in Peru as representing an “authentic voice,” while others discounted it as too subjective to be “science.”
SK: So how did you come to write about animals?
MEG: When I started grad school in ’94, my work was focused on Indigenous cultural politics and Indigenous political mobilization in Peru. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the scholarship on Indigenous politics in Latin America was focused on the question of why nothing was happening in Peru—a country with a large Indigenous population— as opposed to Bolivia or Mexico where you saw massive political mobilizations of Indigenous organizations at national scales. In my work I argued against that analysis and explored instead what was actually happening at local, regional, and national scales in Peru. I developed this work during a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University, and then found my way to Sarah Lawrence College [SLC] as an assistant professor of anthropology.
At SLC, I taught classes on indigeneity, human rights, and violence in Latin America. Because SLC was so small and offered a lot of freedom in terms of what one could teach, it was also very open to different topics and approaches. One of my colleagues there, Karen Rader, had written a terrific book called Making Mice. She was giving a talk about this work and had shared chapters from her book which I read before attending the lecture. I was struck by the fact that while the book was about the making of the mouse as a lab animal, there was no real mention of the actual mouse as a living, breathing being that feels pain. I asked Karen what I thought was an innocent question about this, but it led to a long argument which ended with her saying, “I’m done having this conversation. If you care so much about animals, why don’t you teach a class on animal rights?” I remember laughing at this and thinking, “That’s not the point.” But I could not stop thinking about Karen’s suggestion.
As an anthropologist in a very human-centric discipline I wondered, What would an anthropology of animal rights look like? I went to the public library to see what I could find in animal studies, and I was blown away by the range of texts I found: books by philosophers, feminists, historians, and literary critics, all writing about animals from multiple vantage points. This led me to develop a class on animals, which was really about comparative social movements. I was interested in the ways considering animals might expand our thinking about labor, the environment, gender, and race.
I was just beginning to learn about animal studies, but animals had been an important part of my life. My mother had studied to be a vet and while in Virginia worked with rescue organizations and fostered several animals. Companion animals had always been very much a part of our lives—but we also ate everything. We came to this country and I remember we were forbidden from eating in the cafeteria; we had to go home to eat Peruvian food. The first few years one of our typical dishes was a big bowl of chicken hearts, sautéed in garlic and butter, because it was cheap. People talk about this all the time: the disconnect between loving and eating animals. But it was teaching this first class on animals at SLC that got me thinking more explicitly about this disconnect.
That class was transformative for me. I had thirteen students, some of whom I am still very close with. I had a handful of animal rescuers, vegetarians, and vegans. But primarily I had students with very specific motivations: One young woman was there to defend her right to hunt, and another African American woman from Georgia wanted to defend the Christian notion of dominion. It was a fantastic group of students and they each brought such different perspectives. I walked into that class saying, “This is not my field, so let’s do this together.” I thought I was going to push them to think about race, class, gender, but they pushed me to take animals seriously. I always use a lot of audiovisual materials in my classes. Witnessing violence against animals is something I had previously avoided at all costs. But in this class, I could not ask my students to look and listen if I was not going to do that too. I remember waiting until the last possible minute to watch documentaries depicting horrible violence, just so I could be prepared to watch them again with my students in class. Some students brought their companion animals: dogs, cats, rabbits, and even a python. The seminar, then, became a transformative space. Toward the end of that class, I made a radical break and turned toward a vegan diet. While my approach at the time was not great—I was exhausted, with no time, meaning we ate only pasta, beans, and rice—I think of that as a formative moment, and the beginning of an intense journey around food, ethics, and alternative relations with other animals.
SK: Did you then come to do research on animals because you started seeing things differently as a result of teaching this class, or did you have an intention that animals were going to become a focus?
MEG: Actually, I never thought it would be part of my research. I thought I would only teach one class on the subject. The funny thing is, I have always seen the personal, political, and intellectual as intertwined in my life, but in this moment I made this artificial separation where I would somehow only teach about animals. But as that seminar progressed, I started to wonder what I had missed in my previous research. There are important relationships between many of the Indigenous communities and activists with whom I’ve worked, and, in particular, guinea pigs, alpacas, dogs, and other animals, but I never really thought about it. It was through teaching—and reading work by other scholars who were thinking with animals—that I became interested in thinking more broadly about these kinds of connections. This also coincided with the Peruvian “gastronomic revolution” that I am now writing about. Today my work certainly informs my teaching, and vice versa.
SK: Could you talk about the potential you see in putting postcolonial studies and animal studies in conversation with each other?
MEG: Animal studies is an important interdisciplinary field. It’s pushing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences in significant ways, but there are blind spots. One of the concerns I have with animal studies is—in some cases—the lack of openness to thinking seriously about race, colonial legacies, or indigeneity. This is changing, but there is still work to be done in bringing these concerns together. Similarly, it is important to think about the consequences of lack of engagement with nonhuman animals in the work of postcolonial scholars and critical race theorists, for instance. This is challenging, but we also need to consider the impact of colonialism and imperialism on more than human beings.
One of the things I struggle with in my work is that in some ways, bringing in the nonhuman—whether an animal or a mountain—can be seen as reproducing postcolonial violence: Placing animal and human next to one another in certain contexts, the so-called “equating” of human and animal life, can be perceived as reproducing naturalized hierarchies that place certain animals above certain humans. How do you begin to question this binary when some marginalized communities are trying to fight for the status of humans to begin with, and when it’s wrapped up in broader struggles for human rights and justice? At the University of Washington, the Animal Studies Working Group is moving toward what some are calling “intersectional animal studies”: putting animal studies in conversation with postcolonial studies, critical race theorists, queer theorists, and others. We consider the mattering of nonhuman animals in a way that intersects with human concerns around difference, inequality, and justice.
It’s tricky, but when you begin to think about the impact of colonialism on bodies and life, human or nonhuman, and the ways in which we’re always entangled, some amazing things can happen. It also reminds us— and Claire Kim’s latest book is a terrific example of this—of the fact that race and nature have always been intimately linked; you can’t really disentangle them.
SK: Maybe I will jump to ask you about that—how do you navigate the danger, in certain situations, of making “equations” between humans and animals?
MEG: Even if we very carefully avoid the notion of equating, work placing humans and other animals in the same analytic frame can still be perceived that way. So we have to be extremely thoughtful and careful about understanding particular histories, and particular contexts or moments. Inspired by Chad Allen’s theoretical and methodological approach to global Native literary studies, I find the term critical juxtaposition quite useful in this. I’m trying to think through critically juxtaposing the impact of violence on particular lives and bodies. For example, a lot of the work I do is embedded in thinking about the history of political violence in Peru. I run study abroad programs to Peru designed to have students think about this particular history and its legacies; we work with artists and others who are trying to keep alive discussions of colonial legacies, political memory, and contemporary violence around extraction, environmental justice, and more. It’s a central part of what I do, but one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how nonhuman others fit into this work. I have been struck by the fact that animals don’t really figure in narratives of political violence, except for a couple of iconic cases. The Shining Path introduced itself to Lima by hanging dead dogs on lampposts. There is one photograph of one of these dogs that is one of the iconic images of this moment. People say, “That’s horrible,” but the sentiment does not necessarily translate into concern for other dogs or even for Indigenous victims of the violence. There is another emblematic moment that is in the memory of a lot of people: the Shining Path massacre of hundreds of alpacas. The alpacas were part of a U.S.-backed agronomy institute, so they were seen as part of U.S. imperial projects by the Shining Path and recognized as victims by the state and other Peruvians. I have been thinking lately about how we might think more about the impact of political violence on both humans and nonhumans. Many of the testimonies of Indigenous Peruvians include the theft or mutilation or killing of their animals as violence they experienced. I want to go back through those testimonies, to track the animals throughout, and to talk with Native and campesino activists about this project and approach.
SK: So it is in there; it’s just that it has not been talked about or recognized.
MEG: Right, it is in there, and recognized only rarely. But doing this kind of work is challenging for the reasons we have discussed. No matter how careful I am, this kind of project can be seen as equating human and nonhuman deaths and minimizing the suffering of human beings. This is something I am already facing in my work on guinea pigs. Given how charged discussions still are today about what happened during the war and who is to blame, developing this project will be extremely hard, and I will have to be very careful. The last thing I would want is to be perceived as reproducing ongoing violence against marginalized communities in Peru—especially given the histories of animalization of Indigenous peoples and others.
SK: I was going to ask you about the significance of the guinea pigs as a focus of study and the ethical and political challenges of doing this kind of work. Is there anything you want to add to what you have said already?
MEG: Guinea pigs are a fascinating entry point into the complexity of contemporary Peru. It’s an iconic animal; tourists who travel to Peru— even before the food boom—will often try guinea pig. You can find tons of Google images of people posing with guinea pig dishes, saying “Look, I’m eating guinea pig!” Because they are considered food animals in Peru but not in the U.S., consuming guinea pig becomes part of the exotic adventure. It’s a way to consume the other.
Guinea pigs also have a significant place in Indigenous and Andean history. They were domesticated centuries ago by Native peoples; they live with people in their homes, and Indigenous women have particularly strong relationships to them as they have traditionally been the ones to care for—and kill—guinea pigs. But in this moment of gastronomic high-end fusion cuisine, there is a need to authenticate culinary fusion as Peruvian, and the guinea pig has become important in this move. The representational dimension of this is also interesting because it allows us to talk about how the figure of the guinea pig in television commercials, in restaurant posters, and even as presidential mascots can signal colonial histories and legacies, and the racialization of certain people.
I’m also concerned about actual guinea pigs—the animals themselves. In recent years, a guinea pig boom has accompanied the Peruvian gastronomic revolution. There has been a push to industrialize guinea pig production, develop the export market, to genetically “improve” these animals, as part of the move toward national “progress” and modernity. Part of my current project includes tracking the guinea pig, the impact of this moment on guinea pig bodies, and the consequences it has on relations between guinea pigs and Indigenous and campesino farmers. The leading guinea pig expert in the country says the animal is going the way of the chicken—following a model we know is horrific. So, while the guinea pig is a fascinating entry point to think about race, species, and capital in Peru, it is sometimes difficult to talk about their centrality to my work.
I will give you one example. I was at a guinea pig breeding farm a few years ago; I was pregnant at the time, and for me that created an even more intense connection with the 1,400 or so pregnant guinea pigs I saw at the farm. I remember being really shaken up by this encounter. I returned to my grandmother’s apartment in Lima where my mom was also staying, and tried talking with her about the experience; about my relating to these animals in part because we shared the condition of pregnancy. She was furious with me. In her view, I was comparing my human body, and perhaps my child, to animals. And for her, this was the worst sign of disrespect to women. It was a lesson for me: I don’t talk to my mother about these things anymore. But it was also a really important moment for me to think more carefully about my approach, my methods, and to anticipate critiques, but without shying away from thinking with and about animals as sentient beings.
SK: It is a courageous project in many ways. One thing that’s been coming up in our interviews is how social science and humanities scholars are being more influenced by people who do work on animal sentience and emotion. Is that true for you?
MEG: Yes. I really want to dive into the work ethologists have conducted on guinea pigs and other animals. I was just at the Race and Animals Institute at Wesleyan and this was part of a really interesting conversation about foregrounding the “real-life” guinea pig more fully. I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to include the sensorial dimension of this work, and engaging with the work around animal sentience, and bringing that in as a way to explore the rich and complex emotional lives of animals. Spending some time with people who live and work closely with guinea pigs will also be helpful in this regard.
SK: That sounds fantastic. I have one more question in terms of theory and scholarship: Is there a key concept that guides your work in this area?
MEG: I’ve thought a lot about that question. I would say that entanglement is something I keep going back to because I find it really helpful in teaching about these issues. It seems to be something that students can latch on to that’s not threatening, strangely, and that allows them to see new connections and possibilities. We tend to think so much about the differences between humans and nonhumans—and that’s important—but finding ways of talking about shared precarity and vulnerability can open us up to compassion in ways that move us away from the common question, “Why should we care about animals when there is still so much human suffering?”
SK: Can you describe your current relationship to consuming meat and other animal products?
MEG: I would say it’s messy. But I live in Seattle, which I am grateful for because it makes it easy for us to essentially live a vegan lifestyle when I’m at home. That said, I do not consider myself a vegan and prefer not to label myself that way. In addition to my work in Peru, I also work closely with Native scholars and activists in the Pacific Northwest. At the University of Washington, as I mentioned earlier, we are trying to build an “intersectional” animal studies, but we are also working hard to build global Indigenous studies on campus. Over the past couple of years, there has been great momentum around that with new hires and the building of wǝɫǝbʔaltxw, which in the Lushootseed language of the Coast Salish peoples means Intellectual House, a longhouse-style facility that serves as a center for Indigenous students and as a reminder to all who see it that we are on Native lands. This means we find ourselves invited to events on Native sovereignty, food sovereignty, and to ceremonial spaces, and there are moments when communities will offer salmon, for example. For me, in those moments it is extremely important to accept these invitations and to eat with others. This is similar in Peru. When I was starting to think about these issues and when we had that drastic move toward veganism in the U.S., I would still go home to Peru and eat meat. At my goddaughter’s home, for example, my compadres would offer a whole guinea pig and I would always eat it. These are important moments of relationality, solidarity, and affection. Or with my grandmother, she and I would have intense conversations where I would tell her what I was teaching and thinking about, and why I wasn’t eating meat, and she would say, “That’s great! Now here is your goat, so eat.” Food is love and relation and culture, and for all these complicated reasons, in certain spaces I eat more flexibly. This got harder and harder as my work and teaching developed, and as my work began to focus more on guinea pigs. But I also figured out ways to navigate and negotiate these contradictions. With my parents in Virginia it depends on the moment. My dad actually went vegan for a while. He watched Forks over Knives, he read The China Diet, and for health reasons started thinking more about his patterns of consumption. For my mother these discussions are interestingly gendered, and so for a long time she felt I deprived my partner by not cooking meat for him.
SK: Has your partner been happy to go along with your newfound veganism?
MEG: He has really been incredibly supportive, wonderfully supportive. Initially we did have a lot of conversations. The fights began over milk for some reason. He’d say, “I understand you don’t want to do this but I really want to drink this,” or “How about maybe I have some chicken?” My response to that was, “Okay, that’s fine. But you have to buy it and prepare it because I’m not going to do it.” And he just didn’t. It’s harder for him when we go to see his family in El Paso, who have been less open. They have seen me as depriving him, and not being a good wife, though this seems to have lessened. I would say that we are now both on the same page, that we both see our relationship to food and eating as part of a long and winding journey.
SK: Would you like to add anything about the relationship between your research interests and your writing and your dietary practices, and how that relationship might have changed over time?
MEG: Teaching that initial seminar at SLC and the work I have done since then in animal studies has certainly informed my research and absolutely shaped my dietary practices. This work got me to think about food in an entirely different way. But there are moments that can also push me in a different direction. For example, I just had a really hard conversation about Native sovereignty, animal rights, and food politics where there was a striking blindness to the everyday reproduction of settler-colonialism, and the ways certain positions and approaches can in fact work against Native sovereignty. And when I start to feel this paternalism or hear people say, “Native people should do X, Y, or Z,” I question the politics of veganism. It makes me question my own dietary choices. And then I have to take a step back and talk to friends and colleagues and my partner to think about my position, how I am situated, and why I make the decisions and choices I make. I try to remind myself that these choices are messy and contextualized. I’m noticing that these kinds of conversations and some of my commitments around Indigenous sovereignty have begun to reshape my thinking about what I eat or don’t eat as a particular kind of politics.
SK: I can see that. I’ve been thinking about how Indigenous people who are vegans might be mobilized in a problematic, tokenizing way. One of our other interviewees, Lauren Corman, also raises this question.
MEG: Absolutely. This happens quite a bit, the tokenizing and mobilization of those proclaiming Indigenous veganism, often by non-Natives, to impose particular viewpoints on tribal governments, for example. And this in fact takes away from a fuller and more serious engagement with Native epistemologies. Indigenous veganism offers a really wonderful opening to think more about the complexity of Indigenous sovereignty, knowledges, and food. But I am frustrated by those using this as a way to push a particular political project, in a way that disavows another political project. Also, it’s not just about animals. For example, in Seattle we belonged to a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] and we were able to get organic local products. But a lot of the organic berries are picked by Indigenous migrant laborers from Mexico in horrendous conditions, and this is one reason why we no longer belong to that particular CSA. So how do we think about justice in a way that is more encompassing of all of these complex political issues? It gets really hard, but I think it’s important for us to think about. Especially with my son, I want him to be an ethical eater, but we are constantly developing what that means for us. I just want him to be thoughtful about how our choices are very much connected to broader structural systems.
Three years ago I became chair of an interdisciplinary program at UW called the Comparative History of Ideas, and we have all sorts of events—graduation, thesis presentations, etc.—that involve decisions about what food we are going to serve, how we will serve it, and whom we should buy from. I have been navigating these choices and trying to push an ethical approach as much as I can, but all the while moving slowly enough so that others don’t feel that I am imposing my choices or ideas on them. So, depending on the different places we inhabit, I think we need to find ways of pointing out these kinds of entanglements and connections in ways that open up conversations rather than shut them down. That’s one of the things I love about Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals; I was really struck by his ability to open up a conversation. This is crucial if we are ever going to continue to move together, however imperfect the ways in which we all move.
Another thing about that book—he begins by discussing his struggles with vegetarianism, and how having a child made it possible for him to commit to a vegetarian lifestyle. He writes that after the birth of his son, he received a note from a friend that said, “Now anything is possible again.” And it’s so moving and powerful. But when I had my son I struggled with that, because I had the entirely opposite feeling. I worried that if I raised him eating a vegan diet, he would not be able to go to Peru and eat my grandmother’s cooking and our traditional food with my family. That was and still is a huge struggle for me. And then the first time we visited my parents in Virginia once he was old enough to eat solid food, my mother gave him some kind of chicken sandwich, which he devoured. I realized that in this context, maybe it was okay for him to eat different things. For my mother, feeding him is very much caught up in broader concerns about food as tradition and food as history. But this was interesting to me; I felt this kind of ethical responsibility to raise him in a particular way but then, as much as I am an anthropologist who writes against the notion of essentialism, I still have this fear of loss. What is he going to lose? It’s tricky, and I think for me that’s also why emotion is so important; these ideas come from deep thinking but maybe they come from some very deep feeling as well. Which is a different form of intelligence, a different form of engaging with the world, with ideas.
SK: And so when your son visits Peru, does he eat guinea pig?
MEG: No. During one trip to Lima when he was about a year and a half, my grandmother offered him ham and chicken, which he ate. This is when conversations with my partner began in earnest about what our son would eat or not eat, and they were tied to the significance of his knowing not just traditional Peruvian dishes but traditional and important dishes within our family. After that visit we spent a summer in Lima with him, but this was different because for the first time we actually had our own apartment. That was much easier because it was our space, which made me think we could possibly go to Peru for a year, and it wouldn’t necessarily mean giving up on our commitments; it would just mean re-framing them.
SK: You partly addressed this already, but can you tell us a story about a time when your dietary practices have been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, or hostility?
MEG: Yes. My mother is this ball of contradictions; she loves Bill O’Reilly and she’s a member of PETA. She’s just a super interesting and difficult woman, whom I love to death, of course. One year for Christmas I decided that instead of buying people gifts we would sponsor an animal for each member of my family through the Farm Sanctuary. For my mother, we sponsored a turkey. And you know, you get a picture of the animal with a list of their food preferences among other things. Everyone seemed happy about this gift, which arrived in time for Thanksgiving. When we moved to the U.S., we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving; my mom would make a big Peruvian, Venezuelan, or Mexican meal instead of the traditional Thanksgiving meal. But my brother got here when he was six years old, so he’s grown up in the U.S. and he likes the turkey and all the traditions—so over time my mom began shifting toward a more traditional version of this holiday. This particular year we went to visit them for Thanksgiving and she had made an elaborate meal that included turkey. As she is setting the table I see her get the picture that Farm Sanctuary had sent her. I remember the turkey’s name was Chiqui and she put it right next to the turkey on the table. She thought it was the funniest thing. For me, it’s just an example of the complete disconnect in our thinking about animals. She obviously understood what we were trying to say, but I think for her it was a deliberate way of minimizing the importance of what we wanted to do and making sure that it was still okay for some people at the table to eat meat.
SK: That must have been a tricky situation! Can you talk us through your typical approach to buying or otherwise procuring food?
MEG: We used to belong to a CSA, so every two weeks we would get a big box of vegetables and fruit from local farms. I would take a look at the box, figure out what I could make over the next weeks, create a menu, and then supplement that by going to Whole Foods or a local co-op. We try to be thoughtful about our choices. For example, in learning from Native leaders and activists about the conditions in which Indigenous migrants work in some of the organic berry fields in Skagit Valley, we changed our approach and no longer belong to the CSA that sourced from those farms. We just try to think carefully about the politics of the choices that we make and understand that we’re not perfect, and do the best we can to minimize suffering.
SK: I think that’s really important. Amy Breeze Harper recently organized a conference, the Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter, and one of the things that came up over and over, particularly from black activists who are also vegans, was frustration with white vegans who do not take racialized labor practices seriously. And then, on the other hand, you have these moralistic discourses about food, obesity, and related things.
MEG: Yes, I have similar frustrations. This is where thinking about Native sovereignty comes in for me. It’s very much related to those concerns about imposing a particular way of thinking about the world, or food, without a full understanding. For example, the Makah whale hunt: As much as I might disagree with some practices, we need to understand the multiple ways in which this hunt—and other forms of killing such as salmon fishing—relates to Native sovereignty.
This relates to another point about the politics of killing, and care. I’ve been struggling recently with the idea of “killing as care.” There’s a famous case of a Bolivian woman who would rather kill her llama and sell her as meat to foreigners than sell her alive. So what does that mean in terms of thinking about those relationships, in terms of “killing as care”? Is it possible? In that case, the decision was linked to spiritual ideas about what happens when you sell an animal alive without knowing what the consequences are, without knowing what will happen to this animal. I find it is important to think in a multilayered way about killing rather than say, “Killing is bad.” As much as I might have a hard time personally with some of these decisions, I’ve been encountering a lot of situations where people are pushing me to really think about this. So I try to be open.