Post-Colonial Farming
I write this from my farm which is located on Treaty 2 land in western Manitoba. My great-great-grandfather received a quarter section of land as a gift from the federal government and set up a homestead right around the turn of the twentieth century. My family has farmed this and adjoining lands for over a century now, which for a young country like Canada, constitutes a farm with "deep" roots. Over that century, the nature of agriculture has been deeply affected by colonialism from start to finish.
To understand the pervasive force of colonialism in Canadian agriculture it is necessary to begin with the conception of property rights that John Locke articulated in the 17th century. According to Locke, God has granted people certain inalienable rights - rights that are so strongly guaranteed that not even we can give them up. According to this account of rights, we have a right to freedom. When we use that freedom to perform some type of constructive work we own the rights to that work as an extension of our right to freedom. Somebody cannot simply come and lay claim to the fruits of our labours; whether those fruits be money or some other type of property that we have constructively transformed. If the state, or some other agent, were to come along and arbitrarily lay claim to the products of our work then, in a sense, they would be enslaving us for the period of time during which the work was being accomplished. This enslavement would break our basic, inalienable right to liberty which, according to Locke, is guaranteed to us by God. The right to property is therefore the corollary to the right to liberty and it becomes for Locke one of the foundations upon which he basis his account of a just society.[3]
While Locke's account of rights is intuitively powerful and remains a powerful means by which to keep the state in check, it also had the unfortunate side-effect of underwriting incredibly opportunistic colonial policies in both Canada and the United States. Canada is only a legitimate state by virtue of the treaty relationships that the British Empire entered into with the Aboriginal nations that lived across this wide land. Let me repeat, without these treaties in full effect, Canada would be an illegal state. The problem with these treaties is that they were entered into by two nations with two different accounts of what it means to live in the land. For the indigenous people who live close to the land, their relationship with that land is that of a sacred gift. People who live from and of the land, understand that the land offers up gifts, but those gifts must be accepted as such. The European colonialists on the other hand, understood that the land was commonly held by all people until a section of the commons was enclosed and transformed by the application of "work" into property. Once the land is property, it is an extension of a free person's pursuit of the good life and can be used or used up as seen fit by the property owner.
The tragedy of the treaties is that in an attempt to allow two peoples to live in and from the land, the land, and its indigenous populations were enclosed and transformed into commodities or problems to be solved. The Canadian government embarked on a genocidal policy of Indian Residential Schools of which much more can be said than will be attempted here.[4] Less obviously, but arguably just as significantly, the treaties cleared the way for the euro-colonial approach to land use to become the dominant philosophy of the land as alternative narratives were silenced or unable to be understood.
Colonialism further affected agriculture in the new world by transforming it into an essentially commodified enterprise. This commodification is related to the above-mentioned account of property rights, for it is in the application of work to the natural world that things become "property." In this way, the things that are properly of the earth may be confused with being of work. With this disconnect of the fruits of the land from the land an abstraction was inextricably set in place that allowed the products of the land to be viewed as commodities. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, colonies were established as a means to access new resources to feed into the machine of industry which then created "value-added" consumer goods that were in turn sold back to the colonists. Thus the owners of industry, the true and original "capitalists" were able to establish a global system of extractive production that has reached a truly fevered pitch in our own time.
As Canada transitioned from a colony of the British Empire to a sovereign state in its own right, the first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, ensured that this colonial economy would be woven into the very fabric of the nation with the construction of the first trans-national railway. The building of that railway would cost the lives of many Chinese laborers and see the almost complete eradication of the buffalo that once roamed by the millions across the prairies. The new railway was seen as a project of unification, but in reality it was a guarantee of economic bondage of the agrarian west to the industrial east. Wheat and timber would be shipped to the factories of eastern Canada, and furniture and tools would be shipped back west. As certain regions of Canada were deemed producers of certain commodities, these commodities would be focused on to the exclusion of secondary economies. This created high efficiency in specific industries but created weak economies and communities that were highly dependent upon the wealthy capitalist elite, first in the east, and more recently, to the south.
This colonial-extractive economy is what we have inherited today. It is generally accepted as an "ideal" state of affairs by the neo-liberal ideology that dominates both sides of today's political spectrum. The economic collapse of 2008 showed us the very real dangers of continuing to develop a highly extractive economy, but Stephen Harper was successful in convincing the majority of Canadians for almost a decade that this is exactly the way to a stable economic future. The Liberals under Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015 with promises of diversification and building a green economy, yet there has not, nor could there be, any meaningful effort to reorder the Canadian economy after centuries of colonial notions of land use.
The cost of colonialism has been well documented in the havoc it wreaked among our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but we have yet to reckon with the cost that colonialism has demanded from our land. Land has its limits, but because of our naive optimism regarding technology, we have gleefully transgressed these limits for the better part of the last century. It used to be common practice to practice crop rotation, incorporating diverse plants and animals to create healthy agrarian ecosystems that were both sustainable and profitable. This common-sense approach to agriculture was abandoned with the invention of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As I traversed our farm the other evening, foraging for wild herbs, I couldn't help but notice the dead, grey, sandy, eroding soil across the fenceline from one of our pastures. The crop of wheat coming up on it was beautiful, and I have no doubt that, given continued good weather, there will be a bumper harvest. But the soil is dead. The routine application of agro-technologies that promise abundance and security have betrayed the land, killed it, and sold the farmer into the hands of those companies that now provide the only means by which that dead land may produce a crop.
The logic of colonialism has been unleashed upon the land, we have taken it by force and killed it. The very mechanism of property that was to guarantee our inalienable right to freedom has been sacrificed on the altar of "necessity" and "best practices."
Canada has signed onto the Paris Agreement, recognizing that we have done incredible damage to the Earth and that things need to be changed. I do not know if the policies that governments are putting in place to face the growing ecological challenge are adequate or appropriate, but I do know that I have a responsibility as one who has profited for over a century from the agro-colonialism of the Canadian Prairies to do something about it. What is needed now is a paradigm change. What is needed now is a truly "post"-colonial approach to farming.
The point of this new blog is to reason to the heart of the issues that face Canada here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to seek to make confession for our collectives sins, and find a way to redemption. I will be bringing a theo-agrarian perspective to this problem as I operate out of the two things that most concretely identify who and what I am. I have been baptized in Christ and I have stubbornly grown out of the rich dark soil of the Canadian Prairies. I am a farmer and a churchmen. I will be in conversation with Wendell Berry, Ellen F. Davis, the Holy Bible, Stanley Hauerwas, and many other philosophers, theologians, and contemporary thinkers. This blog will serve to be a testing ground for the ideas that I am wrestling with for my graduate thesis in theology that will hopefully be completed in the spring of 2017. I welcome dialogue, questions, critiques, and good argumentation (who am I kidding, this is the internet...). If there are thinkers that you think I should be engaging with more, please let me know.
I began this reflection by noting that my great-great-grandfather received a gift of land - it is time to start receiving that land as the gift it truly is.
[1] Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. In the Former, the False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers Are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter, Is an Essay concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government. Dublin: Printed for J. Sheppard and G. Nugent, 1779.
[2] See the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here.
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