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| ISSUE NO. 578 |
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This newsletter is the last in a three-part series by Jasmine Michel, a farm-to-table chef and writer who dedicates her work to the marginalized. An alumni of The French Culinary Institute and the Eco Practicum School of Ecological Justice, Jasmine's newest project, Dreamboat Cafe, is a small food platform of pop-up dinners and underground food journalism rooted in the effects of societal stigma and standards on minority mental health and liberation. Read her first posts in this series here and here. It allows us the painful lesson of how to safely take up space when visiting foreign land and how to do so without leaving its community in a deficit. In order to understand that, we must first understand how tourism affects a community. Beyond the job opportunities it creates and the fiscal benefits of tourism, there is also the influence it has on its local Native people, pollution, the increase of prices, and preservation as a whole. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received in the recent events surrounding overcrowding tourists on the Hawaiian islands is to respectfully find other lands to steward while Native communities stabilize themselves to safety. It may mean not going on the vacation of your pandemic dreams right now, and instead putting the safety and preservation of the places we desire to visit above our own desires. A revolutionary advocacy campaign and instagram account, No White Saviors, is led by a majority female, majority African team of professionals based in Kampala, Uganda. With almost one million followers and the mission statement, “If you’re not uncomfortable you’re not listening,” it has been a go-to place for educating oneself in the topics of ongoing colonization and oppression. One post reads: "decolonizing our mind won’t do a damn thing if it does not cause us to radically change how we live.” Now more than ever we are seeing how our individual movements affect us as a whole. So what does decolonizing our lifestyle look like and how can that encourage a more sustainable tourism experience? Our recently passed elder and Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask wrote what could only be a piece of historical direction for us to learn from in her article, Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and The Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture, “I would imagine that most Americans could not place Hawai’i or any other Pacific Island on a map of the pacific. But despite all this ignorance, five million Americans will vacation in my homeland this year and the next, and so on into the foreseeable capitalist future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American standard of living; ignorance of, and yet, power over, one’s relation to Native peoples.” What we’re really asking ourselves is, what is the cost of tourism? Is it worth the continual displacement of marginalized communities? The toll Western civilization has taken on the rest of the world is not isolated to impoverished places, it directly affects our lives here and now. As Americans, we are not only obligated to pay attention, but to take an active role in healing communities that are barely hanging on as colonization takes over. Even if it means postponing travel plans, or doing extra research as to how Native communities in the area have been affected - and what the next, most righteous step forward is - because at this point, refusing to become more educated and involved with the issues on our planet is the refusal to create positive change within our own homes and communities.
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tidbits...resources on anti-racism, environmentalism and food culture AKA stuff we're reading / listening to / watching / noticing / thinking about / captivated by this Tuesday . . . |
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