CALS faculty, staff and alumni are welcome to watch recorded lectures for the new course “Hort 375: Structural Racism in the U.S. Agricultural System,” coordinated by Dr. Claudia Irene Calderón during the Spring semester 2021. The course provided a historical analysis of the agricultural systems in the U.S. through a series of seminars by expert speakers, addressing the racialized history of agriculture and providing an overview of the following topics:

• The conquest of Europeans and expropriation of land from Indigenous populations
• Enslavement of West African people and their agricultural labor in US plantations
• The transformation of labor relations in agriculture through subsidies that allowed migrant labor to be cheap and legally exploitable
• Government treaties and US agricultural policies targeting farmers of color
• Gendered impacts of agricultural labor
• Examples of resistance and liberation in the food system

The YouTube playlist is below and includes these speakers:

February 5, 2021 | Dan Cornelius (Outreach specialist @Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center – GLIC-) | “Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the Great Lakes Region”

February 12, 2021 | Jane Mt. Pleasant | (Emeritus Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University) | “Scholarship on the History of Indigenous Agriculture in North America: Crimes of Incompetence and Bias”

February 19, 2021 | Jessika Greendeer | Ho-Chunk seed keeper and farm manager at Dream of Wild Health | “The Parallel Lives of Indigenous Seeds and Their People”

February 26, 2021 | Elena Terry | Executive Chef / Founder of Wild Bearies | “Native American Food Sovereignty”

March 5, 2021 | Christy Clark-Pujara | Professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at UW–Madison | “Black Rice in South Carolina 1690-1860”

March 12, 2021 | Donale Richards | Michael Fields Agricultural Institute |”Farm Bill Appropriations and Implementation”

March 19, 2021 | Nan Enstad | Professor of Community & Environmental Sociology at UW–Madison | “How the Development of Bright Leaf Tobacco Bred White Supremacy in the U.S.”

April 16, 2021 | Michelle Miller and Sarah Lloyd | Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) at UW–Madison | “Wisconsin Agricultural History Through the lens of Immigrant Farmers at the Turn of the Last Century (1890-1930)

April 23, 2021 | Lupe Gonzalo: Alliance for Fair Food + Coalition of Immokalee Workers | “Historical Perspectives of Migrant Workforce in the U.S. Agricultural Sector”