If you actually look at what ‘peasant’ means, it means ‘people of the land.’ Are we Canadian farmers ‘people of the land’? Well, yes, of course. We too are peasants and it’s the land and our relationship to the land and food production that distinguishes us . . . We’re not part of the industrial machine. We’re much more closely linked to the places where we grow food and how we grow food.
The language around this matters. It begins to make us understand that ‘people of the land’ – peasantry everywhere, the millions of small subsistence peasants with whom we think we have so little in common – identifies them and it identifies us. They’re being evicted from their land, and that decimates their identity and their community. And we’re also being relocated in our society.
The language? As long as you keep us in separate categories and we’re the highly industrialized farmers who are sort of quasi-business entrepreneurs and they’re the subsistence peasants, then we can’t see how closely we and all our issues are linked.”
Nettie Wiebe, Former President of the National Farmers Union
Fernwood Publishing and Pluto Books: Point Black, N.S. and London. Book available at Mac’s Fireweed Bookstore.
Annette Aurélie Desmarais
