On the surface, it might look like solidarity. In reality, it’s a gross and hypocritical move, and it deserves to be called what it is: using Indigenous struggles as a crutch to excuse personal indulgence.
Most of the people making these arguments aren’t hunters relying on the land for survival. They’re city kids with supermarkets, farmers markets, and endless plant-based options within walking distance. They are not killing out of need. They are consuming out of habit and preference, and then wrapping that choice in the language of decolonization to make it sound noble. That isn’t solidarity. That’s exploitation.
Invoking Indigenous people as a justification for eating animals takes real, lived practices tied to survival, culture, and sovereignty and reduces them to a convenient talking point. It’s a selective form of “allyship” that only surfaces when it helps someone protect their own violence. When Indigenous communities are calling for land back, for sovereignty, or against extractive industries, these same leftists are often silent. But when it’s time to defend bacon, suddenly they’re the loudest voices championing Indigenous tradition.
That double standard is ugly. It erases the material differences between Indigenous subsistence and settler consumerism. It weaponizes Indigenous culture to silence critiques of animal exploitation. And it shows a disturbing comfort with turning other people’s struggles into shields for personal behavior.
Let’s be clear: choosing to keep consuming animal products when you have other options is not the same thing as living off the land in the context of colonization and displacement. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. Worse, it’s a way of laundering violence—because that’s what it is, violence against animals – through the language of solidarity.
If leftists actually cared about Indigenous sovereignty, they’d listen to Indigenous people on their terms. They’d show up for land back, they’d oppose pipelines, they’d fight resource extraction. What they wouldn’t do is tokenize Indigenous lifeways as cover for their own consumption habits.
Using Indigenous people as a crux to justify killing and eating animals when you live in a city with endless alternatives is not solidarity, it’s not decolonial, and it’s not leftist. It’s hypocrisy. And it’s evil.