Imagining Shared Food Futures: honouring Canada's obligations towards Anishinaabek foodways​

Abstract

Sustainability scholars characterize climate breakdown and biodiversity loss as converging crises tied directly to settler colonial ‘resource management’ regimes. Canada gestures toward mitigating these crises by ‘including’ Indigenous knowledges in environmental impact assessments and policy. Canada prioritizes commodity market profitability over mitigating these crises by excluding Indigenous knowledges in resource management decisions when acting on that knowledge would disrupt industry-favoured practices. One such practice is glyphosate use in forest ‘management.’ Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum agricultural herbicide repurposed to ‘manage’ regrowth after clearcutting forests. Banned by Quebec in 2001, Ontario embraced this practice. In 2013, Anishinaabek Elders along the north shore of the Great Lakes formed the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Elders to campaign for a moratorium on glyphosate use, which is counter to Anishinaabek environmental governance. Proponents claim herbicide use speeds stand regeneration, yet that regeneration converts food-bearing forests to pine plantations. Ontario legislators are not seeing the forest for the trees.

This dissertation contributes to radical food geographies scholarship by characterizing the cumulative impacts of forestry policies on Indigenous foodways. Foodways include economic, material, linguistic, spiritual, intergenerational, scientific, ceremonial, and social dimensions of a culture’s food governance. This study concludes that efforts to imagine shared food futures in Canada’s settler colonial context require reframing ‘renewable’ resource extraction as Indigenous foodways disruption. Applying case study and participatory action research methods, I offer three manuscripts that together characterize the limitations of settler colonial knowledge in imagining shared food futures that meet settler treaty obligations. These three studies conclude that converting Anishinaabek food-bearing forests to pine plantations undermines the conditions required for Canada to meet treaty obligations to protect Anishinaabek foodways.

In the first manuscript, I adapt Vivero Pol’s multi-governance framework to Canada’s settler colonial context to analyze customary and contemporary Indigenous food initiatives through a food commons lens. This study reveals the limitations of settler colonial frameworks for imagining shared food futures. The second manuscript seeks to overcome these limitations by centring an Anishinaabek research paradigm in collaboration with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Elders of the North Shore of Lake Huron. Our case study examining the cumulative impacts of changes to forestry legislation on Anishinaabek foodways centres TEK Elders’ efforts to stop glyphosate use in forestry. Reflecting on Ontario’s Bill 197, we characterize the limitations of settler colonial knowledge systems for understanding the impacts of forest ‘management’ decisions on settler treaty obligations. To better understand the limitations raised in the first two manuscripts, I apply participatory action research methods in the third manuscript to analyze transcripts from the Canadian Society of Ecological Economics’ bi-annual conferences I co-organized between 2019 and 2021. I ask what Indigenous knowledge holders have to say about the repackaging of Indigenous concepts by sustainability researchers within colonial knowledge systems. Despite gestures towards ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous knowledge, settler colonial frameworks depoliticize Indigenous resistance and resurgence, often reinforcing colonial narratives of land cessation and dispossession. Without addressing the underlying settler colonial assumptions and structures, sustainability scholars and settler governments relying on their research risk replicating the violence inherent in food policy frameworks built on settler supremacy. Collectively, these manuscripts identify actions settler colonial scholars have the responsibility to take up, beginning with transforming settler colonial narratives.