Embodying Self-Determination: Re-placing Food Sovereignty through Everyday Geographies of Indigenous Resurgence

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2015

This text is centered on how Indigenous foodways, specifically those of Anishinaabe people from the Treaty 3 territory in northwestern Ontario, cultivate an embodied self-determination from nourishing our bodies, minds and spirits to cultivating our kinship relations, to renewing our political economies and governance structures. Specifically, I bring place-based Anishinaabe knowledge and experiences into dialogue with food sovereignty scholarship, Indigenous studies and feminist geographies to examine how Indigenous foodways have and continue to be impacted by colonial-capitalist structures of violence, including historical legacies of genocidal practices of assimilation and contemporary colonialism reproduced through industry-sponsored forms of state-making, development and resource exploitation. Subsequently, I examine how Anishinaabe people embody self-determination through a balance of anti-colonial resistance and a resurgent politics. I argue that a resurgent politics is founded on the renewal of responsibilities to and a decolonial love for land, including the nexus of cultural traditions that make up land-based food practices such as language, storytelling and ceremonial protocols. Namely, everyday acts of resurgent decolonial love entail the rebuilding of intimate and spiritual relationships with family and land, the reclamation of ancestral territories and the re-envisioning, experimentation and embodiment of alternative political economies and governance structures. For Anishinaabe people, this resurgent decolonial love is founded in their ancestral law of mino bimaadiziwin or “living the good life”.