Content area
Full text
Abstract
This article looks at settler colonialism and the manufacturing of food insecurity in Indigenous communities located in present-day northern Canada after 1945. The federal government undermined the foodways of Indigenous peoples and sought to make them reliant on a southern market based food economy through the criminalization of Indigenous hunting and harvesting practices and the imposition of government programs like Family Allowance, Foodmail, and Nutrition North Canada. Examining how these events and policies worked together shows how food serves as a regulatory project of assimilation and governance whereby Indigenous peoples are seemingly 'encouraged' to adopt European-Canadian foodways.
Introduction
The manufacturing of food insecurity among northern Indigenous peoples1 has a long history in Canada. In the words of legal scholar J. Solomon Bash, food functioned-and continues to function-as an "effective and inexpensive means of controlling a population [and] consolidating political control."2 Federal and provincial governments in Canada in the decades after the Second World War worked to undermine the foodways of northern Indigenous peoples and impose a southern market-based food economy. These efforts have been so successful that when the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, issued a report on his visit to Canada in 2012 he noted that 60 percent of on-reserve Indigenous households in northern Manitoba were food insecure,3 as were 70 percent of Inuit adults in Nunavut. These rates of food insecurity are six times higher than the national average and "represent the highest documented food insecurity rate for any aboriginal population in a developed country."4 This article focuses on three federal programs-Family Allowances, Food Mail and Nutrition North Canada (NNC)-to illuminate how state food management initiatives were (and are) intended to replace Indigenous foodways and secure settler control of the Canadian North. Taken in concert, these programs can be viewed as exercises of governance created to sustain hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity in many northern Indigenous communities within the claimed boundaries of Canada.
Looking at food management programs designed for northern Canada following World War II illuminates the intimate connections between the disciplinary power and civilizing logic of settler colonialism. The logic of settler statecraftwas (and is) assimilatory-that is, federal policies and programs are designed to destroy differences between Indigenous peoples and settlers....