Healing Colonial Wounds: Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Land Back, and Cultural Resurgence

Abstract

My English name is Charlotte Coté; my quu'as or Indigenous name is łuutiismaʔuƛ (Carrying Thunder).I am Tseshaht.We are part of the larger nation of Nuu-chah-nulth (located on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada).The name of our ancestral territory is Muumaʕas and refers to the name of the river that runs through our community.1 For thousands of years before contact with Europeans, Indigenous people held autonomy over their food systems and maintained food security through a rich knowledge of their environment and food resources, passed down through oral tradition and long-standing land stewardship and cultivation practices (Turner and Turner 2008).Reviving and restoring our Indigenous foodways by enacting food sovereignty is directly linked to decolonization by resisting Western and unhealthy foods that were forced on us-forms of culinary imperialism and food hegemony.For my Tseshaht people, and Indigenous people worldwide, re-Indigenizing our diets is at the heart of the cultural resurgence and food justice movements we are witnessing in our communities today.I begin this chapter with a story of one of my favorite harvesting traditions, picking wild trailing blackberries.We Indigenous peoples come from oral traditions, and our knowledge, theories, and epistemological frameworks are developed, maintained, and transferred from one generation to the next through the stories we tell and share.Our stories are both individual and communal and are grounded in our own personal lived experiences, while si mul ta neously, connecting us to our families, communities, and cultures in a deep and profound way.As Cree/Saulteaux scholar Margaret Kovach (2009) 5 Healing Colonial Wounds: Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Land Back, and Cultural Resurgence Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht Nuu-chah-nulth)