Decolonizing Indigenous cuisine: How chefs are rethinking relationships with traditional food
Ontario-based chef Rich Francis and others are rediscovering cooking practices lost to impacts of colonization
Chef Rich Francis describes diners' reactions as "shock and awe" when they try some of the food at his Seventh Fire dinners.
"The first time they have a bite of beluga whale that's been buried in coffee beans and vanilla, [they're] like: 'What?'" he said.
He's been hosting dinners that he calls "resistance cuisine" — the sale of wild game meat in restaurants is prohibited in Ontario — at the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southern Ontario.
Francis, a member of the Tetlit Gwich'in and Tuscarora Nations, is no newcomer to bold culinary moves; in 2014, he placed third on Top Chef Canada. But he isn't here just aiming to surprise patrons' palettes.
"The Seventh Fire is an Anishinaabe prophecy that states that seven generations ago is when all the negative stuff started to happen for Indigenous people," he told Unforked host Samira Mohyeddin. "The assimilation, the colonization, residential schools, all of that stuff."
Modern Indigenous cuisine takes a look at the current issues we face as Indigenous people today. My vehicle to address that is food.- Rich Francis
Francis and other Indigenous people in Canada are finding ways to rediscover elements of their traditional cuisine after the effects of colonization — including residential schools — severed those connections to their ancestors.
"Modern Indigenous cuisine takes a look at the current issues we face as Indigenous people. My vehicle to address that is food," he said.
Francis might channel personal memories visiting fishing camps with his family as a young boy living in Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories. Or, he might build a plant-based menu inspired by the Haudenosaunee nations, who he said ate vegetable rich diets.
For Francis, whose father was forced to attend residential school, it's especially poignant when he's able to spark memories of better times.
"Numerous times, elders have come up to me and said, 'You know, this reminds me [of] before I went to residential school,'" he recalled. "Even now ... you get a lump in your throat talking about it."
Access to the land
Food was used as a "weapon" against Indigenous children, and its effects resonated through subsequent generations, said Leigh Joseph, an ethnobotanist and member of the Squamish First Nation in B.C.
It was wielded in several ways in residential schools, she said, including "through starvation, through experimentation, or simply through having good food for the people working at the school, and having basically rotten food ... or very, very poor quality food for the children."
Manny Jules, a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, said his father, who was at the school in the 1940s, remembered that the children were always hungry, while staff ate well.
"He always wondered why, because there was lots of eggs, lots of beef, lots of produce, but the kids didn't get it," Jules told The Current.
The suspected remains of 215 children were discovered outside the Kamloops school earlier this month.
Last week, the Cowessess First Nation announced the preliminary discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatoon.
For Joseph, undoing that damage to Indigenous people's relationship with food involves foraging spots in forests, estuaries and the B.C.'s subalpine region (the forested region of a mountain just below the tree line).
She works with Indigenous communities by taking people out to the land to harvest traditional foods like mountain blueberries, stinging nettles and balsam fir pitch, which is used as a medicinal tonic.
"There's so much embedded in that experience. One, we're trying really cool food. Two, it tastes amazing. But three, our ancestors were forbidden to access these foods. Our ancestors were told these foods were bad for us — were evil. We couldn't eat them," she said.
The practice of foraging, and preparing foods with these ingredients, was forcibly taken away from previous generations of Indigenous people when they were removed from their land by European colonists, Joseph said.
The effects of that, compounded by poor nutrition at residential schools, can still be felt today; Type 2 diabetes is one of the leading health concerns for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in Canada.
According to Diabetes Canada, Indigenous people are diagnosed with diabetes at a younger age, have more severe symptoms, and face higher rates of complications than the general population.
To Joseph, improving Indigenous people's "access to the land" has broad positive effects on their physical and mental health.
"One of the things I love is to just hear people on the landscape, you know, hear people talking and laughing," Joseph said.
She recalled helping elders with mobility issues travel safely to view the subalpine, or seeing kids playfully mash freshly harvested blueberries into each other's faces.
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What about bannock?
Francis is also finding inspiration from foraging, or using herbs and plants — like a thunderbird smudge, which he encountered in a Cree ceremony.
"I kind of smelled it and I was like, 'Oh my god, this would taste so freaking good on a buffalo steak,'" he recalled.
"The irony, again, is it's always been here … All I do is connect the dots, basically, of what's already there."
Francis also hosts "decolonizing workshops" for Indigenous youth in cities like Toronto and Vancouver, teaching them how to make traditional foods they may have never heard of before.
"You see this little light bulb happen in their eyes, where their food memory or their food DNA is triggered just like intergenerational trauma," he said.
But he won't teach his cooks how to make food with ties to what he calls "the colonial food system that almost killed us."
That includes bannock, the fried bread ubiquitous in many Indigenous communities, but whose complicated origins can be traced to Scottish settlers.
"Bannock is here to stay, don't get me wrong. It's a symbol of survival for us ... but we don't have to eat that way anymore," he said.
"As a contemporary Indigenous chef, it makes no sense for me to put that stuff out there."
Written by Jonathan Ore. Produced by Levi Garber.
