The History of Food in Canada Is the History of Colonialism | The Walrus

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• ostensibly

• 1970s, hunters started spotting moose less and less frequently

• upermarket staples, which generally need to be flown in, often cost double what they do in southern urban areas

• Indigenous people who are privately and publicly engaged with the restoration of their food cultures, returning to a more traditional diet through activities like sustenance hunting—practices long under threat of eradication but not gone forever.

• Moose is his primary source of meat, but it has been over a year since he killed one—a butcher processed it into 486 pounds of steaks, roasts, sausages, pepperettes, and ground meat, and it has lasted until now

• end of October—already the middle of the moose-hunting season

• sovereignty

• decimated

• Canada’s formation is a history of legislating First Nations, Inuit, and Métis out of existence, including by erasing Indigenous food cultures:

• Gradual Civilization Act, the banning of potlatch ceremonies, the signing of treaties that exchanged life-sustaining hunting grounds for farmland, livestock, and pitiful amounts of cash. All of it was designed with the purpose of elimination through assimilation.

• exchange between the diets of early settlers and Indigenous peoples were largely one-sided

• Collapse of the bison herds placed the surviving people of the plains in a situation of dependence on the government for famine relief

• Hudson’s Bay Company established a monopoly over the fur trade in 1821, its market control enabled the company to drive the price of pemmican down—which, in turn, forced an increase in production to make up for the lost revenue.

• Europeans thriving by adapting Indigenous food-preparation techniques, harvesting wild rice in the fall and maple syrup in the spring.

• Catharine Parr Traill,

• Hiawatha First Nation (then called the Mississauga Anishinaabe people

• baskets, mats, ducks, and venison were traded for settlers’ pork, flour, potatoes, or clothing—an exchange that would be ruinous over time

• mid-twentieth century, industrial production, preservation science, manufacturing, marketing, and the hospitality industries transformed the way people ate

• This is the period that gave us the refrigerator and the gas stove, food-safety regulations, canning, and frozen dinners.

• Canada’s government engaged in a concentrated effort to eradicate Indigenous peoples and their cultures, including by squelching language, self-government, land use, and hunting rights.