Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples and Food: Federal Indian policies and nutrition programs in the Canadian North since 1945

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.