Description
Book SynopsisThe manufacturing of a chronic food crisisFood insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways.
Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is not a naturally occurring phenomenon or the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination.
Plundering the Northprovides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project, laying bare the processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities. An important re-evaluation of northern food policies, this timely contribution to scholarship on settler colonialism in Canada enables better understandings of the ways the state and corporations endanger the health and well-being of northern Indigenous communities.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter One Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Food Sovereignty: The Assault on Indigenous Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, and Trading
- Chapter Two Constructing Dependency: The Hudson’s Bay Company Before the Second World War
- Chapter Three “Making Proper Use”: The Family Allowance Program and Forced Purchasing Lists
- Chapter Four “Left at the Trader’s Mercy”: The HBC and the Northern Stores Department
- Chapter Five “Preferred Perishable Foods”: Origins and Outcomes of the Food Mail Program
- Chapter Six “We Blanket the North”: The Expansion of the NWC, 1987–2007
- Chapter Seven “Direct, Effective and Efficient”: Nutrition North Canada and the Restructuring of Federal Food Subsidy Programs, 2008–2017
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
