From salmon to shellfish to trailing blackberry, the Pacific Northwest coast is rich in local food sources that Indigenous communities have cultivated for millennia. With the violent arrival of colonizers to the region, access and management of these native food resources has been disrupted. Indigenous communities face some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the US and Canada, but activists such as Dr. Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) argue that this inequity can’t be solved simply by shipping more processed foods to grocery store shelves. Instead, positioning her narrative within the growing Indigenous food sovereignty movement, she calls for the decolonization of foodways, the renewal of Indigenous harvesting methods, and the dismantling of corporate food monopolies.
Join History Café as we discuss Dr. Coté’s upcoming book “A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast,” learn how Indigenous peoples are enacting food sovereignty to resist settler-colonialism and understand how the industrial food system continues to impact the health of our global population and our planet.
History Café is produced as a partnership between HistoryLink and MOHAI.
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ASL Interpretation and CART captioning is available during the program through generous support of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. For additional accessibility support, please contact programs@mohai.org.
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