Gathering and Growing from Past to Present: Building Future Foodways and Indigenous Landscapes in Turtle Island

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How can archaeological data contribute to Indigenous food sovereignty efforts and biocultural restoration of Indigenous landscapes? We present two projects from northern Turtle Island from vastly different ecologies (Saskatchewan and Ontario), where paleoethnobotanical research has been effective for connecting archaeologists, Indigenous scholars, and community members seeking decolonized foodways and revitalized Indigenous landscapes. In the Bridge to Land Water Sky Living Lab in Saskatchewan, paleoethnobotanical, archived ethnographic, and community knowledge are braided together to create a cohesive narrative of First Nations human-plant relationships across time. In the “Collaborative Archaeologies, Decolonized Foodways” project in Ontario, food residues from archived Indigenous ceramics are queried from different ways of knowing to understand past foodways and to help inform current and future food sovereignty efforts. These two projects work toward connecting the past to present and to help strengthen connections to land and non-human communities. In this presentation, we show the potential of such approaches, the challenges of such research, and the importance of pursuing collaborative projects focused on foodways and sustainability in Turtle Island.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Cultivating Food, Land, and Communities

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39455.0