Speaker: Nicole Gombay

l'Université de Montréal

Using a settler colonial context, this talk addresses the discursive regimes whereby “food security” has, over time, largely been conceived of and defined in terms of health, resource conservation, and economics. It highlights the ways in which that framework at once instructs Indigenous peoples as to correct behaviour, blames them for their misconduct, and ignores the role of settlers not only in defining notions of right and wrong, but in creating the conditions that promote and sustain those definitions.

Using the case of Inuit in Canada, I will trace how ideas of food security have been conceptualised and constructed in such a way that the role of settler colonial states and populations in producing many of the material and conceptual conditions that give rise to Indigenous peoples’ food insecurity have been overlooked. Instead, they have been subjected to programmes of ‘ideological pacification’, with the goal of ensuring that they adopt behaviours necessary for their participation as individuals in a market society. That process has bracketed out the larger context of Indigenous peoples’ dispossession, so that how food (in)security can be conceived of, known, and acted upon masks what contributed to its very coming into being.

Nicole Gombay is a human geographer at l'Université de Montréal who has an interest in Indigenous-settler relations.