L.4.1 Storying Netukulimk: exploring 15 years of collaborative filmmaking with Bear River First Nation

• Martha Stiegman, York University

Sherry Pictou and I have been research collaborators for more than 15 years. Our shared outputs include numerous articles, and two short films. In Defense of out Treaties (2008) explores L’sitkuk / Bear River First Nation’s critique of the federal government’s response to the 1999 Marshall Decision that recognized the Mi’kmaq peoples’ treaty right to earn a “moderate livelihood” through commercial fishing, and explores their vision for a treaty-based fishery grounded in the Mi’kmaq lawways of Netukulimk. We Story the Land (2016) follows an intergenerational group of paddlers from L’sitikuk as they reclaim a series of ancient canoe routes that leave from the Bear River First Nation reserve to cross their traditional territory. Together, the films present two moments in the evolution of L’stikuk’s journey of resistance, refusal, and resurgence of Netukulimk; to explore and live out the original spirit and intent of 18th century Peace and Friendship Treaties from their Mi’kmaq perspective. The films also speak to the possibilities of settler solidarity and what Pictou (2015) terms “small-t treaty relations”. This presentation will outline the participatory action research process that was used in the production of both films, and the long-term community-organizing and informal learning processes each film was embedded in and contributed to. I will discuss the dynamics and evolution of the intercultural research and filmmaking partnership between myself, a white settler academic, and Sherry Pictou, a Mi’kmaq community leader and now Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Governance. Finally, I will explore the vision of Indigenous food sovereignty that emerges from both films and the ways it reframes the understandings of food in mainstream food studies literature.

L.4.2 Getting it Wrong: Unlearning Things through Food+Art

• David Szanto, Icebox Studio

Power relations are central to the many challenges embedded in our food systems—ecological, humanistic, economic, and otherwise. They include the power to own and exploit resources and labour, the power to determine rules and regulations of production and consumption, and even the power to frame the nature of what we consider eater, eaten, culture, environment, and capital in the first place. Yet underlying these forms of power is a set of frameworks that situate knowledge within systems of ordering and control, discipline and measurement. In contrast, many forms of food art—particularly those that involve performance and interaction—support a different ontology, one that is relational, fluid, uncertain, and open. This presentation starts from the position that material-discursive-processual food art can contribute to alternative states of knowing and feeling and being, an ‘unlearning’ of disciplines, and a destabilization of masculist-dependent structures. Through reflections on several of my own research-creation projects related to food, I will explore a number of themes that might contribute to alternative human-human, human-food, and food-food relationships. These include failing, wondering, and not-knowing—in short, ‘getting it wrong’ when it comes to scholarly food knowledge. Projects to be examined include: a one-on-one storytelling cycle about yeast, humanness, and death; a feeding robot treating themes of dominance and nurturing; an ‘un-concert’ based on the translation of food into music; and several meal performances in which place is represented through eating. Audience members will be invited to challenge and question the proposal that not-knowing can be as useful as knowing when it comes to the the evolution of food systems, as well as challenge and question their own epistemological frameworks—including assumptions about the power relations on which they are dependent.

keywords: food art, gastronomy, research-creation, epistemology, queer

L.4.3 Aural Oral: Listening as a Precursor of Response-ability

• Grace Gloria Denis, HEAD Geneve

This presentation explores ongoing research of the pertinence of sonic practices as a catalyst to contemplate alternative modes of consumption, inviting an expanded constellation of sensorial relations to the process of engaging with food, traversing beyond dominating visual and gustatory aesthetics. As a starting point, the artist’s series Aural Oral is examined, which explores the meal in the form of a sonic and performative moment in agricultural research, proposing a sensorial reflection of processes of cultivation and consumption. The meal pairs an auditory archive of its ingredients with its ingestion; each accompanying track sketching a sonic cartography of the dish, amplifying the micro-actions of the farm and kitchen. The ambient soundscape posits an examination of subtle processes, offering a sensorial relationship with the meal that extends beyond the domain of taste. Aural Oral references acoustemological research, coined by Stephen Feld, expounding upon methodologies of “knowing-with and knowing-through the audible.” The presentation thus speculates upon listening as a precursor for response-ability, proposed by Donna Harway to indicate a “cultivating collective knowing and doing,” valorizing sonic research as modality to ignite the contemplation of alternative food futures. In Aural Oral, listening serves as a means to arrive, as well as an integral precursor to response-ability, employing audible ingestion as a means to embark upon an expanded observation of both sites of the meal’s preparation; farm and kitchen. The revealation of myriad micro-actions inherent in food preparation encourages a moment of collective reflection, eliciting a space of inquiry. Listening traverses beyond the ingestion of sonic landscapes, it is an immersive tool that fertilizes the possibility of understanding peripheral ecologies. What can one learn by listening? How can we implement listening as a tool for cultivating reciprocity?