Overview

The 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.

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9781772840490

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"""Spanning the late nineteenth century to the current day, Plundering the North provides meticulous detail about the ways in which HBC and NWC operated as agents of the state's settler-colonial ambitions while the state subsidized the processes and profits of those private corporations. This is a valuable, unique, and timely contribution."" -Elaine Power, Queen's University,"

Author Information

Dr. Kristin Burnett is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Learning at Lakehead University. A settler scholar, Burnett has published broadly on topics related to Indigenous health and well-being, and much of her current research and policy work engages with systemic barriers to health care, social services and supports, and food. Travis Hay is a historian of Canadian settler colonialism who was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is currently an assistant professor at Mount Royal University and the English Language Book Review Editor of the Canadian Journal of Health History.

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