Miijim: Food as Relations is a series of conversations presenting Indigenous, Black and People of Colour food scholars, growers, artists and advocates who will gather virtually across Canada. The series will discuss the interconnections between art, earthwork, cultivation and harvesting experiences that decenter colonial frameworks, while thinking through labour and power relations related to food justice in urban and rural communities.

UPCOMING: MIIJIM CONVERSATION SERIES WINTER 2021 SCHEDULE

March 16, MIIJIM: Carrying Food, Music & Memory

This conversation brings together professor and author Honor Ford Smith, musician Beny Esguerra, and growers Jacqueline Dwyer and Noel Livingston, founders of Black Farmers and Food Growers Collective, to explore how intergenerational knowledge is immersed in food cultures and carried across borders to Toronto. Through dialogue and improvised performances, the speakers will interweave stories with the multiplicity of rhythms found in Toronto’s diverse communities.

What labours of memory sustain the nurturing and transformation of this knowledge across generations? What forces attempt to destroy their significance and with what consequences? This session launches the new project “Oral Histories, Music-making and Food Justice,” an initiative that aims to recover local oral histories of food cultures through contemporary musical and sound explorations, in search of caring acts of intergenerational transfer, collaboration and food justice.

Register here to attend the Zoom event.

Or join us on YouTube Live Streaming: https://youtu.be/MLcF0XZPfww

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PAST MIIJIM CONVERSATION 2020-2021

February 23 , MIIJIM: Gardens as Art as Relations

This roundtable will delve into contemporary artistic and curatorial meditations on working with gardens, plants, seeds, harvesting, and other land-centred practices, both inside and beyond the spatial and temporal confines of art institutions. Moderated by Anishinaabe artist, curator and educator Lisa Myers, the conversation will open with a reflection by her on tending Mike MacDonald’s Butterfly Garden works, and will follow with presentations by Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson, scholar and curator Andrea Fatona, curator Crystal Mowry, and artist Christina Battle. This roundtable inquires on radical, reciprocal and sustainable ways of listening, caring, thinking and doing that can flourish from a close attention to the human and more-than-human collaborations involved in these weedy endeavours.

Link to Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/i-U1tFhGh_g

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February 2, MIIJIM: Food & Gardens as Remediation

This conversation brings together Indigenous artists who are using seeds, planting and cultivation in their practices. T’uy’t’tanat - Cease Wyss (Skwxwú7mesh / Stó:lō / Hawaiian / Swiss) and Anne Riley (Cree / Dene) will discuss A Constellation of Remediation, a project that includes the planting of Indigenous remediation gardens on vacant and untended lots on the unceded homelands of the xʷməθkʷəyə̓m (Musqueam), Sḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Cease and Anne will be in conversation with Joce Two Crows Tremblay (Mohawk / Pottawatomi / Francaise / Ashkenazi), an artist, Earthworker and member of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, who will be sharing their work with the Re~Sistering garden on the Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih ~ Kobechenonk ~ the Humber River, a project that seeks to re-Indigenize land by creating Three Sisters and medicine earthworks on ancestral urban sites.

Link to Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/tCqeL-GM3f8

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October 6, Indigenous Food Sovereignties

This conversation will bring together Secwepemc artist, curator and co-creator of Bush Gallery Tania Willard in conversation with Dawn Morrison (Secwepemc), Founder and Research Curator of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, and Mi’kmaw professor and Indigenous land and food justice advocate Sherry Pictou, to consider their work in defence of Indigenous sovereignties, and in relation to the reclamation of land, medicines, foods and plants.

Link to the Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/rgU9gsTQ6AM

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October 20, Indigenous and Black Food Relations

This conversation opens up the decades of work by Cree scholar Dr. Priscilla Settee in Indigenous Food Sovereignty with Leticia Ama Deawuo’s work at Black Creek Community Farm and her personal research on food history connecting with her grandmother and African Indigenous foods. The speakers will discuss the intersections of climate change and food injustice and its effects on Black and Indigenous people, while sharing the strengths of working in solidarity across communities.

Link to the Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/sNyGiWifn2g

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November 10, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Food Systems

Considering that food systems are specific to cultures, nations and territories, this conversation brings together medicine and food scholars Joe Pitawanakwat from Wikwemikong First Nation, William Kingfisher from Rama First Nation and Chandra Maracle from Six Nations of the Grand River, to consider this specificity and to add nuance and complexity to the potentially flattening term “Indigenous food system.”

Link to the Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/J4Z1EtA91g0

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November 24, Migrant Workers and Food Justice

This conversation is grounded in artistic practices that raise important considerations of labour and living conditions of those workers who grow the food that fills the grocery stores. We will bring together activist and advocate Evelyn Encalada, and workers rights organizer and community artist Tzazna Maranda to consider their calls to action through art and activism.

Link to the Recorded Conversation: https://youtu.be/oYqud2qmY8c

Watch online the previous MIIJIM conversations!