Biiskaabiiyang: The Process of Returning to Ourselves; A Look at Anishinaabe Foodways

SHILOH MAPLES, Upper Midwest Coordinator for the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network

The Anishinaabe are people of a particular place, as the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes.

Our identities, histories, spirituality, and traditions are inseparable from our respective ancestral territories. The very fabric of who we are is defined by the landscape of interconnected relationships and our responsibilities to all our kin—all of those human and non-human relatives that we live with in interdependent, mutually-beneficial relationships within this place. This is the foundation of our worldview.

These cultural teachings are our Original Instructions of what it means to be human— our roles and responsibilities, how to live in balanced, good relationships with the rest of the world. These teachings inform our seasonal practices which make up our place-based lifeways. From this perspective, the preservation of foodways goes beyond basic sustenance—they affirm and renew relationships, nourish our spirits, and help us to be in balance with one another. Foodways are core to expressing our identities, are part of our spiritual practices, and play a role in our cosmologies.

However, over generations, many communities have experienced disruptions or disconnection from our foods and land-based practices. Food and land have always been weaponized against Indigenous peoples to coerce them into colonial agendas. These are the origin stories for many social and health disparities we see today. Indigenous food movements recognize that revitalizing these foodways is essential to our survival, cultural preservation, and sovereignty.

Some call this process of revitalizing traditional lifeways “decolonization”, but in our language we say it is Biiskaabiiyang—a process of returning to ourselves. Recovering our land-based cultures, identities, and wellness is really about remembering who we are and living out our spiritual responsibility. Reclamation of ancestral lands, waters, and sacred sites is fundamental to preserving land-based practices and lifeways– without these we cannot be people of a particular place. The Indigenous food sovereignty movement recognizes that this is as much about upholding our sacred responsibilities as it is about protecting and exercising our treaty rights.

Our cultures have endured because our daily practices are aligned with Natural Law and the Earth’s rhythms. Every plant, every animal, and even the weather– they all have seasons, cycles that dictate how they exist in the world. Our Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is specialized knowledge belonging to a specific culture and a particular locale. Our hyperlocal sense of time is based on generations of observations and collective knowledge about our plant and animal relatives’ lifecycles; today, people refer to this study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena as phenology. This intimate knowledge of place informs our seasonal lifestyles, foodways, and land stewardship practices.

In our traditional Anishinaabe calendar, the names of each lunar cycle correspond with what is occurring in our local environment at that particular time and what human practices are in season. It is here that you can see that Indigenous cultures come from the perspective of place-knowing, rather than place-making.

Read the rest of the story at blog.localdifference.org/indigenous-foodways