Snippets from the Kitchen Table
"All my Relations", led by Kim Anderson, is one of five clusters part of the Live Work Well Research Centre. Their work consists of Indigenous mentoring and networking and providing land-based learning and activities. This blog post was written by a graduate student, Emma Stelter, working in Kim Anderson's lab. Below, Emma provided us with very interesting updates on the research being done in their lab.
Métis scholar Dr. Kim Anderson (FRAN) is a supervisor and ‘auntie’ to a research lab of nine graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Guelph called the “Kitchen Table” which is based on a Métis kitchen logic. Métis Kitchen Table Theory is a practice and a methodology. It is a safe space to gather for dialogue, knowledge sharing, eating, drinking tea, and learning from a Métis worldview. “Eating was the least of the activities done around our kitchen table”, states Metis scholar Dr. Sherry Farrell-Racette, who inspired some of this methodology. “It was primarily a creative space, a work surface, a space for meditation and a social space... It was a female-centred space, where men, women and children worked, dreamt and created...It was a space of action”. The Kitchen Table provides a comfortable, informal, collaborative, and reciprocal setting conducive to dynamic knowledge production and community engagement.
Usually, our Kitchen Table shares a potluck lunch on Fridays in Dr. Anderson’s office in Macdonald Institute on campus, where we discuss our updates, setbacks, and accomplishments. This format centres relationality and wellbeing, two core concepts for our group, as we believe that they are necessary for producing healthy, intentional work. The concept that we are all related, and that our wellbeing depends on how we uphold responsibility to our relations (human, earth, air, water, plants animals, ancestral) is at the heart of Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Currently, Dr. Anderson and two other Indigenous scholars on campus, Dr. Brittany Luby (Anishinaabe, History) and Dr. Sheri Longboat (Haudenosaunee, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development), are working to build a “grandmother research space” based on kitchen table methodologies called Nokom’s House. Grandmothers hold distinct leadership positions in maintaining the wellbeing of these relations within the Métis, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe cultures of Drs. Anderson, Longboat and Luby. Nokom’s House will provide a culturally safe space for reconciling with these relations through research with community Grandmothers, knowledge keepers, Elders, and other community partners across the generations in a land-based setting. Nokom’s House will accommodate focus groups/talking circles, Indigenous protocols/ceremonies, community gatherings/feasts, land-based knowledge acquisition, and interviews/rich conversations, providing a space of research visioning, planning, data gathering, analysis, and knowledge mobilization.
Image 1: Envisioning Nokom’s House.
Another project our Kitchen Table is involved with is Wisahkotewinowak, a garden collective that aims to grow sustainable and culturally relevant food for local urban Indigenous people. The collective manages four garden spaces in Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo. This year, the gardens operated differently due to the pandemic, but it also provided opportunities for change. Previously, garden produce was distributed to Indigenous Student Associations on Guelph and Waterloo’s campuses, but with campus closures, the collective turned to the broader Indigenous community. For about 13 weeks of 2020, 10 families in the Guelph and KW area received weekly food boxes full of seasonal garden produce, which also helped address some concerns over increased food insecurity due to the pandemic.
Image 2: Some of the November produce getting packed for distribution.
Wisahkotewinowak takes a decolonizing approach to gardening by prioritizing Indigenous ways of knowing and relationship-based practices around land, food, and medicine. Graduate Research Assistant, Liz Miltenburg, explains that most food options in urban settings are colonized systems based on colonial ideas of what should be consumed. Wisahkotewinowak provides an alternative, giving urban Indigenous people an opportunity to revitalize foods that have been colonized or lost. Having an urban garden is a key aspect as well, as it continues to challenge the Indigenous erasure we typically see in cities while helping people connect with the land. “Land based education is not just about going out into the bush” explains Liz. “There is so much land around us [in cities], it is just different about what it can provide”.
Image 3: The Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) growing at the Steckle garden.
Decolonization is a central part of our work and we hope to encourage the University to follow our path to Indigenize and decolonize their Eurocentric spaces of research and learning, especially in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s recommendations. The Kitchen Table is central to a project called “Picturing Decolonization within the Academy”, which is a student led research project exploring student perspectives on decolonizing the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences (CSAHS). Research Assistant Rachel Imai explains that the idea originally started as a class project in the wake of institutional attempts to complete similar projects. Student researchers completed their data collection in early 2020 by conducting focus groups by asking students to reflect on what a decolonized space is. They are currently working on data analysis. Hopefully, this project will encourage other colleges to picture how they might start their path to decolonization, and eventually the university as a whole.