Food waste to food 'cycling' : the reinstatement of natural law for the "future taste of our homelands"

This thesis is a cross-tribal co-created research project led by Atlanta Grant and three community members from Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation, a coastal community within the Great Bear Rainforest. This research employs an Evolving Cross-Tribal Methodological Design and Framework that employs decolonizing methods to mobilize oral storytelling and sharing of food-cycling practices and teachings. Explicit conversations around Indigenous biocultural heritage and food-cycling (the Indigenous practices of intentional purpose and intentional re-purpose) illuminated two research streams that operate in parallel with one another throughout this body of work and coalesce together towards a common goal towards Indigenous futurism and cultural resurgence. The first is a decolonizing stream that employs a decolonial lens onto the settler-colonial industrial food system and its production of food ‘waste.’ The second stream discusses food-cycling stories and teachings as the reinstatement of Indigenous Natural Law, that illuminated where knowledge erasure is occurring in community, and where ‘Lost Arts’ are observed. Through this illumination, this research mobilized into a journey towards uncovering why ‘Lost Arts’ are forming, resulting in a brief discussion and curation of decolonizing cross-cultural collaboration frameworks and ‘parallel’ preservation systems. This is not a thesis about food waste. It is about Indigenous resistance, cultural resurgence, and freedom and the actions that can be employed by First Nation communities across so-called Canada that can be enacted to halt additional Indigenous knowledge erasure from occurring. Although this body of work hosts many concepts, phrases, terms, decolonizing frameworks, and decolonial thought, the heart of this work is Indigenous freedom, futurism, and barrier-free cultural curiosity. It is resistance and the reinstatement of Indigenous Natural Law through the very nature of sharing and swapping stories through such a space revitalizes those very practices that we seek to protect. It is for the future taste of our homelands, a future of cultural freedom, expression, and resurgence for not just Kitasoo/Xia’xais but for all Indigenous peoples, who too desire for all generations to have a taste of their homelands.Science, Faculty ofResources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute forGraduat