Presentations
April Lindala (Center for Native American Studies) recently presented a paper at the 2014 Crossroads Conference in Cultural Studies hosted by the Association for Cultural Studies in Tampere, Finland. As part of a panel titled Food and Travel, Lindala presented “Decolonizing Reel Foods: Recognizing the Positioning of Colonizers' Foods in Native Films.” Her paper addresses how Native peoples’ forced detachment from traditional homelands—and their deep relationship to food sources in those environments—has contributed to physical health concerns for American Indians, specifically heart disease and diabetes. Recently, Indigenous foods sovereignty movements have been sprouting up throughout the U.S. and Canada. Lindala took part in the year-long Decolonizing Diet Project, a study that explored the relationship between humans and Indigenous foods within Anishinaabe traditional homelands, specifically in the Great Lakes region. During the year-long study, she noticed that the change in her daily eating habits began to influence her viewing habits. Lindala began to analyze the positioning of colonizers’ foods, specifically fry bread, within Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals and other Native films.