Moosemeat & Marmalade: Analyzing Mediatized Indigenous Food Cultures on TV

In recent years, we have seen an increase in media discourses about food, especially in the form of television food shows, in- cluding instructional cooking shows, travel shows on culinary destinations and cooking competitions. However, these shows mostly bring culinary experiences to global attention framed so as to satisfy ‘normative appetites’ and teach pragmatic culinary knowl- edge that promotes regimes of culinary taste (De Solier 2005). Indeed, while Canadian TV screens do reflect the multicultural essence of the nation, with cooking programs focusing on Italian, French, Japanese, and other ‘fancy’ culinary cultures, no space is de- voted to Indigenous eating traditions on mainstream TV networks. Studies have pointed out that Indigenous cooking knowledge, habits and ingredients have long been neglected and Indigenous food sovereignty violently negated as an effect of cultural and lin- guistic imperialism. However, since the 1990s, Indigenous cultural knowledge has undergone a process of mediatization and has been profoundly affected by the rise of mediating technologies (LaDuke 1999). The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), for instance, broadcasts cultural contents, re-mediated for television consumption, produced by and for Indigenous peoples, including Indigenous food knowledge. The present study aims to investigate how food is deployed counter-discursively in the television space of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), a Canadian cable TV channel made for and by First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, in light of the broader process of Indigenous cultural revitalization and Indigenous food sovereignty.