Consuming the Wiindigoo: Native Figurations of Hunger and Food Bureaucracy

Abstract

This chapter provides an exploration of popular images of Indigenous hunger and settler-bureaucratic management in the U.S. and Canada. By analyzing literary and cinematic texts that hinge on food management and cannibal figures like the Algonquian wiindigoo, Miner argues that contemporary Native/First Nations writers invert colonial constructions of hunger in order to indict the instrumentalist ideology of federal Indian policy—casting bureaucrat, rather than Indian, as savage cannibal. He begins with official records of “ration policy” and demonstrates how texts like Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Stephen Graham Jones’ Ledfeather critique this history of bureaucratic coercion that still serves to materially and representationally consume Indigenous bodies and lands. Miner concludes by examining these authors’ reclamation of food-sharing and other Native practices of cooperative management.

[I]t was a dangerous thing to commence the system of feeding the Indians. So long as they know they can rely, or believe they can rely, on any source whatever for their food they make no effort to support themselves. We have to guard against that … by being … stingy in the distribution of food, and require absolute proof of starvation before distributing it.

—Sir John A. MacDonald, Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs and first Prime Minister of Canada, 1880 ¹ (emphasis added)

Being Indian Agent … is a primer for death. You learn how to move as though invisible, as though you can have no immediate effect on your surroundings. Meat, you want meat? I can give you the ghost of meat, the carcass of food. … I made it known … that in the morning we would divvy up the rations. That this was New Policy.

—Indian Agent Francis Dalimpere, in Stephen Graham Jones’ Ledfeather (2008) ²