Canadian self-regard holds as one of its sacrosanct myths that its government has treated Aboriginal people—“our Indians”—in a more humane way than did the Americans to the south of us. This myth of bien-pensant liberals will contrast, for example, the genocidal missions of the US Cavalry with the more benign North-West Mounted Police—the latter seen as “protecting” Canadian Aboriginals from the depredations of American whiskey-dealers. But thinking about the role of the gastronomic in settler-colonial relations—from starvation policies on the nineteenth-century prairies to food experimentation on Indigenous schoolchildren in the midtwentieth century—gives the lie to such a comfortable myth. I will look at two accounts of such a history in particular: nutrition experiments that have been documented by food historian Ian Mosby, and, more fully, testimony by Indigenous Survivors of Canada's residential schools as to how they were fed in those institutions. And so, in this chapter I seek to understand the role that food played in the colonial practices of the Canadian state.

But even a cursory examination of such a history is incomplete if we do not take account of how Aboriginal people have resisted precisely those forms of gastronomic colonialism. Before looking at Mosby and Survivors’ testimony, then, I will examine some ways in which Inuit, Cree, and West Coast Indigenous groups have figured the gastronomic: from the word escheemau that Cree used to mark the Inuit (then mispronounced into English as “Eskimo”), to the modern Cree word for pizza, pwakamo-pahkwesikan (or “throw-up bread”), to oral stories of colonial “pizza tests,” to the artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun's Haida Hot Dog. My argument will be that these Aboriginal interventions into colonial gastronomy should be thought of as modernist. That is, to conceptualize this complex history of colonial force and Indigenous playfulness, we require an equally robust theory of modernism. I begin, therefore, with Fredric Jameson, who, in A Singular Modernity, not only argues for a periodization of modernism qua break (thereby reminding us of the notion of colonialism as a break or rupture), but, intriguingly, that modernism can be conceived of as a post-colonial intervention.