Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the Time Of COVID-19

Anishinaabe writer Andrea Landry’s article, “Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the Time of COVID-19,” examines how the pandemic became a catalyst for storytelling centered on Indigenous cultural survival and resistance, specifically through revitalized land-based practices. Focusing on traditional knowledge, self-sufficiency, and sustainability, Landry documents how the COVID-19 crisis prompted a narrative of reclamation and adaptation. She interviews three Indigenous women from British Columbia and North Dakota—Electa Hare-RedCorn, Nitanis Desjarlais, and Jessica Van Ierland—whose stories exemplify how pandemic lockdowns became turning points for rebuilding kinship networks and confronting systemic neglect. These women describe using food sovereignty practices as a response to the compounded pressures of the pandemic, including government inaction, historical trauma, and ongoing displacement.

Desjarlais underscores the legitimacy of cultural practices that operate beyond colonial authority and emphasizes how this autonomy supported her community’s survival during the pandemic. Landry’s storytelling foregrounds how COVID-19 revealed the failures of settler-state infrastructure and simultaneously strengthened Indigenous resistance through everyday acts of cultivation, hunting, and ceremony. Despite structural inequities and precarity, Indigenous communities reconnected with ancestral food systems as an assertion of resilience and cultural continuity. These pandemic-era narratives culminate in what Desjarlais calls a “point of thriving on the land now, not just surviving” (Landry)—a powerful counter-story to dominant discourses of crisis and collapse, and a reaffirmation of Indigenous futurity through COVID-19 storytelling.