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Food is celebrated as a sacred entity in many Indigenous cultures globally; this is well captured in ancient Sanskrit texts as Annam Parabrahma Swaroopam, which means “food is the form of the greatest creator and symbolizes divine universal consciousness.” For most of us, our ancestral way of life—and for some, our present-day lives—have been shaped by such a sacred narrative of food. For many, this type of holistic and divine worldview of food has changed in today’s world, accompanied by changes on other fronts—including personal, social, environmental, political, and economical—in varying degrees.

As noted in this book’s introduction and the chapters in section I, the undesirable and enduring impacts of these changes on health and well-being have become more serious, particularly among Indigenous people in Canada and many parts of the world, in recent times. Food security statistics (as one measure of health and well-being, most commonly used by many governments and non-government agencies) speak to an alarming rate of food-related health conditions and disproportionate levels of poverty that Indigenous people experience in Canada and globally. At only 5 percent of the global population, Indigenous people are overrepresented among those who experience poverty at 15 percent (Hall & Patrinos, 2012). The rate of childhood poverty on-reserve in Canada was 60 percent in 2010, with childhood poverty rates on-reserve in Manitoba reaching 76 percent (Macdonald & Wilson, 2016). The Food and Agriculture Organization—a leading global agency of the United Nations with over 194 member states that works in 130 …