Kitchen Table Politics: Bannock and Métis Common Sense in an Era of Nascent Recognition Politics

Abstract:Bannock, a simple bread made of water, flour, and lard—fried or baked—is a staple of Indigenous diets across what is now called Canada. A pan-Indigenous symbol, bannock is a historically dynamic food grounded in both European and Indigenous origins. On both counts, it presents a paradox to the settler imagination, which clings to fixed definitions of Indigenous Peoplehood essentialized in precontact traditions. For Métis, however, bannock is no paradox. Neither its European origins nor its diverse forms and composition across time and place cause confusion. Rather, in oral history interviews Métis positioned bannock as a critical component that sustained a Métis identity through the twentieth century. Bannock offers important lessons for understanding the place of Métis within Canadian history and reveals how Métis mediated state interventions into Indigeneity in the 1980s. Tracing this historical trajectory, I suggest a useful inversion of Mark Rifkin's concept of settler common sense to focus on what I call a Métis common sense; that is, those aspects of a Métis livedness that were obvious for Métis. I follow other Métis writers who have proposed the kitchen table as a site of Métis identity survivance that functions as an alternative to public, androcentric expressions of Métis-ness legible to Canadian recognition politics. Métis interviewees negotiated with, and simultaneously rejected, essentialist assumptions of their Indigeneity. Interviewees understood bannock as a key marker of kinship sustained through female labor and activism within a matrilocal Métis Peoplehood.