Through the Restorative Foodways Project, we gather together to share food and stories, and teach through embodied relationships to land. Through this project, we promote and support dialogues that go beyond the binary of minority/majority, to explore the pluralism that emerges when we face our complex histories head on.

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With foodways as an anchor, the Healing Garden and “Food as Medicine” meals will examine how relationships to land and the food it produces have been used as tools of oppression, but also have the capacity to be reclaimed as sites of free expression and empowerment. At the center of this work is a naming of colonialism, white settler culture and white supremacy as structures that force(d) displacement, violence, and rupture of Indigenous relationships to land and foodways globally. Yet we recognize family and community recipes as vehicles that carry echoes of these relationships to land and to one another - a portal by which we access and embody another place, another time, another world. 

 

Our goal is to create space for students, faculty, staff, and community members historically excluded from the white-centric cultures of IU and Bloomington to honor their lineage, ways of being in the world, ways of learning, and ways of knowing, providing space for these diverse forms of existence to radiate out.