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

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 Metis, 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 Metis positioned bannock as a critical component that sustained a Metis identity through the twentieth century. Bannock offers important lessons for understanding the place of Metis within Canadian history and reveals how Metis 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 Metis common sense; that is, those aspects of a Metis livedness that were obvious for Metis. I follow other Metis writers who have proposed the kitchen table as a site of Metis identity survivance that functions as an alternative to public, androcentric expressions of Metis-ness legible to Canadian recognition politics. Metis 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 Metis Peoplehood.