Dear Readers,
Some pieces ask us to look past our own story to understand it better. Shelly G. writes this week about a history she did not live but has spent years reading, sitting with, and letting reshape how she understands her own relationship with food. It is a reminder that eating disorders rarely begin in a vacuum, and that context, even context far outside our own experience, can teach us something about the shape of our own hunger.
Take good care of yourself, and remember to nourish your body, mind, and that place inside you that makes you who you are.
Your blog moderator, Kira
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What the Land Took, What the Body Remembers
by Shelly G.
I am fifty six years old and I have spent more of my life thinking about food than I ever wanted to. For a long time I assumed my relationship with eating was simply mine, something to trace back to my own childhood and stop there. It took me years of reading and listening to understand that the story is bigger than any one of us, and that some of the clearest illustrations of that come from a history that is not mine to claim, but one I believe we are all responsible for understanding.
The Sixties Scoop is not ancient history. It ran from the 1950s into the 1980s, a period in which provincial child welfare authorities removed Indigenous children from their families in extraordinary numbers and placed them, usually without consent, into non Indigenous homes. Children were given new names, new tables, new food. They were taught that their own hunger, and the ways their families had always fed it, was something to be corrected.
Researchers who study the intergenerational effects of residential schools and the Scoop have found something that deserves to be said plainly. The trauma inflicted on the body in these institutions cannot be separated from the trauma inflicted on the mind and spirit. Food was one of the sharpest instruments of that harm. Survivors of residential schools have described hunger, deprivation, and punishment tied directly to food as among their most searing memories, memories that did not stay contained in one generation but moved into the next.
A study exploring social support for Indigenous people with eating disorders included the voice of a Métis woman who put it with more clarity than most clinical literature manages. She spoke about living in a condo, unable to keep a garden, unable to hunt, cut off from traditional food not by choice but by policy, and she named directly what so many practitioners miss, that colonial restrictions on food sovereignty are inseparable from the conversation about what gets labelled anorexia or bulimia in Indigenous women. What looks like a diagnosis is sometimes also a map of dispossession.
Reading that stopped me. I had spent so long treating my own eating disorder as something that lived entirely inside my head, entirely inside my choices, that I had never asked what it might mean for a person’s relationship with food to be shaped not by personal history alone but by policy, by removal, by generations of being told that your hunger belongs to someone else’s rules. When a people are severed from their land, their hunting and fishing and gathering rights restricted or erased, their traditional foods replaced with rationed, unfamiliar substitutes, the relationship to eating does not stay simple. Add the specific violence of the Scoop, children raised by strangers who fed them according to rules with no relationship to where they came from, and you have generations of people whose first lessons about food were lessons about not belonging to their own bodies.
I do not share this to draw a straight line between that history and my own. My struggles came from a different place entirely, and I want to be careful not to borrow someone else’s pain to explain my own. But learning about this history did something important for me. It reminded me that eating disorders are so rarely only about food, and so rarely only about the person living with one. They are shaped by what came before us, by what our families were taught to fear or ration or apologize for, by forces much larger than a single kitchen table.
Researchers who work with Elder women on food and colonization describe something else worth sitting with, women who moved away from their home communities finding that distance from the land was not just geographic but a genuine barrier to belonging and healing. I think about that when I think about my own healing, how much of it has come not from a meal plan but from relationship, from community, from slowly letting food become something that connects rather than something that must be managed.
I am not writing this to hand anyone a tidy conclusion. There isn’t one. But if reading this shifts even slightly how you understand your own history with food, or reminds you that the story is always bigger than the plate in front of you, then I think it has done what I hoped.