Abra Brynne was formerly a project manager with CFICE’s partner Food Secure Canada.

CFICE is an action-research project that seeks to engage effectively with the community across a variety of different research hubs. In order to achieve our goals, there are many significant people involved that work to initiate and foster relationships between community and campus through brokerage and partnership. Abra Brynne is one of these important figures.

Abra Brynne was previously a project manager of (FSC) that works predominantly with the community side of the Community Food Security hub of CFICE. In this role, she acted as a liaison between CFICE and FSC, and collaborated on a few projects each year, checking in to see how work was progressing and providing any support the projects might require.

Abra says that her time with CFICE has allowed her to gain an understanding of how the academic world works and what constraints and opportunities go in-hand with academia.

“It was really interesting to me to learn how I can be connecting more effectively with academia in my own work, but also making that information more broadly accessible with communities with which I work,” said Abra.

Canadian Association of Food Studies team.

CFICE has also shown her the kind of support systems for engaging directly with communities that exist within some of the academic institutions, such as community-based research and community service learning models.

Of her time with CFICE, Abra says that it has been interesting to see from a community perspective how the project has evolved. Through community-campus partnerships, Abra says that CFICE has helped identify that the dichotomy and division between community and academia is rather artificial and arbitrary.

“There are many activists within the academic community. There are researchers within the community base, and so some of those divisions are artificial and arbitrary and I think the CFICE project has shone a light on that,” says Abra.

Listening to Cathleen Kneen speak at a conference.

CFICE has helped bring the two together and create a deeper credibility and recognition for the research and knowledge generation that comes out of the community. Abra says this has been a really important contribution of the CFICE project.

CFICE has also provided its partners with historical background, analytical skills and data that can provide communities with context to help leverage their own work. In addition, Abra says that CFICE has given her, and other partners, opportunities for learning and building relationships with like-minded individuals through such activities as supporting Abra’s attendance at conferences such as the Ěýł¦´Ç˛Ô´Ú±đ°ů±đ˛Ôł¦±đ.

“I’ve also really appreciated the opportunity to attend the various academic conferences…that has allowed me to strengthen relationships, make some new ones, and get exposure to academic work on food systems that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

Abra Brynne and Cathleen Kneen were close colleagues and friends.

Of her experience with CFICE, Abra says that the people she has worked with have been amazing and patient as she navigated her role and found where her perspective was of value.

Abra would especially like to acknowledge and pay tribute to Cathleen Kneen from FSC who passed away in February of this year.

“She is irreplaceable for her wisdom, her generosity, her incredible support, her analysis, her feisty feminism and willingness to learn and adapt. My only consolation in the face of this enormous loss is that her legacy is almost as large and available to us in many ways, through her presentations, her writing, and her wonderful editorial drawings.”

To better understand how we can decolonize our practices as non-Indigenous/settler peoples involved in community-campus collaborations, we would like to share a draft working paper entitled Toward Decolonizing Community Campus Partnerships: A Working Paper for Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement. We invite feedback on this draft working paper and specifically to the questions posed on the final page.

Feedback can be submitted by commenting on this post or by emailing cfice@carleton.ca!

For more on decolonizing food systems see:

Bradley, K., & Herrera, H. (2016). Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement. Antipode 48 (1), 97-114.

Brynne, Abra. 2015. . Rabble.

Kepkiewicz, L., Chrobok, M., Whetung, M., Cahuas, M., Gill, J., Walker, S., & Wakefield, S. (2015). Beyond Inclusion: Toward an Anti-colonial Food Justice Praxis. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 1–6.

While many of the  (CFS) Hub projects within the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project have sought to address structural impacts of patriarchy, capitalism, and racialization within the food system, the collective research generated from our project partners has highlighted the need to better understand settler colonialism in Canada. This is particularly important because colonialism in Canada is often ignored, normalized and left undiscussed by non-Indigenous peoples. However, the more we learn, the more we understand Canada as a colonial power that was created by taking Indigenous land, never returning it, and denying Indigenous peoples sovereignty and self-determination. Settler Colonialism in Canada continues to be reproduced through policies that work to further separate Indigenous peoples from their land, validating settler claims to property, and assimilating Indigenous culture, history, and foodways. Erica Violet Lee further (2016) explains that:

“It is not a coincidence that areas with high Indigenous populations are the areas deprived of access to food and health care. At its core, this is an issue of maintaining the dispossession of Indigenous people and the legitimacy of Canadian control; an attempt to destroy the nations and legal orders that we hold in our blood, our muscles, our stomaches, our minds, our mouths.”

Within this context, our core team at the CFS Hub has been trying to better understand how we can decolonize our practices as non-Indigenous/settler peoples involved in community-campus collaborations. We start with the understanding that decolonization works to realize Indigenous sovereignty, repatriate Indigenous lands, and re-imagine relationships to land and beings. This understanding leads us to a series of questions about how we can best change our work: How can community-based research challenge institutional structures and policies that promote extractive research and delegitimize Indigenous knowledge? How can community-campus relationships support Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination? How can research promote settler education around colonialism, decolonization, and Indigenous resurgence? How do our research practices work to support Indigenous struggles for land through food? How does community-based research provide encouragement and support relating to the unsettling and discomfort necessary for dealing with settler complicity?  What are our intentions in doing this type of work?

In thinking through some of these questions we look to community partners who are doing this work, such as the British Columbia Food Systems Network (BCFSN) and community organizers such as Dawn Morrision and Abra Brynne. For example, Dawn explains Indigenous food sovereignty as a “framework for exploring and appreciating the optimum conditions and possibilities that exist for reclaiming the social, political and personal health we once experienced prior to colonization” (2011, p. 106). From a settler viewpoint, Abra talks about the need for discomfort as a starting point for figuring out “what it means to be in a relationship of justice and integrity with the people of the land I now squat upon” (2015). Within this process of learning and (re)learning Abra highlights the need to listen, to engage in conversations with Indigenous peoples, and to be humble. With these learnings in mind, we are particularly excited to support some of this work through our CFS Hub partnership with the BCFSN as they explore what it means to decolonize day-to-day activities within their organization.

References

Brynne, Abra. 2015. Decolonizing food systems: A journey into an uncomfortable, but necessary place. Rabble. Online:

Lee, Erica Violet. 2016. Feeding the heart of the city: A love letter at the closing of our grocery store. Moontime Warrior. Online.

Morrison, Dawn. 2011. Chapter 6: Indigenous Food Sovereignty: A Model for Social Learning. In Food Sovereignty in Canada: Creating Just and Sustainable Food Systems. Eds Hannah Wittman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais and Nettie Wiebe. 97