The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery has published its 2019 proceedings—Food & Power—and I am delighted to have contributed the chapter “The Muckamuck: Restaurants, Labour, and the Power of Representation.”
How do restaurants express political and cultural power structures? By narrating the history of the Muckamuck Restaurant in Vancouver, one of the first Indigenous-themed eateries in Canada, my essay discusses restaurants as venues for cultural representation.
Opened in 1971 by three settlers and closed in 1981 because of a labour dispute, the Muckamuck is a compelling example of how restaurants are entangled with issues of power. This essay weaves together a discussion of the restaurant’s dishes, its three-year picket line, and contemporary artworks about the Muckamuck’s legacy for Indigenous self determination in the 2018 exhibition Beginning with the Seventies: Collective Acts.
