French anthropologist reframes Tlingit foodways as living relational system, not subsistence

Arnauld Chandivert, maître de conférences in ethnology and anthropology at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, delivered a lecture at Sealaska Heritage Institute's Clan House in Juneau exploring Tlingit traditional foodways as a living relational system connecting generations, species, and geography. The lecture, part of SHI's summer lecture series and livestreamed on SHI's YouTube channel, drew on Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant's theory of archipelagos. Chandivert described what he witnessed during annual visits to Hoonah and Juneau since 2023: "the existence of a vast archipelago of multidimensional and cyclical connections of deep networks of attachment, a world in itself, reversing the taken-for-granted relationship between centers and peripheries."

What Gets Lost in the Word "Subsistence"

Chandivert opened by explaining that traditional foods and foodways broadly correspond to what federal and state regulations call subsistence, while many Alaska Native people consider that term inappropriate to describe their practices. "I prefer to use this expression rather than subsistence, which is rightfully very controversial," he said, framing traditional foodways as practices that help "go beyond basic oppositions between spirituality and materiality, between land and ocean, between animals and human beings, between keeping and giving, between the self and the other."

He offered a concrete example of what the relational dimension means in practice: "When elders in Huna are offered goose eggs from Glacier Bay, the most important thing is not the protein in the yolk. It is the fact that these goose eggs provide spiritual and cultural nourishment." Sharing, he argued, is one of the most important means of creating what he called multi-fiber connections through traditional foodways networks. He cited the Tlingit saying "When the tide is out, the table is set" as an illustration of how food gathering brings people together and builds intergenerational memory.

Pressures on Traditional Foodways

Chandivert acknowledged that traditional foodways face significant pressures. "Native traditional foodways are under pressure nowadays," he said, citing federal and state regulation, climate change, competition with the commercial sector and sport hunting and fishing, and broader changes in ways of life as factors with negative impacts. He noted that despite these pressures, Native people "really care about these traditional foods," describing them as healthy, healing, and capable of being practiced in ways that do not harm the environment.

He contrasted what he called "spread-out social-ecological networks" — the globalized food import system on which Southeast Alaska depends for roughly 90 to 95 percent of non-wild food — with the "dense social-ecological networks" of traditional foodways, which are crisscrossed by multidimensional connections between humans and the living world. He was careful to note that the distinction is not simply local versus global: traditional foods such as salmon, herring eggs, and black seaweed also travel long distances when shared with family and friends, making them connectors rather than markers of isolation.