About

Dr. Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth) is Professor and Chair of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. Her scholarship is grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems, relational ecologies, and community-based research, with a particular focus on Indigenous food sovereignty, Indigenous law and governance, coastal food systems, and the revitalization of ancestral foodways through multimedia scholarship and applied/public research. Her work examines how cultural foods sustain Indigenous health, wellness, and collective resurgence, with attention to marine-based food traditions and governance practices of the Northwest Coast. Dr. Coté is the co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences series at the University of Washington Press and has authored books including 'A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast' (2022) and 'Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors' (2010). Her recent book theorizes Indigenous food sovereignty through place-based teachings, Nuu-chah-nulth epistemologies, and lived relationships with land and water. She is the founder of the Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Indigenous Foods Collective and the annual Indigenous Foods Symposium, which promotes Indigenous food sovereignty and relational food systems. Additionally, she serves as Chair of the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House Advisory Committee, supporting Indigenous-centered spaces and knowledge production at the university.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Ecology
• Environmental ethics
• Law
• Geography
• Biology
• Archaeology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Healing Colonial Wounds: Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Land Back, and Cultural Resurgence

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2026-02-03

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  My English name is Charlotte Cot; my quu'as or Indigenous name is uutiismau (Carrying Thunder).I am Tseshaht.We are part of the larger nation of Nuu-chah-nulth (located on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada).The name of our ancestral territory is Muumaas and refers to the name of the river that runs through our community. 1 For thousands of years before contact with Europeans, Indigenous people held autonomy over their food systems and maintained food security through a rich knowledge of their environment and food resources, passed down through oral tradition and long-standing land stewardship and cultivation practices (Turner and Turner 2008).Reviving and restoring our Indigenous foodways by enacting food sovereignty is directly linked to decolonization by resisting Western and unhealthy foods that were forced on us-forms of culinary imperialism and food hegemony.For my Tseshaht people, and Indigenous people worldwide, re-Indigenizing our diets is at the heart of the cultural resurgence and food justice movements we are witnessing in our communities today.I begin this chapter with a story of one of my favorite harvesting traditions, picking wild trailing blackberries.We Indigenous peoples come from oral traditions, and our knowledge, theories, and epistemological frameworks are developed, maintained, and transferred from one generation to the next through the stories we tell and share.Our stories are both individual and communal and are grounded in our own personal lived experiences, while si mul ta neously, connecting us to our families, communities, and cultures in a deep and profound way.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indigenous food sovereignty: embodying Nuu-chah-nulth principles of ʔuʔaałuk (to take care of), ʔiisaak (to be respectful) and hišukʔiš cawaak (everything is interconnected) in policy and practice

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  In this chapter, the author discusses how Indigenous People are enacting food sovereignty and revitalising our sacred relationships to our ancestral homelands. The author asserts that food sovereignty must honour the wisdom and values of ancestral knowledge in maintaining responsible and respectful relationships with the natural world. Hence, for Tseshaht/Nuu-chah-nulth people, food sovereignty is grounded in our philosophies of ʔuʔaałuk, to take care of, ʔiisaak, to be respectful, and hišukʔiš c̓awaak, everything is interconnected. The author analyses how/if Indigenous food sovereignty can be realised through Canadian domestic policy reform, utilising articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a framework. The chapter argues that, while political and legal recognition of Indigenous rights can be significant to Indigenous self-determination and food sovereignty, placing emphasis on a rights-based discourse that focuses on state political and legal recognition of Indigenous rights rather than food sovereignty initiatives within our communities is to be questioned.

  PublisherDOI

• 7 Understanding the Taking of Animals for Food through an Indigenous Lens, Utilizing the Concepts of Food Sovereignty and ʔiisaak (Being Respectful)

  New York University Press eBooks · 2024-05-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Indigenous food sovereignty through resurgent self-governance: centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles in sea otter management in Canada

  Ecology and Society · 2023 · 13 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Although North American settler governments face scrutiny over the ecological, social, and ethical shortcomings of environmental policy, many Indigenous Nations are pursuing a resurgence of environmental self-governance according to ancestral principles and practices. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, the reintroduction and prioritized conservation of sea otters by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) actively impedes the harvest of culturally and nutritionally significant shellfish species by Nuu-chah-nulth Nations. Integrating a range of qualitative methods, we argue that structural inequities, divergent normative and material priorities, and ontological differences animate a divide between Nuu-chah-nulth and Canadian state governing bodies in sea otter management. The DFO’s unwillingness to accommodate Indigenous knowledge, principles, and priorities in its sea otter management scheme reproduces the unequal power relations of settler colonialism to the detriment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security. We propose to reframe sea otter governance around the Nuu-chah-nulth principles of <em>hišukʔiš c̓awaak</em> (everything is one), <em>ʔiisaak</em> (respect with caring), and <em>ʔuʔaałuk</em> (taking care of). This reorientation is in alignment with the efforts of Indigenous peoples throughout Canada and globally to enact multi-species caretaking through the resurgence of self-governance rooted in ancestral knowledge and wisdom. Ultimately, we argue that a sea otter governance structure centering Nuu-chah-nulth principles, ecological knowledge, and leadership would be well-positioned to lead collaborations and respectful engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Nations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• hishuk’ish tsawalk—Everything is One. Revitalizing Place-Based Indigenous Food Systems through the Enactment of Food Sovereignty

  Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · 2019-10-31 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  First paragraph: My&nbsp;name is Charlotte. My traditional name is thlutismayulth, Carrying Thunder, from our whaling heritage. I’m going to talk a little about who I am and where I am from. I am from the Tseshaht Nation, one the 14 groups that make up the larger Nuu-chah-nulth Nation on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Before I begin, I want to pay respect to the First Peoples of this land, the Coast Salish peoples. Every time we enter these territories—unceded, recognized traditional territories—we need to acknowledge not just the people, the elders, and the leaders, but also the ancestors whose spirits still walk in these spaces. So, I acknowledge that before I begin. The material in this talk comes from a book I have been working on for quite a few years since I published my last book. So, who we are. The Nuu-chah-nulth are on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The traditional territory of the 14 nations also includes the western tip of western Washington, because the Makah in western Washington are our relatives (Figure 1). It was the border that separated us, but we are recog­nized as relatives and share the same language, the same traditions, and the same whaling heritage. . . . See the press release for this article&nbsp;

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Food, Control, and Resistance: Rations and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and South Australia by Tamara Levi

  Great Plains research · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Food, Control, and Resistance: Rations and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and South Australia by Tamara Levi Charlotte Coté Food, Control, and Resistance: Rations and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and South Australia. By Tamara Levi. Foreword by Walter R. Echo-Hawk. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2016. ix + 227 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $39.99 paper. For Indigenous peoples throughout the world, traditional foods were, or are, at the very core of their cultures and existence. Ancestral knowledge, traditions, and languages were transmitted, strengthened, and affirmed through the gathering, harvesting, eating, and sharing of these foods. Colonization undermined this cultural relationship with food and colonial policies—such as removal, the establishment of reservations, and restricted access to fishing, hunting, trapping, and gathering sites—worked together in severing Indigenous peoples from their homelands that provided them with the animals, plants, and medicines that nourished and sustained their communities. In her book Food, Control, and Resistance: Rations and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and South Australia, Tamara Levi provides an interesting and unique comparative study of state food rationing in the 19th and 20th century between two Great Plains tribes and two Aborigine nations in Australia. Her study explores the colonial process whereby the Pawnee and Osage tribes in Nebraska and Indian Territory (which later became Oklahoma) and the Moorundie and Ngarrindjeris Aborigines at Point McLeay in South Australia were removed from their lands, restricted from having access to and/or harvesting their traditional foods, and forced to eat foods that were provided by the colonial agents through various rationing programs. These programs stayed in place until the early 1900s in the United States when the commodity food programs were established, and continued in Australia until the 1960s when Aboriginal people became eligible to receive government benefits. Situating her research within Settler Colonial and Food Studies, Levi argues that these US and Australian food rationing programs were a significant tool of colonization and worked alongside assimilation policies to weaken Indigenous societies and bring Indigenous peoples under colonial administration and control. Once Indigenous peoples became dependent on these food rations, government officials deliberately manipulated them, determining where and when the food would be distributed, restricting the kind and amount of foods that were distributed, and determining who the foods would be distributed to. Levi does not paint Indigenous people as passive victims of these policies; instead, she argues that they actively resisted these colonial rationing policies by utilizing strategies such as ignoring food rations altogether and/or taking rations for their own reasons and within their own cultural frameworks. Levi does a very impressive job of utilizing US National Archives to procure Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian agents' reservation rationing reports and Australian government agents' reports to support her discussion and analysis, and these primary sources make her study significant and original. However, her discussion on Indigenous resistance to these rationing policies could have been developed more fully and would have been stronger with reorganization of her material, which would have allowed for a better flow of the points she is making. This said, I agree with Pawnee law professor and attorney Walter Echo-Hawk's comment in the book's Plainsword that studies such as Levi's, which critically examine colonialism, are "timely." Such studies come as the 2007 United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has pushed Indigenous human rights into political forums and discussions, and has created minimum standards in addressing Indigenous people's right to eat, produce, and have access to their traditional foods. Charlotte Coté (Tseshaht/Nuu- chah- nulth Nation) Department of American Indian Studies University of Washington, Seattle Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

  PublisherDOI

• The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People by Joshua Reid (review)

  Native American and Indigenous Studies · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• “Indigenizing” Food Sovereignty. Revitalizing Indigenous Food Practices and Ecological Knowledges in Canada and the United States

  Humanities · 2016-07-15 · 255 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The food sovereignty movement initiated in 1996 by a transnational organization of peasants, La Via Campesina, representing 148 organizations from 69 countries, became central to self-determination and decolonial mobilization embodied by Indigenous peoples throughout the world. Utilizing the framework of decolonization and sustainable self-determination, this article analyzes the concept of food sovereignty to articulate an understanding of its potential for action in revitalizing Indigenous food practices and ecological knowledge in the United States and Canada. The food sovereignty movement challenged the hegemony of the globalized, neoliberal, industrial, capital-intensive, corporate-led model of agriculture that created destructive economic policies that marginalized small-scale farmers, removed them from their land, and forced them into the global market economy as wage laborers. Framed within a larger rights discourse, the food sovereignty movement called for the right of all peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right to define their own food and agricultural systems. “Indigenizing” food sovereignty moves beyond a rights based discourse by emphasizing the cultural responsibilities and relationships Indigenous peoples have with their environment and the efforts being made by Indigenous communities to restore these relationships through the revitalization of Indigenous foods and ecological knowledge systems as they assert control over their own foods and practices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors

  University of Washington Press eBooks · 2015-12-31 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Following the removal of the gray whale from the Endangered Species list in 1994, the Makah tribe of northwest Washington State announced that they would revive their whale hunts; their relatives, the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation of British Columbia, shortly followed suit. Neither tribe had exercised their right to whale - in the case of the Makah, a right affirmed in their 1855 treaty with the federal government - since the gray whale had been hunted nearly to extinction by commercial whalers in the 1920s. The Makah whale hunt of 1999 was an event of international significance, connected to the worldwide struggle for aboriginal sovereignty and to the broader discourses of environmental sustainability, treaty rights, human rights, and animal rights. It was met with enthusiastic support and vehement opposition. As a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation, Charlotte Cote offers a valuable perspective on the issues surrounding indigenous whaling, past and present. Whaling served important social, economic, and ritual functions that have been at the core of Makah and Nuu-chahnulth societies throughout their histories. Even as Native societies faced disease epidemics and federal policies that undermined their cultures, they remained connected to their traditions. The revival of whaling has implications for the physical, mental, and spiritual health of these Native communities today, Cote asserts. Whaling, she says, “defines who we are as a people.” Her analysis includes major Native studies and contemporary Native rights issues, and addresses environmentalism, animal rights activism, anti-treaty conservatism, and the public’s expectations about what it means to be “Indian.” These thoughtful critiques are intertwined with the author’s personal reflections, family stories, and information from indigenous, anthropological, and historical sources to provide a bridge between cultures. A Capell Family Book

  PublisherDOI

• Food Sovereignty, Food Hegemony, and the Revitalization of Indigenous Whaling Practices

  2014-12-05 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• P. Joshua Griffin

  4 shared

• Éric Angel

  Informatique, Biologie Intégrative et Systèmes Complexes

  2 shared

• Valerie Legge

  Memorial University of Newfoundland

  2 shared

• Dominique Clément

  2 shared

• Carol L. Higham

  2 shared

• Lindsey Popken

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Ryan O’Connor

  1 shared

• Carolyn C. James

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Native Knowledge Grant, Center for American Indian and Indig…
• Qacagʷac Grant, Center for American Indian and Indigenous St…
• Donald L. Fixico Award, A Drum in one Hand, A Sockeye in the…
• Nautilus Gold Award, A Drum in one Hand, A Sockeye in the Ot…
• Earthlab Innovation Grant, Co-Principal Investigator, Univer…