This article analyzes Red Lake Nation of Anishinaabe author Tashia Hart’s Native Love Jams as a relevant intervention in both Indigenous literature and the popular romance genre. The article argues that Hart reclaims the genre as a space of representational sovereignty. The novel departs from damage-centered narratives grounded in trauma and loss, and foregrounds joy, sensuality and erotic pleasure as central Indigenous experiences in the present. It thus redefines love as not merely individual but inherently relational, expanding it to encompass self-love, community care, and sustaining connection to the natural world. Food plays a central role in the novel, for it organizes desire and relation to place, thus aligning affective sovereignty with food sovereignty. By conversing with and responding to the romance conventions, the novel challenges its foundations as it vindicates Indigenous relational epistemologies to assert and promote survivance and belonging.
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Native Love Jams integrates two of Hart’s main motivations: food and love, both of which are central to her activism and her fiction. As she says, “I wanted to write a contemporary romance with the food sovereignty movement of Native America at its heart” (Friends 2024). For this purpose, Hart refers to her own experience: she is a food activist, she was mentored by Chef Sean Sherman (Oglala), who runs a well-known restaurant in Minneapolis, and she has compiled the “Indigenous Food Producers and Suppliers List.” She has spoken of how food is related to empathy, self-love and acceptance, and she claims that wild foods provide emotional sustenance: “My identity is inseparable from the food I eat. Chokecherry syrup and mashkiigobagwaaboo (swamp tea) feel like home. They are markers of place, space, and time. ... Food and healing go hand in hand” (in Krishna 2019). Her stated inspiration for the novel came “from her own experiences traveling as an Indigenous Chef for food sovereignty summits and events” (in Colvin 2024). Taken together, these experiences position Hart within the Indigenous Food Sovereignty movement, and they illuminate the ethical and political stakes of her representation of food and relationality in the novel. (61)
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