Love, Food and Sovereignty: Indigenous Romance and Relationality in Tashia Hart's Native Love Jams

Abstract

This article analyzes Red Lake Nation of Anishinaabe author Tashia Hart’s Native Love Jams (2023) 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. As part of this healthy relation with nature, food plays a central role in the novel, for it organizes desire and relation to place, thus aligning affective sovereignty with food sovereignty. The novel challenges its foundations—more specifically, its historical whiteness and liberal individualism—as it vindicates Indigenous relational epistemologies in order to assert and promote survivance and belonging.