This article is part of a series on Canadian food and travel, with support from Destination Canada.

When I was in my mid-20s, I had the opportunity to go on a medicine walk around my home territory of Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki. Readers might better recognize it as Halifax, Nova Scotia. My territory is mostly shallow soil on bedrock. We have many bogs, swamps, and wetlands. We were walking through a wetland near the coast when our guide pointed to a scruffy, waist-high bush with leaves that look similar to bay leaves.

Our guide said that this plant was known as “spice bush,” explaining that food was eaten to survive, and spice bush was one of the few things that could be used to flavor a dish outside of smoke, salt, and whatever was seasonally available. But as the colonization of North America steamrolled through, traditional practices and foods became more scarce, and Indigenous people had to become more creative.

When I was a kid, my father used to make me pan-fried bread called four cents. He’d laugh and tell me it was named that because that was as much as anyone was willing to pay for it. I remember he used to put raisins and berries in it and smother it in margarine and jam. Without meaning to, he was passing on a tradition of survival and adaptation. Mi’kmaq in the 19th and 20th century were given flour by the Nova Scotia Indian Agents in charge of “managing us,” but we’d sneak in foods that were hunted and gathered in secret. This would have been my first experience with fusion food: colonial rations flavored with Indigenous resistance.

Connections with culture, language, and food practices didn’t passively fade away as European settlers made their way to Turtle Island, the name many Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples mainly in the northeastern part of North America use to refer to North American continent. Rather, our way of life was forcibly removed from us and criminalized. Significant ceremonies like potlatch and it’s accompanying feast were banned. Residential schools punished children for speaking their languages, and access to traditional ways of hunting and gathering were all but eliminated in many areas with the implementation of the reserve system. As we look at the history of Indigenous food in Canada, we’ve seen everything from the active destruction of traditional food practices such as the massive kill off of bison and buffalo, to the clever adaptation of communities that made “new traditional foods” from government-issued food allowances, like my father’s four cents. This penchant for survival and flair lives on in Indigenous cooking today through fusion foods, pow wow staples, and a return to simplicity.