Spam Equals Spam: Cheryl L’Hirondelle

Cheryl L’Hirondelle’s collaborative online cookbook/artwork, the NDNSPAM Cookbook: Celebrity Edition (2011), embraces Spam as mediation for storytelling in the form of recipes.[1] This volume invites viewers to stand at the stove and enjoy recipes from thirteen celebrities and ten commissioned Spam art projects by Aboriginal artists.[2] Her written declaration provides the main premise of her project:

Also known as, indian steak, spam, klik, kam, bologne and/or any other processed meat has gained popularity and widespread consumption within Aboriginal communities since the early 30s. Though not part of our “traditional” diet, processed meat has been embraced due in part to its affordability and widespread distribution within our communities. As the champions of adaptability and warriors of survival, Indigenous Peoples all around the world know how to make things our own.[3]

L’Hirondelle re-claims and re-appropriates a commonly considered budget-conscious food item, and government issued ration of  “commod” foods to reservations, as a strategy for not only emphasizing the act of making the best use of what resources are present, but also employing the NDNSPAM Cookbook as an email listserv. This listserv offers communication for messages that can range from “political to ceremonial to humorous to musical.”[4] For years, L’Hirondelle collected all the junky chain emails she received from other Aboriginal people and observed the distribution of these emails.

L’Hirondelle embraces the unwanted spam email as a strategy to encourage communication demonstrating her tendency towards inverting meaning and finding use in what most would discard. An absolution of sorts underlies her equation of unwanted spam email and the processed meat her mother cooked for her as a child. As she explains, “I felt somehow vindicated when I realised that I wasn't the only person who ate that meat.”[5] Collecting and disseminating the recipes of Spam with an online cookbook further expresses this quest to come to terms with Spam as a shared food experience reflective of L’Hirondelle’s self identifying as a “nomadic mixed-blood.” 

Inversion, or in other words, changing the meaning and essentially the use of an object or material, brings to mind Jimmie Durham’s description of the adaptation of materials and tools introduced by Europeans. He writes that every “object, every material brought in from Europe was taken and transformed with great energy. A rifle in the hands of a soldier was not the same as a rifle that had undergone Duchampian changes in the hands of a defender.”[6] In terms of L’Hirondelle’s online cookbook, her re-appropriation and reframing of Spam takes the kitsch aspects of the product into a realm purposed for an Indigenous audience. Merchandise such as crochet-topped tea towels and cups in the shape of the Spam can design all display the NDNSPAM logo.  L’Hirondelle’s logo design includes electric versions of the four sacred colours – yellow, red, blue and white. The design includes a white silhouette of a bison with a thought bubble full of stylized designs of four-legged animals in hot pink. The title NDNSPAM is two-tone, with hot pink for the letters NDN and bright lemon yellow for the word SPAM. The use of the bison in this design signifies what was once a major source of food from an expanse of land across North America.

L’Hirondelle’s reference to the bison in the NDNSPAM logo speaks to an important reverence for the animal as a symbol of cultural knowledge and a source of nourishment important in the preparation of a portable food called pemmican. Pemmican also raises an interesting point about the absence of roles and activities around food preparation. Dr. Danny Musqua, Elder in the Saulteaux nation and honorary degree recipient at the University of Saskatchewan, describes the year-round process of making pemmican. In the spring, berries were picked and dried, then buffalo or moose were killed at a certain time in the late summer so the meat was lean and it would dry efficiently in the wind. Firewood was cut and stacked in the winter in preparation for the early spring when maple sap was boiled to make maple sugar. All the ingredients were ground together with marrow fat to make Pemmican, a portable high-energy food.[7] This narrative of pemmican preparation conveys the importance of time, season and place in relation to food preparation.

Although Spam, as a mass produced food product, reifies placelessness and homogeneity, L’Hirondelle refers to spam in the following “recipe” to describe her experience of watching and learning the techniques of spam cookery, thus imbuing meaningful context for this canned meat product derived from her childhood food memories.

Our mama always said, “you’ll shit if you’re well fed” but that was just her way of saying don’t waste food. “Quit your belly-aching and clean your plate up. Don’t go to bed on an empty stomach. If it doesn’t kill you it will make you stronger and as long as we got water we got soup.”

Sliced and fried soft edible pink. Soft but not like the sponge not melt in your mouth like the hard of sponge toffee. Coral coloured but not precious or semi precious and nor rare or on occasion it was everyday fare it was common. Salmon pink but not salmon not from the sea not spawning upstream not even chicken of the sea though it was canned and opened often. Edible and served as soup steak sandwich sausage gruel we called it valium stew. Generous dollops of ketchup made palatable macaroni floating around bobbing canned peas in a familiar sea of stewed tomatoes. Plated turquoise melamine devoured harvest gold copper toned kitchen fluorescent orange crochet and macramé amidst an urban whitewash where the buffalo no longer roam. home sweet home.[8]