Week 9: Food and Reconciliation

What is the Nutrition North Canada Program?

• Government of Canada program to help make nutritious food and some essential items more affordable and more accessible in the North

• Yet, research shows federal funds sent to grocery stores aren’t fully reaching the consumers

What are the food challenges for Indigenous communities today?

• high food prices in northern communities

• Concerns around industry-related contamination of foods

• Landscape changes and disruptions such as forestry and hydropower threatening land-based traditional food systems

What is Indigenous food sovereignty?

• specific policy approach to addressing the underlying issues impacting Indigenous peoples

• ability to respond to our own needs for healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods.

• Community mobilization and the maintenance of multi-millennial cultural harvesting strategies and practices

• policy driven by practice

What are the 4 principles of Indigenous food sovereignty?

1) sacred or divine sovereignty

2) participatory

3) self-determination

4) Policy

Principle 1: Sacred or divine sovereignty (IFS)

• Food is a gift from the Creator; in this respect the right to food is sacred and cannot be constrained or recalled by colonial laws, policies and institutions.

• upholding our sacred responsibility to nurture healthy, interdependent relationships with the land, plants and animals that provide us with our food.

Principle 2: Participatory (IFS)

• based on “action”, or the day-to-day practice of maintaining cultural harvesting strategies

• Living reality for present and future generations

• continued participation in cultural harvesting strategies at all of the individual, family, community and regional levels is key.

Principle 3: Self-Determination (IFS)

• Ability to respond to our own needs for healthy, culturally adapted Indigenous foods.

• The ability to make decisions over the amount and quality of food we hunt, fish, gather, grow and eat.

• Freedom from dependence on grocery stores or corporately controlled food production, distribution and consumption in industrialized economies.

Principle 4: Policy (IFS)

• reconcile Indigenous food and cultural values with colonial laws and policies and mainstream economic activities.

• provides a restorative framework for policy reform in forestry, fisheries, rangeland, environmental conservation, health, agriculture, and rural and community development