Community food baskets

Since time immemorial, Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island held autonomy over their food systems and maintained food security practices through intimate and long-standing reciprocal relationships with the land, forests, ocean, and water relations around them.  

A wholistic way of life was supported through sustainable practices of hunting, fishing gathering, preserving, storing, distributing, trading, feasting and ceremonies. 

Community-centered land stewardship and regenerative cultivation practices were passed down through oral traditions, inter-generational mentoring, and community gatherings and being out on the land together. 

However, through colonialism, the displacement of Indigenous Peoples from their traditional homelands through ongoing colonial policies such as the Indian Act and reserve systems, the increase of processed food and the sky rocketing food prices of industralized foods globally, have and continue to create a pandemic of food insecurity across generations in Indigenous Communities across Turtle Island. 

In 2022, we rolled out our inaugural community food baskets program. During the growing season, we were able to create opportunities of access to healthy and culturally relevant foods to 150 families (approximately averaging 4 per family), approximately a total of 600 Indigenous Peoples.  It was our intention through the community-food baskets program to put into action, Indigenous-led community efforts to enact localized food sovereignty, wholistic ways to decolonize our diets and hands-on ways community members can participate in preserving ancestral knowledge. 

Our communities of focus included three First Nations throughout B.C. This includes the Squamish, Tsawwassen, Halalt First Nations and Urban Indigenous Community members. 

The community food baskets included: pickled beans, pickled beets, salmon burgers, bison burgers, vegetable-bison stew, blueberry jam and fresh apples and potatoes. 

The Salmon was harvested from Musqueam Elder and Fisherman Martin Sparrow and supported by his partner Shona Sparrow and a Musqueam youth being mentored. The bison was harvested and processed through ceremony in the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc Territory. Our vegetables were grown and harvested by Tsawassen First Nations Farm School students as well as local organic farms.