Food processing Workshops

This season, as we launched our inaugural food baskets program, we also offered hands-on opportunities for community members to learn, deepen and share together what Indigenous health means to us. 

We provided educational food processing workshops where we were able 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. We explored how Indigenous health is more than just physical but speaks to our wholistic wellbeing. This includes the spiritual, mental, and emotional wellness of Indigenous People. 

The very act of Indigenous peoples having access and control over facilitating their own visionings of what it means to have individual and collective wellbeing through access to healthy and culturally-relevant foods and food practices has always been central to Indigenous cultures. 

However through colonization and the rapid increase of urbanization, the access to traditional foods has been a challenge. This has affected, the ability to maintain traditional food practices and sustain communities solely on traditional foods. The right to healthy foods is fundamental to Indigenous Peoples. Even though many of the vegetables and herbs that were used in our community baskets were not traditional Indigenous foods, our focus was on finding ways to revitalize wellness and to restore our agency to Food Sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous self-determination efforts. 

Food Security programs can be transactional at times and through our programming this year, community members have shared how important it was for them to not just have access to culturally-relevant and healthy foods but also to have access to opportunities to gather in community, be out on the land, learn to make and preserve culturally relevant foods and meals for their families and communities. 

Food security programs need to include and move towards a foundation of food sovereignty programming rather than only focusing on immediate food crisis distribution programs. They need to be driven and led by the community members they are serving. It’s not only about how many families you feed but also the deep wisdom that is breathed to life during such program activities whether through the growing, making, preserving or sharing of the food. It is a long-term approach to living relationally and what wholistic wellness means in practice.

All the food produced during these workshops went into our food baskets program that were gifted out to 150 Indigenous Families and Community members. The communities we served this season were from the Halat First Nation, Tsawassen First Nation, Squamish First Nation and local Urban Indigenous Community Members. The food processing workshops we provided included the following workshops: canning pickled beets, pickled beans, blueberry jam, and smoked salmon, making home-made salmon & bison burgers and preparing home-made bison and vegetable stew.