Northern community tackles food insecurity
Volunteers, workers helping to support struggling residents during pandemic
SASKATOON Rebecca Sylvestre’s vision of keeping northern communities fed hasn’t been hampered by COVID -19.
If she had her way, families would be equipped with the skills and ingredients to prepare healthy meals together.
Youth in those communities would be knowledgeable about traditions around food and how to turn to the land for sustenance.
Sylvestre’s home of Turnor Lake and the nearby Birch Narrows Dene Nation, about 580 kilometres north of Saskatoon, reached Day 60 of lockdown on Wednesday.
Last week, Indigenous Services Canada announced it was contributing $2.3 million toward managing the ongoing outbreak in Saskatchewan’s northwest, with a portion going toward addressing food security.
The Métis Nation — Saskatchewan (MN — S) and the Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC) are also investing upwards of $1 million into food security over the next two months, to be used for the purchase, storage and distribution of food staples.
While food insecurity in the region has been exacerbated in recent months, the issue was pervasive long before the pandemic.
According to a 2019 national report from the Assembly of First Nations, 48 per cent of Indigenous households living on reserve face food insecurity and 23 living off reserve do, compared to an overall national food insecurity rate of 8.3 per cent.
Turnor Lake has a single grocery store and the nearest large shopping centre is a three-hour drive. Weekly shipments of produce can lose their freshness during travel.
“We live so far up north that it goes from truck to truck to truck to get up here,” Sylvestre said. “A lot of times we go to get the fresh fruit and most of it’s spoiled at the bottom, and we have to throw some of it away.
“So we’re not getting the value of nutrition that everybody else is getting. And the prices — the prices get higher as they come north.”
Fortunately, a robust food education program and progress toward long-term solutions are already taking place in Turnor Lake.
In 2018, Sylvestre and Hélène Hebert formed the Turnor Lake and Birch Narrows Community Food Centre, incorporating cooking workshops and land based education in order to give people better access to more nutritious diets.
The centre delivers a lot of its programming through shared community spaces; work on a physical space with a community kitchen for the centre is underway.
One of the largest drivers for its creation was a desire for a place to prepare and share game and fish with the whole community.
“The centre was created because our community needed support,” Sylvestre said.
“We needed to have a place where we can go and teach children to do basic things in life, to bake, to learn food safety. But most of all, for land based programming.”
Since the pandemic hit northwest Saskatchewan, Sylvestre’s life has been running at a frenetic pace.
As the front-line worker for the food centre, she and a team of volunteers portion and drop off about 200 food packages every two weeks.
The team also processes and portions out meat from hunters, trappers and fisherman.
In her position as volunteer treasurer, Hebert has been hard at work securing grants while Sylvestre continues to deliver programming remotely over Facebook.
Most recently, a grant from the Meadow Lake Tribal Council procured enough seeds to ensure every community member would be able to have a backyard garden.
The centre’s main sponsor, Community Food Centres Canada, recently asked Sylvestre if other northern communities needed assistance. She’s added reaching out across the north to her already busy schedule.