Hello, welcome to Righting Our Relations with Food, a podcast series where we meet with guests from across the country to discuss food security, food sovereignty, and how we can make changes to our food system with the focus on Canada. Righting Relations is a national network of adult educators and community organizers working for radical social change and the series is part of a larger project on food sovereignty and the Sustainable Development Goals, so if you're interested in learning more, please check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. My guest today is Lisa Perley-Dutcher. Lisa is a Maliseet/Wolastoqi woman from the Tobique First Nation, and a registered nurse for 30 years with a master's in nursing. Her work has focused on the improvement of health outcomes for Indigenous peoples in Canada. Lisa also served as president of the Indigenous Nurses Association of Canada and recently she has conducted land based work connecting food harvesting and preparation with the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Welcome Lisa, thank you so much for being here with me today. If you could just maybe introduce yourself and the work that you do.
My name is Lisa Perley-Dutcher, I'm from Tobique First Nation, although I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick. My work currently is of the revitalization of our Wolastoqey language, trying to start an immersion school in this area in Wolastoq territory. We're in a current crisis right now, where we have less than 100 fluent speakers left in our language. So I've made it my life's mission to, to focus on language. And part of that process is, you know, trying to get a place to have it, but also to create an environment that is a land-based environment for children to learn our language, because originally, our language was, stems from the land. And a lot of my focus is on like building a curriculum that is a land-based curriculum. So currently, that is my work. And I I'm semi retired from that. But like I said, really just focusing on the health and well being of our people always has been my goal. And language revitalization is a big piece of that. So yeah, that's basically me. I have four sons, and with my husband, and we have four grandchildren. And yeah, so that's pretty much me in a nutshell.
Okay, thank you for that introduction. So just kind of like moving on to the next set of questions. So we here at Righting Relations have been talking about food sovereignty, maybe just to maybe switch gears a bit, I guess the first question that I would like to ask you, especially where you're from, like, what does food sovereignty look like in practice?
I mean, in practice, I mean, I think there's something we need to talk about. First, I think it's definitely something you know, we've always had food insecurity growing up, you know, our food is, it's part of who we are as people, and I think that's, you know, something we have to, we have to make sure that it's secure. And, you know, when we talk about food sovereignty, and how that looks like, it looks like, you know, having access to good quality food that, you know, is not something we get from other countries or other people but maybe something that we're more connected to in some way, like we're able to, to get our own food sources. And when you don't have control of your food source, then that's puts you at a disadvantage. And our people has, have been at a disadvantage for a long time. And I think, you know, part of our sovereignty process is by having greater access to to our food choices and also how we grow food, when we grow food, how we have access to food? And you know, yeah, so in securing that food, so that our people will, you know, have the essential things that they need to maintain health.
Yeah, like, what approaches have you heard of in terms of addressing, you know, like the food sovereignty, especially like in your area, that have been very successful?
Well, in some of our communities, here, they're starting to have community gardens and, you know, they're starting to have communal hunts, and, you know, having distribution of, of, of, you know, some game that that we would hunt here, traditionally, we've always shared our food with our elders, like, if somebody went fishing and got salmon, somebody got fiddleheads, they would take those, they would get enough for themselves, but also for the elders in the community. That's kind of been our practice. we've strayed away from that, for various reasons. And I think, you know, our people are trying to move back in that direction again. But again, there's a lot of barriers in the way of that our community, in the Fredericton area where I live, there, there's a community garden, which we're a part of, and we're trying to establish our partnership with them. So that, you know, when we start our immersion school, our land based immersion school, that the children will get to go be a part of that learning garden, so that they can go learn how to garden, when to plant, how to take care of your garden, how to reap your garden, you know, so there's all kinds of that initiative is actually quite, quite good, because a lot of our some of our community members are also a part of that, and they're taking it back to the so they come and learn from experienced gardeners how to garden, and, and then they're taking it back to community and helping community to have like, not just a small community garden, but a large community garden that can be harvested, and help to support the people, you know, so that they can have healthy foods accessible to them. So yeah, that's that's kind of a nice example of how the non Indigenous community is helping to support indigenous sovereignty. By building capacity for people and their learning process and learning how to garden then learning how to how relearning, I said, should say, a lot of those practices that have just been kind of lost or taken away.
Yeah, that sounds exciting. Even with that, have youth been involved or interested in that as well?
Oh, most definitely, yes there's uh,there's young people, and they're, they're taking it back to the young people in the communities. Some of the ones that - well, I mean, how do you define young? I mean, most of them are under 30. So I think that's pretty amazing that, you know, you have people at that age that are interested and taking it back to the community and, you know, teaching kids that are in school systems there. Like I said, our immersion school will be that will be part of their education. So that that's hopefully going to start in the fall of 2022. So that's kind of what we're aiming for.
All right, so, yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of our current community stuff being done.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, there, you know, there could be more and I think there are some, uh hunting's more sporadic and, and I guess I don't hear so much about the hunting aspects of it, but I know it's happening. And I know like, again, people are still getting out there. They do have like even tan hiding sessions that are happening in some of our communities. Like teaching any open it up to the community, anybody who wants to come and learn how to tan hide and, but I mean, you know, I mean, again, I, you know, community is very different. Like if it's, if it's, it's within an urban area or in an isolated area, then you know, food sovereignty can look a lot different. But I think in the communities, our rural communities, gardening seems to be more of an easier thing to have access to then within an urban setting, but it's still happening here. So.
Okay, so for, as a closing question, like, what do you think we should approach Righting our Relations with Food?
Um, you know, I think righting our relations with food is is, that's yet to be determined, I think it's something that, that, you know, getting, getting out there, and learning that knowledge so that we can learn how to, you know, from the seed to the harvesting of the food is, is a commitment. I mean, you have to commit to that work, I mean, it's not something that's going to look after itself, you have to actually commit to that work and add our knowledge keepers, people who have access or even the hunter, you know, that's something that, you know, as Indigenous people we typically have not had access to, for some time, even our local salmon, like they're not, we don't have access to, you know, freshwater salmon anymore, because of the there they don't they have fish hatcheries that are kind of replacing that and trying to get people away from fishing, which is like counterintuitive to food sovereignty. So it's, you know, these are the things that I think we really have to reconnect, take the time to reconnect. And I think that taking the time to invest into the commitment to growing food, the commitment to her, like, you know, sharing food, to taking care of the earth. You know, these are, these are big things that face us all really, as a human race, because all it takes is one disaster, that shuts everything down, like in a community. And that really puts us all in a very vulnerable situation. So I think that, you know, being aware of what's happening in the environment, and kind of learning to adapt and create spaces that you know, are respectful to the environment, too. And I think that's a big piece of it is that we can't pollute, while we're trying to create food for ourselves. I think that's a big mistake, that I hope we all learn from.
Thank you for listening to this month's episode of Righting our Relations with Food. We would like to thank our wonderful guests for sharing their knowledge and their insights with us, and from everyone here at Righting Relations Canada, we would like to thank our partner, the John Humphrey Center for Peace and Human Rights, and of course, our funders, the Catherine Donnelly Foundation, and Employment and Social Development Canada, for making this project possible. And we hope you'll join us again next month.
