Canad Inns Destination Centre
Club Regent Casino Hotel
1415 Regent Ave. West

Join Four Arrows Region Health Authority Inc. on June 19th, 20th and 21st to share and learn about indigenous cultural food practices and the ceremonies, stories, and traditional languages that honour food.

Register for the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Summit

As the Food Security Coordinator at Four Arrows Regional Health Authority Inc., Byron has seen first-hand the interest and need for Indigenous communities to reconnect with their food systems. Byron considers himself to be connected to Mother Earth and has found a definite need for this knowledge within himself. Indeed, this is how the vision for the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Summit began. First came the questions: What is food? What does it mean to Indigenous people? And how can we move away from thinking of food as merely sustenance?

To answer these questions requires moving away from a food system that is outside of Indigenous people, and broadening the scope of what an Indigenous food system could be. Too often we hear stories of food insecurity, of people going hungry, in Indigenous communities. Those stories are important, but so are the stories of how we are spending time on the land, growing, gathering, hunting, fishing, and trapping. In many cases, these traditional food practices; the knowledge, the ability and skills around the practices are already present in communities. But it often exists in small pockets, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to share. It’s time to share stories that can help “reignite the fire within our communities,” as Byron calls it. It begs the question: What is Indigenous Food Sovereignty?