Ammo, greenhouses, food pantries: What Sahtu residents in N.W.T. say will help them put food on the table

Beatrice Kosh needs a bag of flour to make bannock. 

The 65-year-old Tulı́t'a, N.W.T., resident is waiting on a pension cheque to come at the end of the month and until then, she doesn't have the money to buy that flour for herself. 

"My neighbour … she's an elder next door too, she gave me a bowl of flour. So me and my common law [partner], we made bannock yesterday." But, said Kosh, she can't always ask her neighbour for help. 

"I only got about 20 cents to my name. But it's OK, I'll figure out something." 

Kosh was one of about 20 people who came out for a community meeting in Tulı́t'a last Thursday with Sahtu MLA Danny McNeely, and representatives from Food Banks Canada and Nutrition North.

McNeely and both organizations visited the five Sahtu communities to talk about food security, and McNeely's idea to set up a food bank in each place. 

He sees those efforts as a way to help his constituents manage how expensive it is to live in the Sahtu, a problem made worse by barge cancellations in 2023 and 2024.

Speaking to CBC News on Thursday, Kosh said a food bank in Tulı́t'a would help a lot of people, including herself, become more food secure.

Helen Squirrel, another resident who attended the meeting last week, agreed. She said money being touted by Food Banks Canada and Nutrition North for tools to get out on the land to harvest traditional food, like fuel, ammunition and snowmobiles, would help too.

"We can't just rely on store-bought groceries and that. We need to eat our traditional food because that's what keeps us going, keeps us strong," she said. 

Aron Ellton, who has lived in Fort Good Hope, N.W.T., his whole life, hunts caribou and moose. He said getting communities equipment to get out on the land will "open up a lot of other doors with the traditional foods." He'd like to see funding being used to teach people how to make dry fish. 

There's already a food pantry run by volunteers at the Our Lady of Good Hope Roman Catholic church. Ellton says growing that food bank could make a big difference because "there's a lot of people struggling here in town." 

In Délı̨nę, meanwhile, many people at a community meeting there talked about the need for healthy produce. 

Caroline Yukon, for example, said that people have diabetes because of poor diets of processed food.

"When we get produce and vegetables in, it's bought right away or some of [it] is already bad," she said. When that happens, it means waiting on the next freight flight to bring in more fresh food. 

A solution she'd like to explore is setting up a community greenhouse. It's been tried before, she said, but it wasn't maintained by the volunteers who started it up. She thinks it's an idea worth revisiting. 

The touring delegation didn't sit down with members of the public in Colville Lake, but there was a meeting there with community leaders who expressed some reservations about what Food Banks Canada and McNeely were pitching. 

Joseph Kochon, the band manager for Behdzi Ahda First Nation, told the group that 90 per cent of his community's diet was traditional food. 

"The emphasis [is] on independence," said David Codzi who, along with Kochon, has many leadership roles in the community. "We don't want to pay for other people to do stuff for other people, you know like go hunting … we make sure that we provide things so that they can do all the things for themselves." 

Codzi said having more than one flight into the community each week would help, and also bringing in material goods for people to get out on the land and to hunt. 

"Those cost lots," he said. "Tents, stoves, fuel, ammunition, all that sort of thing has to come from somewhere. So when you think about [how] to keep that going, that's security for us."

Shauna Spilchak of Norman Wells, meanwhile, said her town gets meat from outfitters after they take clients out hunting, and she said a community kitchen where that meat could be processed would be an asset to her community. 

"Somewhere to properly wrap, cut it, clean it, and then we could dole it out to the communities and ourselves better," she said. 

The Town of Norman Wells has operated a food pantry for four years. Its co-ordinator, Jaime Kearsey, said she currently organizes monthly food hampers for 28 families. 

Spilchak's daughter, Tiana, works with young families and said she wanted to see more high-fibre options in those hampers – like lentils and blueberries. They're expensive and sometimes of poor quality in the grocery store, she said.

Food Banks Canada and Nutrition North Canada told residents in various communities that funding from their respective grants and programs could be used for many of the things residents expressed interest in, including traditional harvesting activities, greenhouses, and shelving for existing food pantries. 

The purpose of last week's trip was not only for both organizations to meet with people in the region and learn about their needs, but also to get a feel for whether there was support for McNeely's idea of establishing a food distribution hub in the region and organizing deliveries of donated food to each community. 

McNeely says one of his next steps will be to find funding for a coordinator who can work out the logistics of a distribution hub.