Nunavut’s Feeding My Family teaches education for empowerment

This photo of a $27.39 pie on sale in an Igloolik store is typical of the photos showing sky-high food prices which continue to be posted on the Feeding My Family Facebook page. (PHOTO FROM FMF FACEBOOK PAGE)

Leesee Papatsie of Iqaluit started the Feeding My Family Facebook page one year ago and watched it grow to nearly 20,000 members, many of whom demonstrated against the high cost of eating in Nunavut.

Now, Papatsie has adjusted her message: she wants people in Nunavut to go out and get an education.

“This site is about empowering people,” she recently posted on the popular social media site.

The best way to empower yourself is “to get trained or educated somehow,” she said.

In a recent posting, Papatsie urged members to stop by their hamlet office or Nunavut Arctic College centre and “go in there and ask what type of courses will be running in the future.”

Take resume writing, she suggested. “Take it. Take any type of course. We need to be teaching ourselves to move forward.”

The bottom line, Papatsie says, is “to find ways to educate ourselves.”

“This is a long process but you know what, we will not go away and we will be here — why not take a course?”

Photos showing those staggeringly high food prices, such as a $27.39 pie from Igloolik, continue to appear regularly on the Facebook page.

And those high prices haven’t changed, she said.

But Papatsie recently returned to Iqaluit with some new ways of looking at food security and how to tackle it.

Along with representatives for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, Papatsie attended the Hunger, Nutrition and Climate Justice conference in Dublin, Ireland, held from April 13 to April 15.

That conference, sponsored by the Irish government and the Mary Robinson Foundation for climate justice wanted to inspire “new ways of thinking about global development challenges” as well as more debate and better policies by “listening to and learning from the experiences of local people.”

The by-invitation-only conference brought together 300 people from around the world who are facing rising food prices, failed crops, under-nutrition, climate change and voicelessness.

Papatisie presented the Feeding My Family movement along with groups from place as diverse as Ecuador and Mongolia.

With the help of the conference organizers, Papatsie narrowed her presentation on “The right to food security in a changing Arctic: the Nunavut Food Security Coalition and the Feeding My Family campaign” down to 10 minutes.

In her presentation, Papatsie said the biggest challenge is still the failure of some community members to acknowledge the severity of food insecurity in Nunavut.

“I don’t believe this is happening in Canada” is a remark frequently posted on the FMF Facebook page, she said.

Another challenge is that dependence on social media as a platform for the Feeding My Family campaign means the message does not reach low-income families or those without access to the internet, she said.

Yet FMF has demonstrated the effectiveness of taking an unexpected and non-traditional approach, she said, “that is, Inuit voices speaking up for their rights, and being heard.”

“Working together is an important tradition for Inuit and by doing so they are driving change in Nunavut,” she said.

Papatsie said the Dublin conference was different than others she had attended because its presentations were aimed at people at the ground level.

The stories from people lead the conference, she said.

“One main thing, that I learned (plus a whole bunch of things), [is] to encourage people or to strengthen people, we need to get more educated to this style of life,” she said on her return.

“If we are to make it better for our future generations, we need to train or get education to make it better for us and for the future.”

A Statistics Canada study on food insecurity in Canada shows the link between education and food insecurity: the prevalence of food insecurity is twice as high in households where no one in the household has graduated from high school, compared with households where post-secondary graduation is the highest level of education achieved in the household.

“We are about empowering people right now. The food prices are about the same, what I am seeing is people are speaking up, which is really good,” Papatsie told Nunatsiaq News. “It will take time.”