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Aboriginal peoples in Canada suffer disproportionately high rates of various health problems including diabetes and heart disease. In an Aboriginal worldview which understands individuals, communities and land to be infused with an underlying spiritual unity, health can be understood to stem from a state of connectedness within individuals and between individuals, communities, and land. This holistic vision of health captures not only the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of individual health, but also a broader sense of community health.
The resilience of a community is an important indicator of its overall health, and is reflected in its self-sufficiency, its adaptability, and its capacity to meet its own needs under conditions of external change. Food plays a unique and meaningful role in this conceptualization of health. Food affects individual nutrition but also plays a role in the social and cultural aspects of community health and can connect individuals to the land. The way that a community accesses food is also an important component of its resilience.
Typically, a community that is resilient in its food supply is one that produces food nearby to the people who consume that food; and in which there is a constant exchange and evolution of food related knowledge. For Canada's Aboriginal peoples, a locally rooted base of food knowledge has been dwindling. Therefore, an important part of increasing community resilience is to facilitate the exchange and development of food knowledge that is grounded in place, in the reality of the land and the life it encompasses.
This report presents the development and findings of the Learning Garden program, which was developed and run in partnership with Ginoogaming and Aroland First Nations in Northwestern Ontario. With the overall aim of fostering this vision of holistic health, the Learning Garden program was developed with the purpose of increasing physical, emotional and social indicators of health, while taking an initial step toward community resilience in the area of food by increasing local food knowledge. Specifically, the purpose of the program was to increase holistic health and to increase experience-based knowledge of both vegetable gardening and forest foods, nutrition and its link to health.
The purpose of the research was to (1) examine the outcomes of the program against its goals for holistic health and knowledge, and to explore three additional research questions. Specifically, (2) we observed through qualitative analysis the process of learning that unfolded in the context of the program with an eye to understanding whether the holistic, experiential, and place-based approach we used resonated with program participants. In addition, (3) we drew upon quantitative survey data to better understand participants' current food behaviours, food values, and perceptions of the food system, in addition to how these perceptions and behaviours correlated with other variables of interest, including holistic health and cultural identity. Finally, (4) we explored through qualitative data the participants' perceptions of place and sought a better understanding of the interactions among place, food, and culture.
Our analyses of participants' perceptions of their food systems revealed that the knowledge base for cultivated and forest food was limited and that it was largely convenience and price that drove people to the dominant food system for the majority of their food. Nonetheless, correlational results also indicated that engaging in forest food activities such as hunting and fishing, and valuing local foods were associated with positive, healthy qualities such as self-reported health, life satisfaction, and social capital. Therefore, even though knowledge and use of the local food system was limited, there may be benefits to accessing this food system for well-being.
Qualitative findings regarding participants' perceptions of place were particularly intriguing. Participants' perceptions of their traditional lands were marked by concerns of contamination and an awareness of change. The change they perceived in their lands was attributed to human activities in the Western culture, such as climate change and industry.
Further observation revealed, however, that participants' perceptions of place were much broader than we had assumed. Specifically, their notions of place included the physical structures of the global food system in their communities, such as nearby grocery and convenience stores, and could also be argued to include less tangible elements of the "global place", such as media, popular fashion, and technology. This insight regarding participants' broad understandings of place and place-based learning resulted in some theoretical developments regarding the interactions among learning, food, place and culture.