“Stop sending expired food”….”fried chicken 64.99”
IQALUIT, Nunavut — A head of cabbage for $20. Fifteen bucks for a small bag of apples.
A case of ginger ale: $82.
Fed up and frustrated by sky-high food prices and concerned over widespread hunger in their communities, thousands of Inuit have spent weeks posting pictures and price tags from their local grocery stores to a Facebook site called Feed My Family.
Holy hell.
WHAT IN THE FUCK? This shit is not okay.
ughhslfkajsdlf gross gross gross
64.99?????
Reblogging for the extra articles.
Also… I might show up to this protest and support them.
Pay attention to this stuff, please, followers who haven’t heard about this! This kind of thing is completely erased in news media.
This is really fucking important.
This is why I don’t respect anyone who blindly supports the anti-sealing protestors. Because for a lot of people, it’s the only affordable option.
It’s not just Iqaluit. In Nain, Labrador this problem has been going on for ages and nobody does anything about it. $47 for a ham and $17 for a block of cheese. In Rigolet, Labrador, a loaf of bread costs $7. Here’s another picture of an Iqaluit food price changing before your very eyes.
The NNCP is starving people, reducing their food choices, and keeping people on EI poor. This is so, so wrong.
How can we help? I joined the group and checked out the website, but I didn’t see anything that can be actively done (other than raising awareness, which, of course, is great).
Excellent question! If you read through the group (which is here, for anyone who missed it), there are people talking about some ways to help.
- Look at the latest news on the Feeding My Family website to see what the priorities are and how you might be able to help.
- If you’re Canadian, call your local MP and ask to discuss this issue and express your concern.
- Look up ways to support putting pressure onto airlines to charge fair rates (a $1000 plane ticket should be from one coast to the other, not a few hundred miles).
- Research and learn what you can about food sustainability. For a start, how about learning square foot/metre (French intensive) gardening or container gardening and starting to practice it yourself? Share these techniques with friends and family. Get good at it so you can teach them to others who have poor food security in your own area.
- For the love of God, stop signing “anti-sealing”/”anti-hunting” petitions and supporting Greenpeace’s actions without understanding the complicated, nuanced situation in the North.
- Watch the FB group, because people there mention direct donations and ways to help the organizations actually on the ground there.
- For example, one person is starting up a donation project/fundraiser.
- Look at what organizations like FoodShare are doing and support them.
There is so much to be done. Sharing news articles and stories, lists of resources, donation and fundraising pages, and knowledge about food security is critical, but there’s a lot more work of all sorts.
Things that (usually white) folks who consider themselves fair and educated and liberal in big southern cities say about hunting under the impression that they understand the situation in the North that never fail to make me bristle;
- “I’m against seal hunting but it’s okay if they’re Inuit” Inuit are not the only Native group in Canada that traditionally hunts seals and to suggest only people registered with the government as Inuit should be able to hunt them is terribly racist and exclusionary to other nations that overlap many of the same territories, such as Dene (who have had a history of being excluded from legislation written to benefit Inuit, this was a big discussion that happened when Nunavut was formed) and some Cree bands, among others. That aside, even just suggesting that only native people with government treaty status should be allowed to hunt raises issues dating back to several decades ago when Canada had terribly racist and sexist laws on the books that stripped native women who married white men of their treaty status and banned their children from having their status recognized, as well as force natives who wanted to vote in federal elections to renounce their status. These laws were not amended until 1985 and people were allowed to reapply for treaty status, but the paperwork is a nightmare and many people didn’t bother. As a result, the North is full of people without treaty status who have just as much native heritage and were raised with as much of the culture as people who do, but nothing can really be done about it. As one of my friends put it “I’ve got the skin colour I just don’t have the number to go with it.” It’s a very complicated issue.
- “Inuit who make seal clothing for themselves are okay, the problem is non-natives who buy seal products” Inuit and other native people are modern human beings with modern human interests and hobbies, they often sell goods to people outside of their communities to earn money for purchasing things they would like to own. The romantic idea people in cities get of Northerners living off the land to fulfill their every need is, frankly, false and patronizing as all get out. Yes, it’s true their priority is feeding and clothing their families, but in some communities selling goods to companies who deal in distributing authentic northern crafts is one of the only forms of infrastructure available, and dissuading the purchase of those goods by non-natives is harmful to their business. Just this whole “seal = bad” idea conservationists have pushed so hard has done irreparable damage to people’s livelihoods without really doing all that much good for the environment. At the very least, selling furs can allow hunters to break even on their hunting trips and raise the funds to continue hunting for food without losing money. It’s important to know where your skins are coming from and in many cases you can ask the retailer, but suggesting natives should not be able to sell merchandise outside of their communities is not the answer.
- “If it’s so bad why don’t they just move somewhere with more jobs and cheaper produce” There are so many things wrong with this line of reasoning you could write a university thesis on how ignorant it is and if someone honestly asks this you basically know you can stop talking to them.
(via butttsoup)
