It's sharing with everybody
My name is Martha Winters-Abel, I’m the Regional Coordinator for Food Security. I’m based here in Hopedale, and my job is to work with the five Inuit Communities.
Juliana Flowers, Coordinator for NiKigijavut Hopedalimi.
Here in Hopedale, the impact that our programs have on our communities and our people is a very positive one.
Well, we now have our walk in freezer. That was one of the main points at the beginning. We have two chest freezers in HICG (Hopedale Inuit Community Government).
And uh, even though the freezer is open to everybody in the community, we find it more, uh, being used more by the seniors and people with low income.
Since the ban on, the, on the caribou, the Nunatsiavut communities didn’t not really have no source of daily staple meat. So what NG (Nunatsiavut Government) had done was they stepped up, and um, got moose from the Northern Peninsula of the island.
We have, uh, an elderly man–we call him our senior–he uses our freezer quite a bit, and um, he called one day and he said, “You got any more of them, oh…moose wieners?”
And <laughing> and I said, “Oh yes, we have so many! We got a lot of moose wieners now.”
So...and of course, you know, he was um, talking about the moose sausages that he got really accustomed to.
They also provide uh, char, and cod. We also get from local hunters. This past year we were fortunate to get a lot of muktuk. And the meat from the, uh, porpoise and jumper.
You know, it’s there, it’s helping our people. I mean, we’ve been doing this for so many years and long before this we were sharing with people. And it’s sharing and it’s providing, it’s um… It’s communicating, and all the things that we do as Inuit. It's...It’s there, it’s all like, and it's been ongoing like that for years since I was growing up, like, if you didn’t have anything the other hunters or harvesters would supply for them, and there was a lot of sharing and...even though this is a, a freezer, it’s sharing with everybody. And that it's provided for them so that there would be no hunger for people.
