Category Archives: Food access

7. Stepping Out

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This week has been a different one for group 28! Instead of our usual group meetings and activity, we finalized our list of native and traditional plants and assigned two or three to each group member, and have been doing individual research. We are looking forward to meeting again to share and post our findings. The research process has been very interesting, with each of us becoming something of an expert on our assigned plants. As we have mentioned, one or two of our members have also taken courses that focused on Native plants, and though we can’t use their knowledge as a source, they have been able to recommend books that have been enormously helpful to our research. We are meeting on November 6th to discuss what we’ve found so far and to share what we’ve learned.

As mentioned before, the database will focus on the native plants as used by the First Nations of British Columbia, beginning with those that can be found in either the IAH Garden or the UBC Botanical Garden. If we have enough time, we will try to include other gardens or wild areas around campus, such as Pacific Spirit Park. Each plant entry will be structured as follows:

  • We will begin with a brief discussion of the species information and ecology of the plant, with links to other databases for further information, such as E-Flora BC.

  • We will then have a section containing medicinal and nutritional information about how Aboriginal peoples have used the plant and the different cultures’ diverse relationships with it.

  • Then we will relay traditional stories about how the plants were used, or anecdotes that can be found in the literature.

  • Finally, we will provide a list of locations where that plant can be found on campus, linked to a map if possible.

We sense that the story section of the database would be more accurate if we could interview local First Nations people, an ethical and temporal limitation that has been frustration to us. This week’s e-lecture highlights the importance of community consultation and constantly listening and valuing local knowledge during intervention projects. We are struggling with the idea of completing our project without consulting any actual Aboriginal members of local communities beforehand. We are hoping that once this project is well established, more each item in our database can be supplemented through ongoing consultation directly with the First Nations community. Perhaps if the concept of Biocultural Diversity is indeed developed into a course, a stronger connection with the local First Nations communities could be established. Of course, the concept of Biocultural Diversity extends to all local communities, so extending the reach of the database will likely always remain a goal.

Post #7 in the making.

Molly Campbell, our TA, also brought a very important concern to our attention. Many of the plants in our database were used for medicinal purposes and we want to include these uses for our future readers. However, we need to be very careful about the content of our entries in order to avoid possible health issues resulting from the use of these plants by the public. For example, the processing of plants and dosage is information that could easily get lost in the various levels of communication intrinsic to academic sources, as opposed to primary sources. Furthermore, the use of a certain medicinal plant could interact negatively with medication that a person is currently taking. We discussed the possibility of adding a disclaimer at the end of each entry saying to not try using this plant without consulting a physician. It is difficult however, because this seems to de-legitimize the knowledge of the Aboriginal people who developed uses of these plants over thousands of years, and using this approach may come across as valuing western science and knowledge as more accurate. As a result, we are currently brainstorming different possibilities to address this issue while attempting to write very accurate entries about the plants. We plan to ask Eduardo, one of our community liaisons, his opinion on this matter.

Lastly, we mentioned in our last blog post that our group would be attending the Feast Bowl that is organized by the IAH Garden; however, the lunch was unfortunately at the same time as our LFS 350 lecture this month and we therefore could not attend. We would like to attend one more Feast Bowl before the end of the term, but November’s event is the day of our final presentations, and December’s is, of course, during finals. Since the decision that the IAH Garden is to take less prominent of a role in our database we haven’t been in touch with our second community liaison Hannah as much, and hoped that the Feast Bowls would be a way to maintain this contact. However, we may find it more practical to simply meet with her to consult about general concerns that come up around our project.

5. Getting Technical

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Although our group has had a thorough understanding of what we would be doing for this project, we have been feeling a bit stuck for a while without knowing where the information that we were researching around the garden would be going. Fortunately, this week, some of our group members met with Eduardo, one of our community liaisons, and Duncan of the LFS Information Technology department. This meeting has finally allowed us to really start to dig into our project; we were finally given clear directions on what our community partner would like us to do and the format in which we can publish our work.

The next step will be to assign native plants from the IAH garden to each one of our group members to thoroughly research medicinal, culinary and cultural uses. But first we must determine which plants are native! We expect this will require ongoing conversations with Hannah and others at the IAH, as we work.

The database that we will be working on will be operating within the UBC Wiki. A wiki format is easy to use and involves very simple coding, so we will be able to focus on the content of our wiki entries rather than the formatting of the database itself. This is a relief to many of us since are aren’t incredibly tech-savvy, and we had discussed our concerns about the possibility that the format would obstruct our ability to use the database. An easy-to-use format will also make it much more possible for future LFS groups to further build the database. The information that will be posted in the Wiki will be embedded into a UBC website which can also host future LFS projects on the use of plants by other indigenous communities.

Eduardo also showed us a few plant databases as examples of what we could do once we start posting on the website and how to format and organize our posts. These databases are interesting and helpful but are definitely more complex than ours will be. One of these was the E-flora BC plant identification database that was created by the Geography faculty here at UBC. It is very detailed, containing in-depth ecological information about the plants that we will be covering in our wiki, but no cultural information about the use of these plants. We will be linking the appropriate E-flora BC page that corresponds to the plant, in order to give the readers a link to all the ecological and descriptive characteristics of the plants, as well as the cultural use of the plants from our database.

This means that our main research will mostly consist of how the Aboriginal communities in British Columbia use native plants for food and medicinal purposes, without going into details on the physical characteristics of the plants. By linking our database to others we hope to expand and create more connections within the existing network of botanical and ethnobotanical information that is already available.

For all of our plant posts, we will be taking our own pictures of the plants in order to avoid copyright issues. We have discussed the idea that the cultural information surrounding the plants should be prioritized to be accessible for the Aboriginal community themselves, who have provided all the information that we are using, including what we obtain through secondary sources. Although it is not strictly stated in our instructions to do so, we are wondering how we can assure that this information will be accessible to the communities to which this knowledge belongs. We suggested this could be done through links to the UBC Wiki and LFS website on the UBC farm page, and letting local communities know about the database we are creating. Members of our group, or our community liaison Hannah, can pass on links to our database through the newsletters and listservs that go out to Aboriginal community members.

Flowers in the IAH Garden

In the IAH Garden – chamomile?

By next week we hope to have the first drafts of our research material about the native plants and their Aboriginal uses posted on our wiki page.

3. Getting to Know Our Project and Who is Involved

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This week has been a very productive one for our group! In addition to visiting the Institute for Aboriginal Health (IAH) garden last week, where we took many photographs and made observations, we were able to attend one of the monthly Feast Bowls that the IAH organizes. The IAH is an institute that was designed in order to improve the health of the Aboriginal people in British Columbia and increase their participation in health careers. One of their goals is to promote indigenous health knowledge and support their traditional health care system. The Feast Bowls are a perfect example of the collaboration between Western knowledge and traditional Aboriginal health, where traditional foods from many communities are put together in order to improve the health of the Aboriginal people while incorporating foods from their traditional diet.

Herbs collected from the IAH Garden

Herbs fresh from the IAH Garden.

Attending the Feast Bowl, we learned about the purpose of the IAH garden and got to know some of the people we will be working with. We helped prepare fish cakes, tzatziki, bannock, steamed vegetables, and an apple crisp. We were shown how to use sweet cicely instead of sugar to sweeten the crisp. Sweet cicely is a local herbaceous plant that is usually considered a weed but it makes an excellent sugar substitute, especially for those with or at risk of diabetes. Almost all of the ingredients used were gathered from the IAH garden, so they were organic, fresh and made for an exceptional meal. Fortunately, there were a lot of volunteers, so the food was prepared relatively quickly and served to the crowd of about 30 people. Before sitting down to eat, we all joined hands and a prayer was given in a First Nations language. This helped to remind us of how much goes into a meal and that not to take any of it for granted. We also took this opportunity to speak with Hannah Lewis regarding future options for our project, including the database and some of the plants from the IAH garden.

Swiss chard from the IAH Garden

A rainbow of swiss chard blanching away.

We have learned many things during our project so far. We realized a need to define the term “traditional”, as we will be using it over the course of our project. “Traditional” can have different meanings depending on the context, but overall, it can be defined as an inherited and established or customary pattern in the way of thinking or behaving, associated with a particular culture. It is also the handing down of information, beliefs and customs from one generation to the other. “Tradition” is most commonly defined as cultural continuity in social attitudes and customs, but traditions are not necessarily specific to one location or culture. To many people the word “traditional” can come across as “old-fashioned”, when in fact it is highly flexible, constantly adapting just as cultures do.

Jen presents the homemade fish-cakes

Jen presents some of the amazing handmade fish-cakes.

Aboriginal communities of the Pacific Northwest, including those that we will be working with, traditionally relied mostly on fishing, foraging, hunting and forms of horticulture for sustenance. However, the IAH garden largely grows a mixture of cultivated crops that were introduced to these Aboriginal communities mostly by Europeans and have since been incorporated into their traditional cuisine. There are also some native plant species in the garden, and more are harvested from the natural forest ecosystems. The cultivated crops and the native plant species are both incorporated in the Aboriginal community lunches.

We look forward to seeing how the IAH garden promotes health through the use of food, which we expect will show a link between food and medicine. The Aboriginal populations in Canada have been using many major groups of plants as medicine, and through the IAH garden, this knowledge can be shared within the community by harvesting native plants and using them in the lunch program as well as for other means. We hope that our database will be able to spread this knowledge even further!

Introduction to LFS 350

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The Land, Food, and Community series is a number of classes that the students of UBC Land and Food Systems take every year.  The students of Land Food and Community II (LFS 350; formerly known as AGSC 350) complete extensive projects on food security issues in British Columbia.  Students work in groups of 6 or 7 to explore issues within their assigned communities and themes, and team up with members of the community to tackle these issues.  In this way, students can engage in their education by learning from community partners and immersing themselves in “real world” situations outside the classroom.  Community Partners can learn about what students are doing and learning at UBC, and can work with students to make a positive impact on their organizations and communities in terms of food security.  The Land and Food Series classes are unique from most other university courses as they emphasize teaching as a “community of learners” and community based research instead of top-down instruction and research.  Students learn from the teaching team, their peers and the communities of British Columbia making for an education that bridges university academics with real world issues.