Iqaluit is the centre of a growing protest against the high cost of northern food

Like a lot of recent social movements, Feeding My Family started as a Facebook group, set up by Iqaluit’s Leesee Papatsie in 2012 to raise awareness about the absurdly high cost of food in the North. But it wasn’t until the group called for a one-day boycott, on January 31, of Northern Stores and other stores (including some Giant Tiger locations) operated by Winnipeg’s North West Company, that the issue spread well beyond Iqaluit.

“Lots of people told us they weren’t going to the store,” Papatsie told the Nation. “It happened all around – even in Alaska. And there were pamphlets given out down south about Giant Tiger.”

The boycott was also driven by the release of a report by the Auditor General of Canada last fall about the failure of the federal government’s Nutrition North program. That program subsidizes northern shipping costs for companies like North West.

However, the Auditor General concluded there was no way to determine whether or not retailers lowered prices or instead used the subsidy to pad their profits, as critics accused them of doing. The report concluded, “Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada has not managed the program to meet its objective of making healthy foods more accessible to residents of isolated northern communities.”

“One of the problems with the federal programs like Nutrition North is that they’re not transparent,” Papatsie said. Another problem, she noted, is that nutrition programs designed by government officials often have little sense of what Northerners actually want to eat.

“What they consider healthy food is not traditionally the Inuit diet. It’s imposing the idea of, ‘Here, this is what we think is healthy for you guys.’ What we’ve been saying all along is that we’re not used to cooking fruits and vegetables – that meat-potato-and-veggie meal. There are some days when I go to the store and see a vegetable, and I have to ask one of my kids, ‘What is this?’ It’s only been 40 or 50 years that we’ve been eating this kind of food.”

Papatsie says the Inuit are still adjusting to a new culture, looking for ways to balance traditional culture and western society. For that reason, she says, country food is still available, though not as much as she’d like it to be.

“Country food depends on where you are. Iqaluit is the hub, and it’s kind of hard in some ways. In smaller communities, there’s a lot of sharing of country food, everybody helps each other out. That happens quite a bit. In Iqaluit, it almost becomes, ‘Just do your own thing.’”

There’s no way around the fact that food will be more expensive up North, Papatsie said. However, she doesn’t believe food prices need to be as high as they are, and she says it adds insult to injury when stores sell food that’s expired or rotten – a problem documented in photos group members have uploaded to Facebook.

“People go hungry: that’s a reality,” she said. “That’s why we started Feeding My Family.”

From the beginning of the Facebook group, there was pressure on her to stay quiet – not from the food retailers, but from her friends and neighbours.

“In the past, traditionally, Inuit had to live together to survive, so they tried to avoid friction,” said Papatsie. “When we first started this protest, we got a lot of, ‘That’s not the Inuit way. Why are you guys doing this?’”

For Papatsie, then, the greatest victory of the January 31 boycott and of the success of the Feeding My Family Facebook group – which now has nearly 25,000 members – has been the shift in public sentiment.

“One thing I’m seeing that makes it really worthwhile,” she said, “is the Inuit are beginning to speak up – that, for me, is the biggie. And I’m seeing more of it, and more people talking about food and food prices. It isn’t under the carpet anymore.”

At the end of the day, Papatsie sees herself as the servant of her community, taking risks so that her family and neighbours can eat more affordable food. She said she’s ready to continue the fight according to what her community makes clear it wants and needs.

“We’re just going by the public, really. If they want another day of boycott, we can arrange to have another.”