Project Description: Aboriginal food and health sovereignty refers to people’s right to acquire and celebrate traditional food and collective wellbeing which involves cultural, spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional security of individual and community. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown methods, this time of survival preparation—and practicing customary, land-based knowledge and focusing on mental health and self-care—became all the more urgent in many Aboriginal families and communities. This claim raises two questions. The first is about what type(s) of community programs are likely to achieve benefits for Aboriginal people. The second is how community members are sharing the impact of the program activities with others. Based on these questions this research project will focus on community resiliency and the diverse ways health and food sovereignty are being practiced and perceived at the community and individual level in the time of the Covid 19 pandemic. The project will work with First Nation communities in northern Manitoba and give participants opportunities to do qualitative interviews to gather knowledge from community narratives.

Project Scope: The mission of UCN’s strategic plan is to serve northern communities and people with education, training, teaching, learning, and research while being inclusive and respectful of diverse Indigenous and northern values (UCN Strategic plan, 2021). This research intends to initiate a knowledge-sharing process between northern communities and UCN students, support groups, and researchers. Aboriginal communities in northern Manitoba have been resilient since time immemorial and people in these communities have been fighting colonialism, environmental racism, and many other systemic oppressions for centuries while holding on to their insights and wisdom of traditional knowledge which are the foundation of their resiliency. There is much to learn from them and this research will create a respectful knowledge-sharing process and will contribute to UCN’s strategic plan. The learning process will be created through the following activities: a) documenting local interventions towards health and food sovereignty; b) creating educational resources for community programs and; c) generating online discussions amongst students, academicians and support groups, and community members through webinars and social media communication to understands the relationship between health and food sovereignty with Indigenous self-determination

Project Skill Development Opportunity for Students and Deliverables:

The project will teach participants diverse skills such as

• Indigenous research methods
• Community-based participatory research
• Conversational Interview Methods
• Qualitative data analysis
• Literature review
• Designing and publishing academic posters

The supervisor will provide weekly guidance and lectures to the team. Each student can choose their own project topic and can decide to produce different types of deliverables, it could be either academic report or paper or academic poster.

Project Objectives: Community-led understanding of knowledge has been recognized as a way of decolonizing research. However, highlighting community narratives as a key source of knowledge is not systematically addressed in health and food sovereignty research involving Indigenous peoples in the world. Our objective will be to

· Do a systematic literature review of health and food sovereignty knowledge gathered from community narratives.

· Conduct a comparative analysis of the Aboriginal health and food sovereignty looking at past, present, and future state of knowledge.

· Gather community perspectives of food, health, and community well being in the time of Covid

· Share community stories with students and academicians through webinars and online gatherings.

· Invite community supportive philanthropy and academic research organizations to support the project and help create educational resources