Six Nations author Alicia Elliott pens story of her relationship with food

Six Nations' Alicia Elliott will be the first to admit she has a complex relationship with food. That can happens when you grow up poor in an unstable family unit, she said. 

Elliott taught herself how to cook Hamburger Helper as a pre-teen when her mother was hospitalized and her father too tired from a long day of door-to-door sales.  

She turned to the instructions on the box and did her best. 

Elliott spoke to CBC News recently about writing the book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: One of the first things you say in your essay about food is that almost all your life you believed food would make you happy. Why?

Elliott: I feel like sometimes for people who are poor or don't have a lot, there's certainly something about just eating sugar. You can't necessarily buy name brand clothes, but the name brand food for like a candy bar is a Snickers, so that was kind of something that I felt like I could be like other people.

But at the same time, I also think that it's very clear that sugar has addictive qualities. It releases endorphins in the same way that a lot of addictive drugs do. 

I think that watching my mother growing up and seeing her kind of used food as kind of a coping mechanism for things that were going on in her life, it was also kind of a learned behaviour as well. 

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: You lived on and off reserve as a child. How easy was it to access healthy food on reserve, by comparison?

Elliott: When I moved to Six Nations, I was already a teenager at that point, so I had quite a bit of experience off reserve knowing how much easier it was living in a city to be able to go to a grocery store. Even if you can have a car, you had at least transit.

But when we moved to Six Nations, we only had one car, and my dad would take it a lot of the time to be going off and doing different things, which would mean that my mom, who was mostly the person in charge of doing grocery shopping and stuff like that, would have to wait until he got home.

When he did get home, we had to drive at least half an hour in either direction, either to Brantford or Caledonia to get groceries. There was nothing accessible on Six Nations other than convenience stores, which didn't usually have anything. Maybe bananas or apples, but that was it. 

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: What about cost?

Elliott: That was the other thing, too.

At the convenience store that I worked at, it would be comparing $3.50 for a bag of chips or two for $5. There were other things like milk and eggs that were consistently higher priced in convenience stores than they would be in the city. You have so many different options in the city. 

CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: Has that changed since?

Elliott: There's now a farmer's market on Six Nations, which is good, but it's kind of weird because of different standards that basically Canada has imposed on band councils. What they essentially want band councils to do is make a profit at this point so that they can gain a certain amount of money.

They used to have the ability to buy medicines like sweetgrass and tobacco and those have been nixed from what they can sell because they want a profit. So they're only selling things they think would turn a profit. There's people who would rely on them for cultural things, but now we can't have that because they aren't profitable enough for band council and therefore for Canada. 

CBC Kitchener Waterloo: How much do you think being indigenous has affected your relationship with food and food insecurity? 

Elliott: It's something worth noting that when settlers arrived, and this is documented, our people, especially the Haudenosaunee people, were very healthy.

We relied primarily on hunting and meat, but also all of the women would farm and have the three sisters, which were corn, beans and squash. Later, we found through science that a diet consisting of corn, beans and squash would give you all the nutrients that you needed, so you wouldn't really need anything else, even if there was like a dearth of hunting or something along those lines.

We were very healthy people. Now thinking back to what's happened since residential schools, we had generations of people who were taken from their homes, and in Brantford, it was called, "the mush" by the people who went there, the kids, because all they would have was porridge crawling with maggots.

The consequences of that are severe, not just for them, but also for their children. We look at epigenetics and this growing field of science, where if you have certain experiences, they turn your genes on or off and that impacts generations in the future.

A professor named Ian Mosby did a lot of research on the impact of residential schools on future generations having diabetes, and now, indigenous populations are among the most unhealthy in terms of having diabetes, obesity, having heart problems. Those have impacts. You look at all of these things, and they're all connected. 

CBC Kitchener Waterloo: We hear time and time again that food banks were never supposed to be a permanent fixture, but there's no sign of them disappearing anytime soon. What does that say to you about how much our governments value the people who are using those services?

Elliott: People think, "You can just go to a food bank if you don't have any food", but they don't really consider the reality of food banks, which is there's only so much you can get at a time. My family would have to go to multiple food banks sometimes every month to get as much as we needed.

You also have to consider what they primarily give out is non-perishable food items, which is not usually fresh, healthy food. Canadian grocery prices are going to be going up by $700 approximately next year and that's for everyone. If you think about how that's going to impact just the average person, imagine how much worse it's going to be for people who already are scrimping and saving to try and make it to end of the month with food for their children.

We need to start considering what it would look like if, for example, we started having community gardens and having it so that people have co-ops where if you come and you work the gardens, then you can bring home fresh foods.

How would our country change if everyone had the right, and the government made it clear, that it's important we all have fresh, healthy food and also access to water.

Most reserves don't even have access to clean water.