Source: National Indigenous Diabetes Association
Year: 2020
“The National Indigenous Diabetes Association (NIDA) presents this resource booklet entitled “Gifts from our Relations”, which consists of commonly consumed traditional foods (plants/animals) that are Indigenous to our lands. Colonization, the reserve system, and residential schools have had significant negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ land bases, territories, and connections to the land. Regular harvesting and consumption of original foods has been largely replaced with a commercial supply of western, processed, non-nutritive foods. As noted by the Canada Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “...original foods were viewed by missionaries, educators and doctors as being diseased and inferior; in residential schools, teachers taught children to dislike their own foods and inculcated them with the poor eating habits of a non-Indigenous institution.”"