The Alexander First Nation is at war with an insidious enemy. Aboriginal people in Canada are three to five times more likely to have Type Two diabetes than non-aboriginals. They are also more likely to suffer its consequences such as high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease and kidney disease. Joanna Campiou, the band nurse, puts it succinctly: “There’s at least one person in every household out here with diabetes.”
Part of the battle goes on inside the local school, the Kipotakaw Education Center. Joanna is a regular visitor, as is Leanne Bourque. Leanne’s Mom lives on the reserve but Leanne was raised in Lac La Biche. She graduated from Portage Community College as a Community Health Representative in June of 2010 and was hired by the Alexander First Nation right away. Her mandate is awareness and education. Together, the pair teaches prevention in the school. They talk to the kids about how not to develop Type 2 diabetes. It is a receptive audience. “These kids know at least one person who has diabetes” says Joanna. “We’re talking 7, 8 and 10 year olds who just know!”
The children take that message home. Stories abound about kids teaching adults the lessons they pick up about healthy eating. One man told Leanne that his kid made him buy dragon fruit at the supermarket in nearby Morinville. He said his child knew it was one of the “mother foods” he had heard about in school.
“Because I grew up with culture and tradition and ceremony” says Joanna, “one of the things I teach is to respect everything that comes from mother earth. When I talk about mother foods, I mean everything that comes from mother earth. Where does an apple come from? The tree. Where does the tree come from? The earth. So that is a mother food. Moose meat. The moose is part of the land, eats off the land. You shoot the moose, you eat the moose. That’s a mother food.”
It was a victory in this battle, when the vending machines were removed from the school. It was another when traditional foods such as fish and moose meat appeared in the school’s hot lunch program. And another when the facility became an Apple school. Funded by the Apple Foundation in Edmonton, every student gets an apple a day. Bags of candy for the kids at traditional feasts have been replaced with fruit.
“Anything that goes to a factory to be processed and comes out other than in its natural form that is not a mother food.” says Joanna Campiou. “That is a food that has things added to them to make us sick. We need to eat healthy. We need to think about the future of ourselves and our loved ones who are here and those who will be here.”
Leanne Bourque is even more succinct. “Education is knowledge and power”.
Good weapons in the war on diabetes.
By Anna Holtby (2017)