By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Wiikwemkoong’s Sarah Gorrie is enjoying her role as Indigenous food facilitator at Roots Community Food Centre in Thunder Bay after completing her placement for Anishinabek Educational Institute’s Native Community Worker; Traditional Healing Methods Diploma Program, which has campuses in Nipissing First Nation and Munsee Delaware Nation.

“I started coming here for a student placement with the Thunder Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre back in December (2022),” Gorrie says. “I finished my placement and I’m about to graduate in August. I got hired on as the Indigenous food facilitator here at Roots and I started May 15. It has been a wonderful learning experience and I just feel like I am at home.”

Gorrie says she relocated back to Thunder Bay, where she grew up and has family, from southern Ontario.

“Being here at Roots just kind of affirmed that it was the best move,” Gorrie says. “We do a lot of good work here, we partner with a lot of different organizations in Thunder Bay and we support each other and we’re constantly learning from different organizations and they bring a lot to the table.”

Gorrie says she works alongside the kitchen director and kitchen animator to work with different organizations in Thunder Bay such as the Thunder Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre to provide traditional meals to the community on the last Friday of each month at no cost.

“We also provide two meals each week to the community at no cost,” Gorrie says. “We invite everybody into this space 60-plus [years-old] to enjoy a meal and come together for companionship and to have a nutritional hot meal.”

Gorrie says she will also be doing work with the Mind Your Food program through Community Food Centre Canada. Roots Community Food Centre is one of 15 Community Food Centres across the country that are bringing people together to grow, cook, share, and advocate for good food for all.

“It really focuses on land-based learning, food sovereignty, and building a relationship with youth and that relationship with their food and mental health, so reconnecting them back to the land, showing them cooking skills, social skills,” Gorrie says. “I really believe in that work because I’ve seen it so far going into the high schools, into these lodges where the Anishinabek students are, a lot of our people learn hands-on. They really thrive in the hands-on learning experience, so when we’re cooking and our heads are down and we’re building things together, I find that people really come out of their shell and really open up and start connecting. They learn new skills and they really enjoy themselves and they can see a sense of pride and empowerment when they’re done, and it keeps them coming back.”

Gorrie says they incorporate produce from their gardens as well as seasonal food from the land for their meals.

“In early spring, we cooked a lot of fiddleheads — we have foragers that bring us an abundance of fiddleheads that we process and freeze so we can have them all year long,” Gorrie says. “Come spruce tip season, we’ll harvest the spruce tips right here on our own land and we make spruce tip salt. That is one of our Anishinabek foods that we know from our 13 moon cycle when to harvest those.”

Gorrie says they also have a wild game freezer for wild game donations.

“Sometimes [the] MNR will bring us a whole moose or a whole deer,” Gorrie says. “So we’ll serve venison, we’ll serve moose stew, moose meat loaf, fried trout.”

Gorrie says they are planning to do a three sisters harvest meal during harvest season.

Roots Community Food Centre also celebrated the grand opening of its dining room on June 29.