Sandy Lake pleased with traditional foods bank

A smile and thanks is all the reason Ken Goodwin Jr. needs to support the Sandy Lake traditional foods bank.
“After you give an Elder the finished product, to see the smile on their face, that’s the only kick I get out of it, just seeing them smile like that,” said Goodwin, a fishing volunteer with the traditional foods bank and communications officer with the band. “It’s like their face just lights up.”
Goodwin said people in need are thankful for the assistance they receive from the traditional foods bank.
“They are just pleased, they are happy,” Goodwin said. “They just smile mostly and thank me. ‘How did you know I wanted this? How do you know I like this kind of thing.’”
Goodwin loves checking his gillnet, just as he did with his grandfather, former chief Jacob Fiddler, when he was growing up. And he still uses the same whitefish set his grandfather used many years ago, which is located about 45 minutes from the community by motor boat out on Big Sandy.
“It’s peaceful, you feel so calm and relaxed,” Goodwin said. “Once you have it done you have this big sigh of relief, like ah yes. And then you see your buckets all full of fish and you are thinking who are you going to give it to.”
Goodwin said he and his wife learned how to set and lift the net and how to prepare and smoke the whitefish from their parents and grandparents.
“It’s like a delicacy,” Goodwin said, describing smoked whitefish.
He said he doesn’t always smoke the whitefish; he often just gives the whitefish uncooked to those in need.
Goodwin and his grandfather would stay at the fishing site to prepare the fish before returning back to the community.
“I still remember going out there early in the morning and coming home in the evening after everything was done,” Goodwin said. “But nowadays, we just bring everything home and do it (there).”
Glen Fiddler first came up with the traditional foods bank many years ago, when he was still a child.
“We were pretty poor in our own home and sometimes we’d run out of food,” Fiddler said. “I got to thinking, I said to myself if I ever get on my own two feet, I want to start something in my own community to help others in my situation.”
Fiddler thought it would be a good idea to start either a soup kitchen or a community food bank, so when he was working in the band office about nine years ago he approached council about the idea and received the go-ahead to proceed.
“I felt there was need for this kind of service in our community due to fact of the high unemployment rates and seeing kids myself going hungry,” Fiddler said.
“We do have certain programs in place at the schools right now, like snack programs and hopefully lunch programs later on, but I’ve seen the need for it.”
Fiddler even approached the Ontario Association of Food Banks with a positive result.
“I’ve been working on it here and there and a few years back I contacted the food bank in Dryden, (where) they directed me to the Ontario Association of Food Banks,” Fiddler said.
“I asked them for their assistance and they were quite interested in helping me.”
Fiddler said Adam Spence, the executive director of the Ontario Association of Food Banks, travelled to Sandy Lake along with London North Central MP Glen Pearson to check out the conditions and food prices in the community and Spence eventually completed a feasibility study about four years ago.
“You should have seen them the first time I took them into the store on the reserve,” Fiddler said.
“They couldn’t believe the prices that we were paying and most of these were welfare, low-income families.”
Prices in Sandy Lake are currently about $8 for a 2-litre carton of two-per cent milk, $3.50 for a loaf of regular bread, 75 cents for an apple or a banana, $3.50 for a 500 gram package of spaghetti, $4.50 for a 700 milligram jar of spaghetti sauce and $12 for a 1.2 kilogram package of cereal.
Fiddler said one of the problems is many people can no longer afford to travel on the land due to high equipment and fuel costs to harvest traditional foods for themselves, so the traditional food preparation skills are slowly disappearing. Gasoline is currently selling at about $1.95 per litre in Sandy Lake.
Fiddler said harvesting traditional foods can be a learning experience for community youth.
“The kids would learn from there how to skin, for instance, a beaver and how to smoke it and how to prepare it for eating,” he said. “Or how to catch fish, how to fillet it and how to cook it.”
Although people usually share their traditional harvests with others in the community, Fiddler said some of the needy are being left out at times.
Fiddler eventually received enough funding with the help of Spence to build a community smoke house.
Community members are able to gather and prepare traditional foods in the smoke house throughout the entire year as opposed to the open-air smokers used in the summer and fall.
“We had to blend technology with the old ways,” Fiddler said.
The community also received some gillnets from the Ontario Association of Food Banks, the London Food Bank and Pearson, which has allowed volunteers such as Goodwin to provide fish for the needy over the past three years.
“There are major costs in fuel,” Fiddler said. “Most volunteers don’t have the time or money to do it fulltime.”
Fiddler is hoping to build the smokehouse this fall if he can get the concrete foundation in before winter, noting there are “quite a bit people” who are currently benefiting from the traditional foods bank.
“A good number of people have called us to say thank you,” Fiddler said.
Fiddler especially praised the volunteers who helped set nets and harvest fish during the winter, when it is very difficult to set nets under three feet of ice.