A food tasting event took place at the Northern Heritage Centre on Jan. 26 as part of an archival photograph exhibit celebrating food in the NWT, named ‘Delicious!’
The prepared foods for consumption were meant to demonstrate the many ways that Northerners gather, prepare and enjoy many types of meals and snacks.
“A lot of people may not have access to country food, as we call it here,” said Erin Suliak, territorial archivist with the NWT Archives. “And the other thing to celebrate is the knowledge and to learn from Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN) — how they cut the food and talk about how the food has been prepared.”
Stacey Sundberg, of the Yellowknives Dene, worked with museum staff to source all the food and find people willing to do demonstrations at the event. Sundberg, who was raised in Dettah, said it was an honour to help and she commended the territorial government for hiring local people, especially First Nations people from the homeland — people who are using this land traditionally to tell their own stories from their own perspective. She added that showcasing whitefish is great and meaningful.
She said that whitefish “is a very big part of my people’s diet. They lived off of this type of fish for centuries. Before colonialism, our people would go around the land during the time to harvest, and there’s a couple of areas that they will go harvest, and one of them is Yellowknife River. Our people sustained themselves from that fish, so I think it is really important to start with (whitefish), and to move on to the animals like rabbit.”
Sundberg added that recognizing the Inuvialuit and Inuit cultures is also important.