Thank you, everyone, and good morning. We appreciate the opportunity to be here to contribute to this very important discussion on how to develop more inclusive agriculture and agri-food policies and programs.
As mentioned, I am a professor at the University of Guelph in rural planning and development, but I am also a Haudenosaunee Mohawk from Six Nations of the Grand River territory. My experience is about 20 years of working with first nations communities, both my own and others, at the grassroots level in education, training and land resource management. Stephen is working with me as a doctoral student. He has seven years of practical experience working collaboratively with indigenous communities on food-related economic and cultural development projects.
Today we're going to talk about agriculture and agri-food in the northern Ontario context, as well as the subarctic and arctic context regions, with an emphasis on community goals around food security and food sovereignty. Both spatially and temporally, this is a massive area, so we draw generalizations and present some commonalities.
However, it is important to recognize that there is great diversity among indigenous peoples across Canada, and their communities and nations, in terms of their relationships to territory and ancestral lands, as well as their food sources and food systems. It is from this context that we will first provide some background to frame the issue, after which we'll provide some recommendations.