I guess I could use some examples and observations from when we travel into northern communities. We take our foot care program into some very remote places. We do a full day of treatment and care, and with that, traditionally we provide food. People come into the programming and we share food together. We use food as a teaching tool.
We've gone into northern communities where we can't find food to provide for these healthy sessions where we're trying to educate by using food as a tool. In the northern stores the food is just not affordable. The items that are affordable, such as pop and chips, are not healthy. We try to advocate for things like drinking water instead of pop. We've learned, as southern educators going into northern communities, that this doesn't work either. They have been on boil water advisories, as they have in Six Nations, which is very close to Toronto.
Sovereignty is having control over your food, knowing where your food comes from, having accessibility to the food, going back to having rights to harvest your own food, having clean fish, and having clean water. It's just the availability of food itself. To me, the feeling that it will always be accessible for future generations is sovereignty.