Yes, thank you.
The cost of pursuing traditional livelihoods and providing food for our families in a very traditional way is expensive. We use Ski-Doos. We use boats in the summer. There are tremendous costs for gas and other supplies to hunt.
In the COVID response, especially the first response in the spring when there was initial money for the indigenous community support fund, many of our Inuit land claim regions provided support for people to go on the land: to go harvest, to go spend the spring and summer in seasonal camps and to get out of communities to decrease the risk of contracting COVID. It also allowed for an increased level of reliance on our traditional diet and increased our food security, if you will.
It's been a big challenge for many Inuit to be able to access their traditional homelands, to harvest in our lands and then to provide for our families and our communities in a more traditional way, because of the costs associated with it. Then also there is the lack of income that many Inuit have to be able to support that type of lifestyle.
It is an interesting dilemma, but it's one that has its roots in colonization and the disenfranchisement and disempowerment of Inuit through the killing of dogs and dog teams, the coerced relocation into communities and the push for a wage-based economy. There have been 50 or 60 years of a push for Inuit not to rely on our own society and our own food, and we're only now trying to get that back. Subsidies are necessary. Grant programs are necessary to help us do that in this space.