PROJECT DETAILS

Based on an Interview with Jacob Beaton 

About

Tea Creek is an Indigenous food sovereignty training initiative that is Indigenous led, land-based and striving for cultural safety. It was born in 2020, when founder Jacob Beaton and family decided to start homesteading and bought a farm. He later learned that it is located at a traditional Gitxsan crossroads between four different traditional routes (grease trails). When the pandemic hit, and shelves in grocery stores were nearly bare, Jacob and his family were approached by multiple Nations who wanted to hire them to help support farming in their communities. However, homesteading didn’t leave Jacob with enough extra time to go farm other peoples’ land; “So we came up with this idea of looking at food sovereignty, including passing on traditional knowledge and food knowledge from generation to generation through education.” 

Another area Jacob and his team wanted to focus on was economic sovereignty. Jacob noted that Indigenous economies are often dominated by non-Indigenous people. “We wanted to create a space where you come here and you can see that all the decisions are being made by Indigenous people and you're learning from Indigenous people.” Last year, Tea Creek introduced nearly 100 Indigenous students to areas such as agriculture, carpentry, drone mapping, administration and planning, heavy equipment operation, and more. 

Positive impacts and outcomes

Jacob commented that one of the most significant aspects of Tea Creek isn’t the local food produced nor the training opportunities; it’s the healing that happens. “We have that safe space where people can talk about trauma and pain without fear of judgment,” Jacob explains. “Most people who come to Tea Creek have experienced intergenerational trauma and institutionalized racism.” Jacob elaborates that being outside, in the dirt, is one of the best things for dealing with trauma. Further, paired with the confidence and skills gained through the training opportunities, the farm indirectly serves as a healing place more than anything.

“So many people are reporting these huge mental health benefits and that it's making measurable big differences in people's lives.”

Tea Creek is also restoring relationships to agriculture. Jacob explains that food sovereignty was stripped from so many people through Indian residential schools, replacing knowledge of traditional agrarian practices with Eurocentric ones. Paired with the abusive experiences of the schools, farming can be a triggering experience for many Indigenous people. But many of the world’s top crops are ones that have been cultivated for millennia by Indigenous peoples (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans to name just a few). As Jacob explains, at Tea Creek they are “reclaiming culture.” 

Challenges

Funding is the number one challenge for Tea Creek. “We have an Indigenous design and development model and the funding streams don’t like it, they really don’t,” explains Jacob. The prescribed solutions funders search for are huge barriers. He also said that there is not a lot of available funding in agriculture nor for getting staff, which is the number one cost.

Funding

The funding Tea Creak was able to acquire came from a variety of sources, mostly employment and training dollars, helping to build the greenhouse. Private donors helped put a down payment on a neighbouring house that will serve as additional accommodations and paid most costs through the winter. Jacob has found that there is much more money available for the training initiatives than for other farm operations. The Industry Training Authority of BC has been supportive. However, there were over 1,000 more guests last year than planned for, and so many items are paid out of pocket by the program organizers. 

Community Climate Resilience 

“We are strategically fighting climate change. Our model is about seeing lands returned to Indigenous people. The other pieces are food security and food production, reducing the carbon cost of food.” Jacob further explains that growing food locally, in smart sustainable ways, reduces the carbon cost of the food to almost zero. “The more we can localize food systems, the lower the carbon cost, the more the earth benefits.” Local food production also helps in times of climate emergencies, like the floods experienced last year, when shelves were empty. 

Tea Creek is also starting to educate on forest health. As Jacob says, “our forests are a critical part of fighting climate change and are also our food security and our food sovereignty: We see direct correlations between damage to forests to huge declines in all kinds of our wild food from salmon to the ungulates.”

Next Steps

Tea Creek has many goals for the years to come. There are plans for a leadership training centre and additional accommodations. Another major effort is toolkits for Nations to develop their own models of Tea Creek, facilitating other communities to “not only produce food, but train people on gaining life skills, provide healing, get people active and acquire the confidence needed to accomplish their goals.”

Recommendations for other Indigenous communities hoping to do similar work

Jacob encourages other communities hoping to do similar work to reach out to Tea Creek; “We can help as best we can, and can refer them to other programs and organizations that can support them.” He also comments that YouTube has been incredibly helpful in learning how to grow food.