Jacob Beaton
VFR: Jacob, please tell us more about Tea Creek, about its value and purpose.
Jacob Beaton: Tea Creek is a wonderful success story, and I'm glad this feature-length documentary will be giving space for this narrative. It will share the truth, about how much trauma, how much suffering there has been — and just how hard it is to be Indigenous in this country. How hard it was and still is; but also, how much hope there is. Tea Creek's a real thing, and it’s delivering real results – it’s changing people's lives in significant ways.
On so many different levels, Tea Creek is delivering value. Value to the community, and value to the country. And we keep hearing in different arenas about how important it is that Indigenous people are able to participate – in the Canadian economy and in the future of this country. You keep reading it in the news, about how many shortages there are right now, especially for labourers. Tea Creek addresses this: we’re creating leaders and skilled workers.
The number of Indigenous people in positions of influence, leadership, and governance is not growing in Canada. The wall is dissolving for some groups, but for First Nations, it's still very much there. There is this feeling that you’re not going to climb any higher – we feel all that stuff at Tea Creek. We feel the discrimination, but we also feel the opportunity. It’s all there; it’s all wrapped into one.
One of the main points for me is that I never intended Tea Creek to become what it is today. I wasn’t a farmer before; I was a business consultant. Building Tea Creek has been a very organic, natural process to get to where it is today. It’s a kind of an entrepreneurial process, just seeing the opportunity and the demand literally showing up on my doorstep – one person and then another person, and another, and so on. We accidentally invented this space of Indigenous food sovereignty, food production, and skills training based on a critical need.
VFR: One of the main themes of the Tea Creek film is that every single Indigenous person was food sovereign before colonization. Please share more about this critical point.
JB: When I explain this, I start by sharing about how many of our familiar food products globally were developed entirely by Indigenous people in what are now called the Americas. Let’s look at tobacco, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, squash, sunflower, corn. These are significant intentional domestications that happened usually between seven to 12,000 years for each of these crops – and they were not accidental, they were not hunter-gatherer cultures. They were farming cultures.
When Christopher Columbus came to this part of the world, what they documented were bean farmers. Eighty percent of the world's beans were developed by Indigenous peoples over thousands and thousands of years. The Taino people were field farmers – they weren't jungle dwellers chasing berries and animals. They were literally in the fields doing block farming. And, interestingly enough, there are a lot of crops and food products that are native to our part of the world that everyone benefits from.
For example, shellfish farming was an Indigenous invention on the West Coast of what is now Canada. This was done thousands of years ago through massive underwater terraces and what are now called clam gardens.
When the first Europeans saw the Coast Salish – what is now Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, Victoria, and Southern Vancouver Island – they called it the Great Prairies of the West, because they were Camas farmers. They farmed in a way that we recognize today as farms with fields, field blocks, and houses with extended families in the one house.
And all of this was well described by early settlers to the Coast Salish territories. They describe essentially irrigation trenches with water-based plants around a field that they would cultivate through controlled burns at different times of year, depending on what they were growing. I've also learned that early settlers tried competing for food production with Coast Salish peoples and failed. The Coast Salish were more adept at field farming than settlers were.
There was competition for potato production, carrots, fish – even duck farming was a big thing. There is all this history of Indigenous people being incredible food producers, and they profited. Again, there is documentation in our Canadian records of the prices that First Nations charged – prices, the kind of product, their successes in food and food production.
But, over time, there was a process of disenfranchisement of First Nations, a devaluing, and then this whole modern myth that we were hunter-gatherers and food poor was created intentionally through many decades of oppression of First Nations food producers and First Nations people. It was an intentional process in Canada, partly based on lobbies from settler groups to break Indigenous agriculture and food producers, including fishermen.
Laws came into place in the 1800s, and they ultimately worked, eroding Indigenous food sovereignty. First Nations people weren't allowed to have motors in their boats. They could only have oars or paddles. They weren't allowed to buy tractors or have any kind of modern machinery for food production. They weren't allowed to own more than 20 to 50 acres of land. Before, there were these massive Indigenous-owned ranches. I read about one in the Chilcotin of British Columbia that was over 20,000 acres and incredibly wealthy – they were the equivalent of modern-day multi-millionaires.
Interestingly, during the Great Depression, First Nations didn’t really know it was the Great Depression. Overall, life went on as normal. First Nations were okay; they had enough food to eat, just growing food on small plots of land. In our oral history, we were food sovereign.
In terms of food sovereignty, what really broke us was the Indian Residential School (IRS) system. It was the IRS system that broke the passing down of knowledge on how to grow food – how to have an abundance of food.
Once you weren’t able to teach your children and your grandchildren anymore, then the food knowledge was broken. And so that's where we are today – First Nations now live in what are called food deserts. The vast majority of First Nations of Canada live in food deserts. Two things to note here: First Nations have been pushed onto reserves, much of which is non-agriculture, unwanted land; and two, you’ve got the loss of food knowledge.
So, now you don’t have food sovereignty anymore.
We actually had a conversation yesterday at Tea Creek about how sad it is that a lot of decolonizing efforts with First Nations are driving towards us being hunter-gatherers; but they’re driving us towards a myth that isn’t the reality of our First Nations history.
Instead, we need to look further behind the myth to learn more about what was actually happening long ago.
So, that's the quick, condensed version of the history, and more is covered in the Tea Creek documentary. It’s harrowing, and I need to learn more about this, so I am learning so much right now.
VFR: Please tell us more about the magic and power of Tea Creek, and how it’s transforming individual lives.
JB: The power of Tea Creek is that it's all about people. It's about love. It's about love and care for one another in a safe way. We need to bring that back – this was something that was stripped from us. We’ve been taught self-hate, and we cover a bit of this in the documentary. One of our trainees talks about being taught to be oppressed and then how to oppress each other.
At Tea Creek, we start to strip that away and to come back down to that place of caring for each other. It’s about being safe with each other.
Everyone wants to know Tea Creek’s secret ingredient. We had someone come here to Tea Creak, and this fellow spent the day with us here, and he’s like, “I figured it out.” I said, “What? Tell me!” And he’s like, “It’s love.” And it really is, but in a safe way. I don’t say that a lot because love can be a such a polluted, unsafe thing for so many people.
But at Tea Creak, that’s really what it boils down to. It’s not just love for each other as humans, but it’s love for the soil, love for Mother Earth, for all living things. It’s all stripped down to the core.
VFR: Jacob, any other key points you would like to share?
JB: Yes, so the big needle-mover for us is Indigenous led. It's the cornerstone of what makes Tea Creek successful.
The argument is straightforward, but not commonly held. The argument goes like this: When community land initiatives are Indigenous led globally, you see increases vast increases in biodiversity, you see increases in food security, you see increases in the health of the local economy. This has been proven, and it's one of the reasons why handing land control back to First Nations is one of the cornerstones of fighting climate change according to the United Nations – because the data supports it.
In Canada, there is really no Indigenous-led model of resources and resourcing. So, when it comes to policy, what we're pushing for is to start following the Indigenous-led standard when it comes to funding and support – then watch the positive changes happen.
What makes us, what makes Indigenous led is that you're Indigenous-owned, you're Indigenous governed, controlled – your leadership is Indigenous and your people working on the ground are Indigenous, the majority Indigenous at every level.
I'm pushing for Indigenous led, because if I and my team get to make the decisions, they're going to be Indigenous decisions, and they're going to have these beautiful outcomes that everybody needs, that the planet needs, that society needs, that our economy needs.
At Tea Creek, our high school graduation rate is significantly higher, and the school participation rate is off the charts.
Skilled Trades BC told us last year that we had single-handedly doubled the number of First Nations people involved in trades in the Northwest since we started. The First Nations participation rate had gone from 10% to 20%. That is significant – that is a huge, huge impact. And yet we struggle to find funding.
The final thing for me to say, is that we’re strongly supported by First Nations and the grassroots community. I just want to underline that. We have off-the-charts participation every year from Indigenous people. We've been unanimously supported by the BC Assembly of First Nations; and they just passed a resolution in March calling on the government to fund us – and that was 100% unanimous, which is pretty amazing!
VFR: How can people support the work of Tea Creek?
JB: Financial donation: We’re currently working on this. Hopefully, by the time the Tea Creek documentary airs next month in May, we’ll have a donation system up and running; and within a year, we’ll have our Canadian charity status.
Endorsement letter: Another thing that is helpful is that we have an endorsement button on our current website. It's a place where you can go to endorse Tea Creek. This is very helpful for us, when someone writes us a letter of support that we can use in a proposal to demonstrate that we are supported broadly. That's one of the biggest things that we struggle with – being pigeonholed as a remote First Nations initiative in the eyes of funders. You can endorse Tea Creek HERE.
📽️ Learn More About the Tea Creek Film:
“The film follows Tea Creek and the story of their newest farmer Justice Moore. Following them through the growing season the film interweaves Jacob’s and Justice’s stories with the broader story of Tea Creek. Exploring the rich history of Indigenous agriculture and the little-known history of colonial actions to destroy it, the film shows how Jacob is leading a revival.”
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