Upcoming traditional medicine programming to explore connection between metabolism and cultural practices

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Wiikwemkoong’s Joseph Pitawanakwat is looking forward to delivering a Jan. 16 Thunder Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre Healthy Harvest virtual presentation about metabolism, obesity, weight loss, and diabetes, and the world of plant medicines.

“This program is advertised as a session that is geared specifically towards metabolism and throughout that, we are going to uncover what weight loss means and how to achieve it properly,” says Pitawanakwat, owner at Creators Garden. “Through understanding metabolism, we will understand diabetes.”

Pitawanakwat says he has worked with participants ranging in age from Kindergarten-age students to elderly men and women during previous workshops.

“I do it in a way so that all of us can understand, I don’t do it in a way that is complex and hard to grasp,” Pitawanakwat says. “I want to make sure and I do make sure that everybody understands at the end of the day what we need to be doing and how our bodies work and why the disease is here so we really understand what the steps do to healing from that disease.”

Pitawanakwat says his presentation includes information about diabetes and the value of cultural components such as nutrition, medicine, exercise, fasting and the sweat lodge, as well as a question-and-answer session.

“In this program, we identify that nutrition is by far the most powerful tool,” Pitawanakwat says. “Although medicine is important, what we do with our diet is the most valuable. If there’s any takeaways from this presentation, it’s going to be changing what we eat and how we eat.”

Pitawanakwat adds that each of the participants in the session will receive a package of medicine to make about four litres of tea.

“It’s just to get people as close to the whole experience of utilizing medicine as a tool as possible,” Pitawanakwat says.

Pitawanakwat says he has delivered this presentation about 50 times through a virtual format since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

“The feedback that we get is always like: ‘I never knew I would be able to learn so much physiology, so much science, I feel like a scientist now,’ when we get that really full understanding of exactly what’s going on from a molecular level to some of those bigger pictures,” Pitawanakwat says. “So it’s going to be super fun.”

Pitawanakwat says he initially developed an interest in traditional medicines while visiting with his grandmother, Thecla Pheasant, whose mother was a midwife and medicine woman, and listening to her stories of using plants as medicine.

He started up Creators Garden to share his knowledge about eight years ago and he and his wife moved to Peterborough about seven years ago to be closer to urban Indigenous communities that were requesting his services.

“Since we moved here about seven years ago, we’ve been able to work with the challenge of all these different urban Indigenous communities,” Pitawanakwat says.

Pitawanakwat says he and his partner used to travel to deliver workshops in a wide range of communities across Ontario as well as in the United States, Mexico and Costa Rico before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In pre-pandemic work, I would go into a healthcare centre and I would be with the community there for a week,” Pitawanakwat says. “We do it in a clinical setting with the physicians, with the nurses so there is continued support when we leave.”

E-mail contacts for information about the Healthy Harvest presentation or to register are: gloria.ranger@tbifc.ca or sheena.campbell@tbifc.ca.