Beendigen brings families together through strawberry picking and jam-making

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Beendigen Anishinabe Women’s Crisis Home and Family Healing Agency held strawberry picking and strawberry jam-making sessions on July 20-21 in Thunder Bay.

Beendigen provides free support and services to ensure women and children have a safe environment to live in, free from violence.

“We had about 25 people that met us at Belluz Farms,” says Jenn Davis, Community Action for Prenatal and Child Health (CAPCH) Worker at Beendigen. “We support families and, in a healthy environment, do traditional types of activities, and through that, we support each other with our parenting. Belluz was very welcoming and took us out to the fields, and we had babies picking off the stems, and everybody got to bring a basket of strawberries home, and children got to see where their food comes from.”

Catherine Fox, one of the participants, says strawberry picking was a fun activity for the children.

“My youngest son just sat there and ate the whole time — he kept emptying the buckets,” Fox says. “I feel it’s important for the kids; it’s time together as a family and it’s time for them to be out in the outdoors.”

Fox says they used sugar, lemon juice, and pectin along with the strawberries to make the jam.

“We have been cutting and preparing the strawberries and mushing them up and now we’re boiling it to package them,” Fox says. “It’s a nice easy gift and it comes from the heart because you made it.”

Gail Linklater, one of the participants, says strawberry picking was awesome.

“I love getting together with other women, getting together with people, learning from them, sharing with them — we had a good time,” Linklater says. “Today, we’re making jam; the smell in the air is so delicious. Beendigen is awesome — they offer so many really great community programs, so for somebody like me, I’m older, it gives me a chance to get out and be amongst people and do fun things.”

Kasey-Ann Becker, one of the participants, says the children had an amazing experience in the strawberry patch.

“They were all eating strawberries for literally three hours,” Becker says. “The processing is pretty good; we’ve all been working pretty hard together. We cut up the strawberries all together and we’re just going to mush them up, and then we add some sugar and some pectin, and then we’re going to jar them up together and share them as a community.”

Lindsey Gladu, Parenting Across the Life Cycle (PAL) Worker at Beendigen, says it was important to get out on the land for the strawberry picking.

“Land-based learning is always amazing, so [it’s important] to get out there and pick our berries and see the whole process that it takes to make strawberry jam,” Gladu says. “I remember going when I was younger with my grandmother and picking strawberries, blueberries, all of that, and then she would teach me to put it into my muffins, into jams, all sorts of things, so now we’re teaching the next generation. We’ve got babies and toddlers, so they’re also here taking it all in too.”

Gladu adds that Beendigen has been offering more programming for families, women, and children, including the CAPCH program for newborns to six-year-old children and the PAL program for newborns to Elders.

“We’re always having programs with the culture and sharing all different sorts of knowledge and skills,” Gladu says. “We try to lean on one another for the knowledge. When we go outside and we sit by a fire, we’re always having teachings; we always try to start with smudge and using our medicines to start in a good way.”

Beendigen posts their upcoming events on their Facebook page.