Country food distributed to more than a thousand Inuvialuit beneficiaries

More than one thousand Inuvialuit households in the North are enjoying free local meat.

The Inuvialuit meat processing plant, run by the Inuvialuit Community Economic Development Organization (ICEDO),sends out boxes of country food to Inuvialuit beneficiarieshouseholds twice a year. Each box contains food harvested by local hunters, including fish, moose and even maktak.

Brian Wade, the director of ICEDO, said more than 1,100 houses in the region were sent boxes last week.

"We hand deliver the elders and single mother boxes right to the house, the others are general pick up," said Wade.

He said the program echoes values and traditions from Inuvialuit ways of life in the old days, if a person could not go and hunt, there would be someone to help them out.

"What we're doing is just taking our cultural values of an able person outsourcing the country food and distributing back out to those who maybe don't have the means to get out and harvest themselves, and that is what this program does" said Wade.

The wild meat is supplied from hunters and trappersacross the six Inuvialuit settlement communities Inuvik, Aklavik, Sachs Harbour, Paulatuk, Ulukhaktok, and Tuktoyaktuk.

The meat plant employs a team of six beneficiaries who handle the meat that's sent in cleaning, cutting, and preparing it to be packaged and sent back out.

The meat is only available to those living in the six communities in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region.

Wadesaid households can register through their community corporation offices.