Indigenous Terra Madre

The gathering began at the Stockholm airport. Indigenous Terra Madre had a table at the arrivals area. Ola Buckard and Gunborg Mellengard where just sitting down for lunch and asked me to join them. Other delegates arrived from various points on all four continents of the globe. Quite an exotic group. Many spoke very limited or no English.

Ola is on the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity as the Suovas Presidium Coordinator. Gunborg was married to a Sami man and they raised their children in Jokkmokk. She now lives in Stockholm. Ola lives in Stockholm and invited me to give him a call after ITM - he was feeling sad that he wasn't going to be there but felt that the event was in good hands because his former colleague, Frank Roy was going to be attending.

Arrived at the airport in Lulea at midnight - it looked like the middle of the afternoon. A bus took us the two hours to Jokkmokk. The country side was a mixture of boreal forest and small fields where hay is grown. Small log huts are used to hold the dry hay in the winter. The trees are a mixture of spruce, jackpine and birch. From the bus I recognized many of the smaller plants - red alder, willow, labrador tea, arctic cotton and buttercups. I was kind of surprised how pastoral it was.

The houses and outbuildings are painted either a deep earthy red, green or yellow. Didn't see any fauna or people. Arrived in Jokkmokk just after two a.m. The landscape and the community reminds me of a combination of Lynn Lake (where I grew up), the north shore of Lake Superior on the U.S. side, Yellowknife and somewhere strange and alien. 

On the bus I met fellow Canadian, Jessica Duncan whose living in Barcelona and about to move to Bath, England to continue work on her PhD. Jess was travelling with a food and agricultural group from India whom she's worked with in community capacity building, rural development and youth engagement. She wasn't there as a Canadian delegate. Met the other Canadian delegate, Ama whose a coordinator for Eco Economic Forum an Indigenous peoples network situated in the Eastern Region Ghana.