National indigenous history Month feature
When Rick Powless learned that Health Sciences North in Sudbury launched its first Indigenous hospital menu, he felt a shift happen.
The third-year doctoral student at 91راة«'s Faculty of Education is a Red Seal-certified Indigenous chef, an Ontario College of Teachers-certified educator and a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Oneida Nation of the Thames, Bear Clan.
He was also the primary consultant on an initiative led by Compass Group Canada to bring Indigenous meals into Ontario hospitals – a project that recognizes the role of traditional and cultural food in healing.
His contributions also serve as a testament to his work to advance meaningful cross-cultural engagement.
"It was emotional for me," he says of the menu’s launch in Sudbury. At 91راة«, his PhD research draws on Indigenous food sovereignty, food insecurity in urban centres and strategies to integrate traditional foods and land-based knowledge into Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.
Much of Powless's work focuses on how traditional foods and land-based knowledge support well-being, identity and learning for Indigenous people living in urban communities. His research explores the impact of food and cultural disconnection on mental health while also examining how Indigenous knowledge is taught – or overlooked – in Ontario’s Kindergarten to Grade 12 classrooms. For Powless, that means pushing beyond superficial, checkbox-driven approaches and creating space for stories, reciprocity and food-based learning rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing.
“If you give somebody a recipe to cook Indigenous food but don't have the stories or the history behind those recipes then the students aren't getting anything out of it,†he says. “Beyond mere sustenance, our food is also a form of cultural transmission.â€
Part of what makes his work distinct is its attention to access. Indigenous ingredients – such as sun chokes, wild rice, butternut squash – have been more commercialized, driving up prices and making them less accessible.
"We're being priced out of our own ingredients," he says.
That tension shapes his approach to teaching. During cooking demonstrations and teaching kitchens across Ontario – including at 91راة«, Hart House and the University of Toronto – Powless shows students how to prepare traditional dishes using affordable, accessible ingredients. For example, Three Sisters Soup – made from corn, beans and squash – becomes a lesson in both food sovereignty and practical food literacy.
The collaboration with Compass Group Canada is a clear example of how his teaching has translated into real-world institutional change. In January 2025, Powless was approached to develop traditional Indigenous recipes for hospital menus across Ontario – including Brantford, Cornwall, Brockville, Newmarket, Niagara Regional Health and Health Sciences North.
He curated and vetted the recipes, wrote the cultural stories to accompany each dish and worked within Health Canada guidelines and hospital food requirements to preserve the recipes' Indigenous identity while adapting them for institutional settings.
For Powless, the menus are about more than nutrition; they reflect what happens to an Indigenous patient when they see their culture represented on a hospital food tray.
"If I can offer a piece of bannock and Three Sisters Soup and our people get that, they're going to instantly recognize the food," he says. "It's going to warm them up inside. It's going to take them back to the territory, back to community, back to family again. When that happens, mental health begins to heal."
Early responses to the menu have confirmed what he hoped for. In September 2025, a man from Akwesasne territory had an extended hospital stay in Cornwall. When the menu appeared, he recognized the dishes immediately.
"He had this smile on his face," Powless recalls. "He said, 'I get to have my food.'"
Looking ahead, Powless hopes to expand the Compass One menus into seniors' homes, correctional facilities and offshore operations focusing on areas with Indigenous populations.
He is also offering teaching kitchens to outpatients at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s Shkaabe Makwa, Canada's first Indigenous-led hospital-based centre. A second recipe menu featuring traditional Indigenous food tied to ceremony and seasonal changes is also in development.
91راة«, he says, has been central to his path as an advocate and educator. When Powless introduced Indigenous dishes to 91راة«'s student dining halls, he recalls being stopped by nursing students who shared that their entire class had been coming down for the soup.
Those conversations reinforce what he already believed: that food is the most direct route to cross-cultural understanding.
"If it wasn't for 91راة«, I don't think I would be where I am today," he says. "91راة« gave me a voice. It gave me a purpose. It gave me real value to what I think the world should look like through an Indigenous lens."
With files from Mzwandile Poncana