Skip to main content

Site Banner Ads

Site Search

Search

Up Here Publishing

Mobile Toggle

Utility navigation

  • Shop
  • Contact Us

Social Links

Facebook Twitter Instagram

Search Toggle

Search

Main navigation

  • Magazines
    • Latest Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Up Here Business
    • YK Guide
    • Move Up Here
  • Sections
    • People & Places
    • Arts & Lifestyle
    • History & Culture
    • Travel & Tourism
    • Nature & Science
  • Newsletters
  • Community Map
  • Contests
    • Sally Manning Award
    • Cold Snaps Photo Contest
    • Arctic Adventure Sweepstakes
  • Subscribe
    • Magazine
    • Digital Edition

On A Kombucha Run In Tsiigehtchic

January/February 2021

One schoolteacher spills the tea on foraging and fermenting in the Beaufort Delta.

By Jacob Boon

Photo by Up Here

Kombucha

Breadcrumb

  1. Home
  2. On A Kombucha Run In Tsiigehtchic

What do you do in Tsiigehtchic if you need a kombucha starter but you don’t have a car? You stick your thumb out or beg the townsfolk to drive you the two-and-a-half hours to Inuvik.

“Random, spontaneous trips is usually how that works out,” says Shelane Stuart, a schoolteacher, kombucha brewer, and budding herbalist. “‘Want to go to Inuvik?’ OK. Drop everything. Go.”

Brewing up a batch of kombucha—the bubbly, tasty, and nutritious fermented tea—isn’t foolproof, but it’s usually more a matter of patience than labour and travel. Take your starter (either pre-made kombucha or a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast known affectionately as a SCOBY) and add it to some tea and sugar, cover and let ferment for a week, pour out the tea, flavour with fruit, and wait for it to naturally carbonate.

Getting started is simple in bigger cities where bottled kombucha is sold in most corner stores. But it’s a little trickier in a town of under 200 just north of the Arctic Circle. So naturally, it’s heartbreaking when all that time and effort falls apart. The pH balance of Stuart’s first kombucha attempt, for instance, went screwy. She had to chuck the whole mouldy lot out and start from scratch.

“It was like a whole month’s investment. I had to figure out how to get back to Inuvik and get another bottle of kombucha,” she says with a sigh. “Northern problems.”

Thankfully, Stuart usually doesn’t have to travel so far to forage ingredients. Just steps away from her backyard are fields of rosehips, Labrador tea, yarrow, and other wild herbs perfect for making teas, tinctures, and medicines.

Inside her small apartment there’s soup on the stove and broccoli sprouts on the windowsill, soaking up the sun. Her sparse living room houses a squat rack and weight bench next to a homemade hydroponic tower of PVC pipes to grow her own veggies. (Stuart’s hoping to build a similar setup at school, where her students will be able to grow their own healthy snacks.) And in her kitchen there are mason jars and potion bottles of various tinctures, medicinals, and healthy concoctions made from foraged northern herbs—like rosehip oil, juniper cough medicine, even a kombucha vinaigrette salad dressing.

“I’m basically just trying to forage and propagate where I can, building up my medicine cabinet,” she says.

In Toronto, where she’s from, Stuart wasn’t much of a forager. Her herbal interest grew from the ground up after she came to the North two years ago to teach kindergarten at Tsiigehtchic’s lone school.

Gradually getting to know the community, and over tea with Elders, she learned about the profound respect Indigenous Northerners have for harvesting the medicine growing all around them. One local Elder even invited Stuart to her personal berry-picking patch; a high honour in the North.

“Since then, it’s just opened my eyes,” she says. “Really seeing every plant that’s around me as having a purpose.”

Stuart’s next project is transforming her kitchen waste into a compost system to feed future generations of plants. It’s all part of her passion for permaculture.

“The idea of ecosystems working together,” she says. “Closing the loop, closing the system, making sure there’s no waste.”

It’s a new idea, but also a very traditional one. Self-sufficiency is how people survived in the North for centuries, and even now it’s the best bet for moving past expensive and unhealthy foods shipped in from the south. All the ingredients are there for a healthy way of living.

Well, except for the worms to make compost. Those, Stuart says, she’ll need to order online. Hopefully pick-up won’t mean another hitchhiking trip to Inuvik but, if so, it’s doubtful she’ll mind. It’s just another kind of foraging.

“Harvesting is my jam.”   

January/February 2021

Imaa Like This: Children and Youth Expressing Themselves Through Music won the $1 million Arctic Inspiration Prize

Over $3 Million For Arctic Inspiration Prize Winners

Several projects that are by-the-North and for-the-North are among three winning groups.

By Anonda Canadien

Photo courtesy of Arctic Inspiration Prize/APTN

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021

January/February 2021

Gathering on the steps of the BC Legislature ahead of the 2020 throne speech, fists raised in the air.

OPINION: From Wet’suwet’en To Baffinland

My experience on a blockade and why the fight to protect our homelands connects all Indigenous peoples.

By Anonda Canadien

Photo by Mike Graeme

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021

Related Articles

January/February 2021

Imaa Like This: Children and Youth Expressing Themselves Through Music won the $1 million Arctic Inspiration Prize

Over $3 Million For Arctic Inspiration Prize Winners

Several projects that are by-the-North and for-the-North are among three winning groups.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021

January/February 2021

Gathering on the steps of the BC Legislature ahead of the 2020 throne speech, fists raised in the air.

OPINION: From Wet’suwet’en To Baffinland

My experience on a blockade and why the fight to protect our homelands connects all Indigenous peoples.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021

January/February 2011

Art Johns in his home

On The Trail Of The Lonesome Cowboy

On horseback, on stage and in boardrooms, Art Johns has blazed a broad path through the Yukon. How? By riding hard and sticking to his guns.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021

November/December 2020

GARBAGE TRUCK SANTA

Garbage Truck Santa

In Whitehorse, Santa Claus trades his sleigh for a garbage truck to bring the town holiday cheer.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021
Photo by Government of Canada

Colonial Bilingualism in Nunavut

Feds announce $10 million for territory's only French-language school, while Inuktut education languishes.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021
Max Ward with a model of one of his Wardair planes.

Remembering Max Ward

The famous northern bush pilot and founder of Wardair died this week in Edmonton.

February 26th, 2021 February 26th, 2021
December 30th, 2020 January 13th, 2021
Newsletter sign-up promo image.

Stay in Touch.

Our weekly newsletter brings all the best circumpolar stories right to your inbox.

Up Here magazine cover

Subscribe Now

Our magazine showcases award-winning writing and spectacular northern photos.

Subscribe

Footer Navigation

  • Advertise With Us
  • Work With Us
  • Write for Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Disclaimers & Legal

Contact Information

Up Here Publishing
4510-50th Ave., Ste. 102
Yellowknife, NT
X1A 1B9  Canada
Phone: 867.766.6710
Fax: 867.669.0626
Email: editor@uphere.ca

Social Links

Facebook Twitter Instagram
Funded by the Government of Canada