As a post-grad in Vancouver, David Cardinal didn’t particularly love his job, but it allowed him to spend his downtime in cafes around the city.
He’d frequent java joints that were far from his home if their atmosphere was just right, and it was in those shops where a newfound appreciation for coffee flourished.
That was the start of a lasting love of coffee – a passion that has taken Cardinal from operating a cafe in the heart of downtown Victoria for 15 years to trekking in Toyota trucks through the Peruvian jungle to visit a remote coffee farm.
More recently, it’s led to him starting turtle island coffee, which launched in November. The latest entrepreneurial journey once again sees him elbow-deep in quality coffee beans, but it’s also helped connect him with a culture that was almost stripped from his family.
Cardinal’s coffee roasting company evokes Turtle Island, which refers to the lands making up North America in many Indigenous Peoples’ creation stories. It’s also a nod to his origin story as a Cree man, but that identity is one he didn’t know much about for a long time. Cardinal’s father was a residential school survivor who was taken at the age of four before he was able to run away from the institution at 13.
“He was taught that being native was bad, so when he had children, he didn’t really teach us Cree, he didn’t really talk about his culture and honestly he didn’t learn that much of his own culture,” Cardinal said.
There was a time when he didn’t know what Turtle Island stood for, but starting his new coffee roastery has also been exciting for Cardinal because he’s gotten to learn more about his Indigenous roots.
“I’m trying to learn what our background is and it helps in meeting other people and hearing their stories, so it’s been helpful to learn more about my own background.”
The idea of starting his roastery sprung when he received a gift box featuring various products from Indigenous-owned businesses. The box included a bag of coffee, but Cardinal was underwhelmed by the art on the packaging and was even more let down when he tasted the coffee.
That led the former head roaster of multiple Greater Victoria coffee spots to pursue starting a company that would pair high-quality roasts with packaging that showcased wowing Indigenous artwork.
The quality aspect starts with using single-origin coffees, all sourced from Turtle Island, as Cardinal prides himself on knowing the micro-region where his beans are from. He then spends about one day a week roasting batches of beans and packaging them at one of his former workplaces, Level Ground Coffee Roasters.
He always envisioned offering four different roasts, so that lined up perfectly with the idea to link each coffee to one of the four teachings that make up the Indigenous medicine wheel. The next step was working with Indigenous artists – based in Greater Victoria, Sooke and Manitoba – to match each brew to a fitting teaching.
For example, the bear in Cree represents courage, which is the name of one of the coffees and is linked to the medicine wheel’s ‘mental’ section.
It was an amazing feeling when Cardinal first held the final product in his hands.
“The images we went with, I think they’re great and the artists are wonderful people,” he said. “I enjoy roasting, I enjoy coffee and I enjoy putting it all together myself and saying ‘Hey, I made this.’”
After November’s launch, turtle island coffee is taking online orders and is currently available in five smaller Greater Victoria grocers.
Cardinal hopes the business will become a full-time job as he enjoys being his own boss. But the coffee lover values working on his own and keeping the company 100 per cent Indigenous-owned and operated. That means, for him, the peak may be having success online and getting his roasts into some more markets that are close to home.
“I want my hands on it,” he said. “It might sound kind of silly but I don’t actually want to get that big.”
“I’m proud of the idea of doing it all on my own.”
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