As the co-chair of the National Indigenous Feminist Housing Working Group (NIFHWG), I’ve been busy searching for better housing alternatives in response to the nationwide housing crisis.
One of the projects I’m most interested in is the creation of off-grid communities in the place where I am from, the NWT. Our group has been working alongside the National Women’s Housing and Homeless Network (NWHHN) on a mission to start a movement for socially, ecologically empowering communities with the priority being Indigenous women and girls.
Our working group is hosted by Keepers of the Circle, an Indigenous non-profit established in 1997 to support the self-determination and equal rights of Indigenous women. The NIFHWG was established through the NWHHN to ensure Indigenous women control the agenda with respect to housing initiatives in Canada. The working group is seeking representation from Indigenous women all across so-called Canada.
The mother is the original home, everything starts with us — we are the life givers. We are the caretakers of our communities and the environment around us, and we should be treated with the utmost respect. This means affording the ability to live in safe, secure environments. For this reason, our group is focused on the Indigenous women and girls demographic, specifically those who are fleeing violent partnerships, experiencing hidden homelessness, the elderly and girls aging out of the foster care system to provide them with a space that is neither a shelter nor a transition house but rather a home that is a self-determining recognition of our inherent rights within a community setting — one that meets people where they are at and offers navigational wrap-around support services, freeing up long public and private housing wait lists.
The 2019 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report mentions the need for safe and secure housing more than 400 times. Eviction due to poverty and housing status should not be a reason to apprehend a child, yet this is occurring at a complex and undocumented rate. A lack of Indigenous-led housing programs leads to unsafe living conditions, inadequate housing, unaffordability and child apprehension.
It is imperative that the government and Indigenous Nations prioritize the immediate elimination of homelessness among Indigenous women and children and utilize all means necessary to ensure they are no longer rendered homeless on their own land. Four in 10, or 40 per cent, of Canada’s Indigenous children live in poverty. Our research indicates that children who experience child welfare involvement are 192 times more likely to become homeless as adults.
Goal of 33 NWT communities
Currently we are in discussions with Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) in a “Not For Sale” campaign with a team of Indigenous-led architects in partnership with the University of British Columbia to design an off-grid, customary “traditional,” culturally appropriate home that incorporates the latest in innovative green technologies to showcase at the Venice Biennale of Architecture between May and November 2023 in Venice, Italy with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. During that time, we will be collecting signatures to support a movement to control our own agenda separate from government-run housing policies that were originally founded on colonial encroachment of Indigenous lands.
The AAHA has identified that the modern invention of fee-simple property, where homeownership is a commodified land grab, is a violent process resulting in an urban environment that is racist, sexist, and classist at its very core without consideration that on any given night, 6.97 percent of the urban Indigenous population in Canada is homeless on their own lands. Nowhere is the financialization of housing and homeownership more visible than in Canada, a country whose economy is now dominated by real estate.
It is the ultimate goal to eventually roll out income passive, off-grid units designed for and by Indigenous Peoples across the NWT in all 33 remote communities to help eliminate the high cost of diesel dependency. Our group would like to train local Indigenous women to build these off-grid homes and we have local contractor support within the construction and manufacturing industries at the ready. Ideally,we would like to construct two to four of these off-grid units as a starting point with locations still to be determined.
We are aware that the off-grid community will have to be easily accessible to an urban centre but, at the same time, be situated in a place that is tranquil, where cultural activities can take place, which is why we have factored in the need for transportation provided to the tenants. This cost will be incurred in our budgeting, along with the inclusion of a shared space, a 24-hour security system, an optional communal cooking area with private dwellings and a designated housing advocate to help facilitate support services to residents on an ongoing full time basis.
In next week’s column, I’ll provide more details on the design and benefits of off-grid homes.