Decolonizing Home: A re-conceptualization of First Nations’ housing in Canada

1. Decolonizing Home: A re-conceptualization of First Nations’ housing in Canada Lindsay Monk MA Environmental Studies 2013 While it is generally agreed that many First Nations are facing a housing crisis in their communities, the Canadian public has largely misunderstood that crisis. This misunderstanding is blocking efforts to solve the problem, leaving us not only ill-prepared to assist First Nations, but also unwilling to offer space for First Nations to address devastating living conditions in their communities. Thus a re-conceptualization of the problem of housing on-reserve offers the possibility of addressing the crisis and opening space for moving forward. Row houses at Metlakatlah, c. 1880 It’s within this context that privatization and homeownership are being offered as the solution to the housing crisis: Why isn’t federal policy improving housing? The 1996 housing policy is failing to meet its own intended outcomes and is not addressing the housing crisis because it is not designed to do so; rather it is geared toward assimilation. Through the principles of First Nation control, expertise, and shared responsibilities, subjects are expected to take on an ethic of individual responsibility and increased control has actually translated into increased liability for band councils. The 1996 policy aims to hand off responsibility for housing to First Nations without accompanying capacity or supports and without acknowledging the federal role in creating the housing crisis. BC Archives, C-08105 www.fnpo.ca MQUP, 2010 Far from being incidental to the colonial encounter, housing has been a contested site throughout the history of First Nations-settler relations, with colonial policies focusing on reshaping how First Nations lived. These policies have been consistently resisted by First Nations. Settler governments have pursued goals of dispossession and assimilation through the housing of Indigenous peoples, exemplified through the use of location tickets as a means of promoting private property – here assimilation became equated with a concept of ownership and of permanent settlement. Housing has been used to promote wage-work, tying Indigenous people ever more closely to the economy of the settlers. Missionaries and government agents were involved in reforming Indigenous housing, equating the housing they found in the colony with what they perceived to be wrong with that society as a whole, thus explicitly recognizing the potential to reorganize society through the home. Each of these elements was connected in a particular way in colonial discourse: locating Indigenous people on reserves, advocating assimilation through individual ownership of land, and encouraging Western-style homes as a means of reorganizing Indigenous society. We cannot understand the housing crisis without understanding how housing is embedded in the colonial project in Canada. • Benefits are that it would allow for easier access to mortgage financing (reserve land could now be used as a security) and thus improve housing on-reserve. Privatization discourse views the on-reserve housing crisis as an economic problem, rooted in the inability of First Nations to own houses. The housing crisis amounts to a lack of individual property rights creating barriers to financing. • This framing ignores the entire history of systematic dispossession of land as well as resistance and its role in maintaining communal land tenure on-reserve. • The move toward privatization embodies many of the same assumptions seen in the location ticket era and carried forward into federal housing policy: that Indigenous people need to take on an ethic of individual responsibility and a relationship to the land that is dominated by private property. Rather than articulating a future that resonates within the cultural context of the community, self-determination here becomes about succeeding in the marketplace and offers no additional means by which communities can build their capacity beyond accessing mortgages. • Inclusion in this society may entail giving up claims to historical entitlement and redistribution. This serves the dual purpose of effectively dissolving the fiduciary responsibility of the federal government toward First Nations for their housing and rationalizing any further dispossession of land with market logic, should mortgage defaults occur. Waswanipi, Quebec Reframing the problem as one of colonial policy pursued and resisted through housing opens up new possibilities and spaces for action. Reframing allows us to put focus and value on what Indigenous communities are doing to improve their housing. Common vision to build housing that improves the wellbeing of the community – housing is at the service of the community. Emphasis on relationships – none of these initiatives works without relationships throughout the process. These relationships are cultivated both from within the community and from outside the community. “[H]ousing became a significant site of conflict in the colonial encounter, a vehicle through which the reorganization of First Nations society was imagined, attempted, resisted, and ultimately refashioned. More than simply reflecting the organization and use of space, homes, like maps, actively shape the way people both imagine and live their social roles. When natives and newcomers clashed over the household space, they were playing out one component of a larger clash over appropriate gender, economic, and settlement patterns, over, in other words, the politics of daily life.” - Adele Perry, “From the ‘hot-bed of vice’ to the ‘good and well-ordered Christian home’: First Nations housing and reform in nineteenth-century British Columbia,” Ethnohistory50 no.4 (2003): 587-588. Partnership between Cowichan Tribes, M’akola Housing, & BC Housing The priorities are remarkably consistent: Housing is at the service of the community, is affordable, builds local capacity, is self-sustaining, is culturally and environmentally appropriate, and the locus of authority remains in the community. Housing has been understood as a vehicle for reorganizing Indigenous society; the housing put forth in these initiatives offers that same potential from a locus of community control. Placing housing at the centre of decolonization efforts can have positive impacts for both housing and, as a consequence, community. Contact: monk.lindsay@gmail.com