October is Women’s History Month in Canada, and to mark it this year, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness organized an online discussion about the Alternative Builds program. Alternative Builds is an ongoing culturally based project that is empowering Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people to design and build housing on their terms.
Hosted by Kim Kakakaway (A Way Home Canada), the panel brought together Elder Marie McGregor Pitawanakwat (National Indigenous Women’s Housing Network), Trinity Fletcher (NIWHN), Arlene Hache (Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network), and Colleen Carpenter (Keepers of the Circle) in front of a live audience.
As Trinity explained, the Alternative Builds project is comprised of three main components: a literature review, consultation with community members, and then designing five culturally appropriate housing models using locally available materials: timber frame, cord wood, stone, log, and straw bale. She said:
“The overarching goal is to promote self-determination within Indigenous communities, and what’s really unique about this project is that it doesn’t just focus on constructing homes. It’s also about the process [being] a way to build capacity, particularly for Indigenous women, girls, Two Spirit, and gender-diverse people, and it’s intended to provide them with an opportunity to take on leadership roles in the housing sector.”
This panel was the eighth installment in the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness’ Prevention Matters! series.
Indigenous Homelessness Prevention
Since Indigenous homelessness is distinct in both its causes and how it is experienced, preventing it requires an approach that takes the impacts of colonialism into account and that is adapted to the specific needs of diverse Métis, Inuit, and First Nations communities. Notably, Indigenous homelessness is not just a lack of a physical structure, but also refers to a lack of cultural and spiritual connections in the context of colonization. Indigenous homelessness prevention strategies must therefore address cultural connection in addition to the physical housing component.
Reflecting on her role as an ally, Arlene reminded attendees that preventing Indigenous homelessness requires us to work with Indigenous communities and support their initiatives on their terms, rather than trying to implement solutions for them: “[I am here] to ensure that my settler peers give space to the knowledge, the wisdom and the leadership of Indigenous women.”
For more details on Indigenous homelessness prevention, see Prevention Matters! episode 6.
“It Was My Own Experience of Homelessness That Led Me to Do This Work… I Will Do All I Can to Help Them Out.”
Colleen described experiencing homelessness while growing up as a child of residential school survivors, “running away from systems that could have taken us away and tear my family apart… We grew up living in tents, to eviction, to prospector tents and living off the land… To face racism, to face judgment, authority figures with threats, it was a long life.” She said that it was her parents’ efforts to raise her and her siblings well, despite all the many challenges, have gotten her where she is today, working with Keepers of the Circle as a lead on construction projects.
Colleen’s story demonstrates how empowering it can be for Indigenous women to reclaim their traditional roles and cultural identities by getting involved in construction. Through Alternative Builds, she worked with a crew of Indigenous women to build her own off-grid home on land that was given to her by Elders in her community. She recalls one of the Elders saying:
“No one should ever fight or be homeless. No one should ever not have a home. An Indigenous person should not beg or pay for land back.”
The build was part of a project with Keepers of the Circle, and it has allowed her to stay stably housed ever since. Her experiences motivate her in her construction work and in training Indigenous women in the trades.
Similarly, Marie told the story of how she ended a period of homelessness in her life by building her own home on the site of an abandoned lumber mill with the help of her community. She started with a tent, then built an 8 × 10 cabin, then added another 8 × 14 shelter and connected them to make a two-room tiny home.
She studied carpentry along the way and built using conventional materials as well as materials she salvaged from the land: “Our friends and relatives helped me insulate it and have a little wood stove installed, and I had a very cozy little home in the bush. You know, it felt so safe and secure and private.”
Pointing to experiences with building her own home, Marie encouraged attendees to reflect on what we really need from a home, rather than what we want: “We need clean air. We need space. We need quiet. We need a place to sleep. We need safety and security. We need a place to wash, a place to cook, a place to be with family.”
Meeting these needs, while still honouring the land one lives on, gives a very different model of home than what we see in mainstream Canadian society, and with access to land, skills, and support, Marie was able to meet these needs for herself.
Indigenous Housing Starts With Land
Marie described how the origins of the Alternative Builds project are in the realization that it is impossible to talk about housing without talking about land. She observed that during the pandemic, the price of building materials exploded, when those materials were even available at all:
“And so I was thinking, ‘Well, what did we used to do long before Home Hardware and building supply companies’ and so on… And I looked down on the ground, and I thought, ‘That’s what we used to do, we used the Earth itself!’”
She said that, in an Anishinaabe worldview, natural building materials are there to be used, but that people have a relationship with the Earth and with all creatures that requires asking permission before taking, which means construction can only happen through ceremony. “That’s the difference between the way we do things and the way industrial, mechanized systems acquire materials.”
Trinity then described Alternative Builds in more detail and how it is anchored in Indigenous protocols and ideas of home. Community members are directly involved in each phase of the project, from the literature review to consultation and design. “The consultations really have been way more critical in the sense that they’ve allowed us to connect with communities directly. We get to hear their needs, and we can then reflect those within the different designs.” There is a constant focus on removing barriers to participation and empowering people who have been historically marginalized through connection to land, tradition, community, and one another.
Trinity explained the impact of the project, “For me, personally, being involved in this project has been incredibly inspiring. I’ve really learned just how powerful culturally grounded housing can be, not only in the sense of meeting immediate shelter needs, but also in reconnecting people to land, to tradition, to community, to one another. And it’s allowed me to shift my perspective on what housing can represent… I think, at the end of the day, what stands out most is the resilience and the strength within communities and seeing that reflected in both the homes and the people building and designing them.”
The Need for a Gendered Approach
After discussing the importance of an Indigenous-specific approach to housing, the panellists turned to why it is important to focus on women, Two Spirit, and gender-diverse people. Marie explained that pre-contact in many Indigenous Nations, women were responsible for building, maintaining, and moving wigwams (homes), and so exposing women to construction trades today is the modern version of those historic skills. She made clear that:
“We have the capacity to learn to build our own homes again, and if the existing systems are not there to help us, well, then they are hindering us. And we need to find our way around that.”
Trinity built on that point by reminding us that Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people face unique challenges around housing and homelessness and that they have been disproportionately impacted by the violence of colonization. This understanding “really alludes to the need for housing solutions to address the specific needs of these groups. Their experiences with homelessness and housing precarity are often tied to different intersecting factors, like domestic violence and poverty, and the loss of cultural identity.”
This loss of cultural identity is a reason to prioritize localized materials and designs, since they support, “the connection to land and place and tradition, which can offer both practical and spiritual support for those who are impacted the most by homelessness and housing precarity.” This creates spaces that are culturally aligned and that allow for healing. Trinity continued:
“It’s not just about shelter. It’s about reclaiming how we live on this land.”
Colleen emphasized the impact of spiritual homelessness on Indigenous women, saying that when she experienced homelessness, she often felt scared, but where she felt most at home was living off the land with her family: “I remember that being the most safe place… It didn’t matter if we didn’t have ammo or guns. My father lived and hunted off the land.”
When creating her home as a pilot participant in Alternative Builds, it was important to her to continue living off the land by, for instance, heating her house with wood that she cuts herself, reconnecting with skills that she wants to pass on in turn.
Spreading Empowerment
When discussing next steps, the panellists emphasized skill building and training to spread the model and to empower other Indigenous people to continue this work. Kim summarized this push for empowerment in her concluding remarks: “I’m encouraged by all of you, and I hope that this goes far, and that other people are encouraged and empowered, especially our Indigenous women, with that self-determination to know that what others around me are saying isn’t true.
We are so much more and have so much more capacity and empowerment within us to, like you’re saying, build our own homes. That’s incredible. I would have such pride to be able to say that and know that it was my hands that did that work, and for it to be on traditional homeland as well.”
For more information about homelessness among women and gender-diverse people, check out our free training on the Homelessness Learning Hub!