Today the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness is releasing Storying Truth and Journeying towards Reconciliation: Indigenous Perspectives on Homelessness Prevention. It gathers stories about what Indigenous homelessness is, where it comes from, and what would have prevented it. Our Indigenous Advisory Circle* guided the work from the first conversation to the last edit, and it exists in the form it does because of them.
We are releasing it on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, but with some caution, as the word reconciliation gets used often. Those who shared their stories for this report were clear that they have little patience for the tokenistic version of the word. What they asked for was that Canada listen to the truth about how colonization is still being lived out, day to day, and then change the systems that keep producing it.
“Systems remain colonized, yet they change them aesthetically to look more Indigenous friendly, like, if you go to Gladue court. They have an eagle feather and sweet grass. They have Indigenous art, but the very system itself is a colonial system to inflict violence on Indigenous people on their own land. Right. So, the hypocrisy is crazy. And to see it day in and day out, it’s just like, it’s just like, there’s no solution. And that anyone that’s in power is only concerned with the optics.” – Service provider
Why We Gathered Stories
This project began in 2021 as a literature review on First Nations homelessness for the Assembly of First Nations. After it was complete, our Indigenous Advisory Circle and the COH decided that a western academic review was not the right next step. Instead, we set out to gather stories from across the country.
Seventy-nine people took part: 37 First Nations, Inuit and Métis people with lived or living experience of being unhoused, and 42 service providers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working to prevent homelessness. Each person was asked three questions:
- What does Indigenous homelessness mean to you?
- What does Indigenous homelessness prevention mean to you?
- What programs, initiatives or organizations have you found helpful?
The COH is a non-Indigenous research organization based at York University, a colonial institution. Listening to Indigenous Peoples who have been unhoused on their own homelands, and putting their words at the centre of a report rather than our own, is a small act of truth gathering. This report is our attempt to hold up some of those truths.
What We Heard
“Homelessness? To me it means it means, means oppression… it means further genocide, further trauma. Because it is so preventable…. nobody should be without their basics, food, water, water, shelter, shelter. You know, nobody should be without that.” – Person with lived experience (PWLE)
Every story shared with us had pain at its centre. People described carrying their own trauma alongside their parents’ and their grandparents’ and their ancestors’, in their bodies and in their spirits, and then having that pain renewed daily by racism, by the shelter system, by child welfare, by being arrested for trying to survive outdoors, by strangers who look away.
“You’re self-medicating because you don’t want to face whatever’s happening, and then the kids get taken away. So now you’re even in more pain. So now you start using again… And then the government just shoots all the cash into somebody else’s home to look after your kids. Why couldn’t they do that in the first place for us? For the family that was struggling? Now you just broke up the whole family and caused trauma to those children by removing them from their home.” – PWLE
The report traces this back to what it calls the “original eviction”: the Doctrine of Discovery, the reserve system, residential schools and the ongoing theft of land. Colonization is not something that happened in the past. It is something that is still happening, and Indigenous homelessness is one of its most visible outcomes.
“Being homeless isn’t the issue. How did they get there in the first place? Yeah, them not having a house is not the issue. By the time you’re homeless, it’s too late. The system has already failed you… once someone’s homeless, then it’s that very late in the game. Like it’s too late…. it’s part of poverty. It’s about being part of an Indigenous person. And it shouldn’t be that way…First Peoples are living in third world conditions.” – PWLE
We also heard, again and again, that substance use is not the cause of homelessness and not simply a result of it. It sits underneath both, as a response to pain that nothing else is addressing. One Indigenous service provider said it plainly: “We are not in an opioid crisis, we are in a pain crisis.” That reframing runs through the entire report.
What struck our research team most was how similar the stories were from one end of the country to the other. People in different provinces and nations, who had never met, described the same pathways into homelessness and the same things that would have prevented it. This shows the causes are structural and systemic, so the solutions have to be too.
Prevention is Possible
Everyone with lived experience who took part said they were sharing their story so that others would not have to go through what they did. That is prevention in its truest sense, rooted in the principle of All My Relations: the responsibility to care for one another so that no one is left without a home.
Home, in that understanding, is more than four walls. It includes relationships to land, water, family, kin, language, ceremony and identity. Many people described being homeless even while housed, because those connections had been severed. The report argues that this broader homelessness is the root cause of Indigenous houselessness, and that prevention has to restore home as well as housing.
From the stories, the report sets out five principles for prevention:
- Reconciliation. Not a statement or a ceremony, but honouring the Treaties, ending the dispossession of land, and returning decision-making power. Homelessness on stolen homelands cannot be solved while the taking continues.
- Self-determination. Indigenous Peoples designing and running their own solutions, with the authority and the funding to actually do it.
- Keeping families and communities together. Supporting families before children are removed, and keeping people connected to kin, community and Nation rather than scattering them.
- A wholistic approach to health. Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health addressed together, at the level of families and communities and not only individuals, because the trauma people are carrying is collective and intergenerational.
- Humanity, dignity, respect and kindness. How a person is treated when they walk through your door, every time.
It then translates those principles into calls to action for governments, policymakers, funders, organizations and frontline workers.
The report also highlights Indigenous-led programs that are already doing this work, and closes with a national resource list of Indigenous-led and Indigenous-serving organizations, region by region.
For Decision-Makers
Alongside the report we are also releasing a policy brief, Indigenous Homelessness Prevention: Restoring Home, Rights and Relationships, written for federal, provincial, territorial and municipal decision-makers. It sets out what prevention has to look like across four levels, from structural change through to housing stabilization, and makes ten recommendations. Those include Indigenous-led prevention strategies, long-term core funding for Indigenous organizations, an end to discharging people from public systems into homelessness, and Indigenous authority over how data about Indigenous homelessness is collected and used.
What This Day Asks of Us
The people who shared these stories did so generously and at real cost to themselves. They trusted us with their truths. What we owe them in return is not a day of reflection but sustained action, at every level.
The goal must not only be that every Indigenous person is housed. It must be that every Indigenous person has a home, in the fullest sense of the word.
We invite you to read the report, sit with the stories, and share it with your networks, your organizations and your elected representatives.
Storying Truth and Journeying towards Reconciliation was written by
Cathy Fournier, COH
Cohen Pinkoski, COH
Betty Edel, The Link
Thomas Edwards, End Homelessness Winnipeg
Fran Hunt-Jinnouchi, Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness
Bernice Kamano, Portland Hotel Society
Cindy Sue Montana-McCormack, Coalition of Hamilton Indigenous Leadership
Clay Shirt, COH Elder
Steve Teekens, Na-Me-Res
Jessica Rumboldt, COH
Averi-Labancz-Vye, COH
Makayla Miller, COH