Abstract
This edited collection of research on Indigenous homelessness in Canada, Australia and New Zealand is welcome, given the paucity of cross-national comparisons in this field. Its two editors, Evelyn Peters and Julia Christensen, are Canadian geographers with extensive expertise in the area. Peters, in particular, has played a leading role in developing the field of Canadian urban Aboriginal geographies.
In her introduction, Christensen notes that the mainstream literature often misses the critical features of Indigenous homelessness which “cannot be decontextualized from the uneven economic and community development, institutionalization, landlessness and cultural genocide experienced in different degrees and scale across Canada, Australia and New Zealand” (Christensen, 2016, p. 3). It is the implications of this shared context for Indigenous homelessness that is the focus of the book.
The book is divided into three parts covering Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with 17 chapters, and an introduction and conclusion. Each of the three sections opens with a chapter outlining the country’s colonial, political, social and economic context. The nine chapters on Canada explore the failure of policy to respond to Indigenous cultural values and behaviours (Christensen and Andrew; Peters and Kern), the racialized criminal justice response to Indigenous homelessnesss in Edmonton (Freistadt), the impact of Indigenous status on health and housing outcomes (Klodawsky, Cherner, Aubury, Farrell, Parell and Smith), subjective understandings of home in Manitoba (Bonnycastle, Simpkins and Siddle), the implications for community engaged scholarship for identifying new solutions to Indigenous homelessness (Thurston, Turner and Bird), the meanings of homelessness for Indigenous people located on their traditional lands (Belanger and Lindstrom) and the implications of this in rural locations for Housing First models of homelessness.
The five Australian chapters include an analysis of “fringe dwelling” as a form of resistance (Prout, Quicke and Green), the lessons to be learnt from good practice in homelessness service provision (Memmott and Nash), a critique of mainstream definitions of homelessness (Greenop and Memmott) and a case study of disciplinary approaches to housing management (Birdsall-Jones). The three New Zealand chapters cover the socio-political context (Groot and Peters), the ways in which dispossession contributes to Māori homelessness (Brown) and how an opportunity to garden on tribal lands enabled some Māori to reclaim their identity as Māori men (King, Hodgetts, Rua, and Te Whetu).
The contribution of the long shadow of colonisation to Indigenous homelessness in these chapters is stark. It is there in the common theme of spiritual homelessness resulting from disconnection from country and kin, which is part of the experience of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) peoples in Southern Alberta (Belanger and Lindstrom), it shapes ideas of home for Indigenous peoples in Manitoba (Bonnycastle, Simpkins and Siddle), it makes the turangawaewae—having an ancestral “place to stand”—central to the re-establishment of a sense of home for New Zealand Māori (Brown) and renders mainstream definitions of homelessness problematic in Australia (Memmott and Nash) and in Canada (Peters and Kern).
It is also present in the failure of governments to develop culturally appropriate responses to Indigenous housing need. The accounts confirm that the drivers of Indigenous homelessness are a combination of housing exclusion (shortage of appropriate affordable housing, discrimination and low income) and cultural differences, especially in relation to culturally sanctioned population mobility and a moral economy of sharing resources and supporting kin. The latter results in high-density households and large numbers of visitors which create crowding, make housing access difficult and heighten the risk of tenancy failure due to breaches of tenancy regulations. Despite the strength of this evidence base, the volume attests to the fact that housing and homelessness policies in each of the three countries examined, continue to operate according to the values and priorities of the non-Indigenous population. As Peters argues in her conclusion, much of Indigenous homelessness is policy driven.
Arrangements for Western housing emerge out of, and perpetuate the forms of Western lifestyles and are premised on a need for stability, privacy and an investment in the future. They are spaces to craft identity and achieve financial and social aspirations. This is markedly different from the orientations of Indigenous peoples evident in this volume, which are based on a relational, rather than instrumental orientation in which it is the response to the Other that is prioritised. This orientation comes across in this account of Ngati Whatua, a local tribal group in the Auckland area, who having won back a small part of their tribal lands overlooking Auckland harbour describe why they involved homeless Māori in caring for the land:
They [homeless Māori men] are Māori and this is a marae and they have the reo [the Māori language] . . . . They just felt at home. And they had a place to come to for their wairua [spirit] and to just be themselves . . . . As a people we could identify with them because we were homeless in our land. We had nothing left. We could identify with them and how they were feeling. We almost got wiped out. So that was our aroha [love/compassion] to them . . . . We are giving respect to our ancestors by helping other people. (King et al., 2016, p. 364)
This failure of policy to respond to the particular realities of Indigenous lifeworlds amounts to a form of assimilation and shows that despite the existence of small spaces for Indigenous-driven policy settings and responses, the overarching context is the persistence of the project of colonisation. This volume is important in revealing this truth and lends credence to Christensen’s claim that solutions to Indigenous homelessness require decolonising agendas which “reorient social policy interventions away from the management of ‘deficiencies’ or ‘deviance’ towards culturally relevant, community and family based programming based on Indigenous values and focused on supports for home building” (Christensen, 2016, p. 5).
While this collection might have been better organised around the themes of the colonial legacy, policy-driven homelessness and resistance (the headings used in Peters’ conclusion), rather than by country, these patterns are readily perceived. It is to be hoped that this volume will be followed by other comparative works, including ones that focus more particularly on the contribution of Indigenous/state relations to Indigenous well-being.