No Home in a Homeland
Indigenous Peoples and Homelessness in the Canadian North
Through personal accounts and analysis of historical trends, No Home in a Homeland documents the spread of homelessness in the North and what it reveals about colonialism and its legacies and the limitations of existing policies and programs.
Description
The Dene, a traditionally nomadic people, have no word for homelessness, a rare condition in the Canadian North prior to the 1990s. Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and proposes solutions by interweaving analysis of the region’s unique history with personal narratives of homeless men and women in two cities – Yellowknife and Inuvik. What emerges is a larger story of displacement and intergenerational trauma, hope and renewal. Understanding what it means to be homeless in the North and how Indigenous people think about home and homemaking is the first step, Christensen argues, on the path to decolonizing existing approaches and practices.
Reviews
Within the stories [included in the book] lie accounts of home seeking that paint an important picture of agency, Indigenous home, and the ways that many Indigenous lives are unrecognized and unsupported through dominant social policy approaches. A key strength of the book is that it challenges southern, urban, and non-Indigenous peoples to face what Christensen terms “the discomfort of positionality,” and to not turn away from the spiritual homelessness of Dene people… Summing Up: Recommended.
- G. Bruyere, University College of the North
No Home in a Homeland represents a significant, unique, and timely contribution to the literature on homelessness experienced by Indigenous people in the Canadian North.
- Michael G. Young, Royal Roads University