No Home in a Homeland

Indigenous Peoples and Homelessness in the Canadian North

By Julia Christensen
Categories: Health, Social Work & Psychology, Social Work, Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences, Sociology, Geography, Geography
Publisher: UBC Press
Paperback : 9780774833950, 304 pages, May 2017
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774833967, 304 pages, February 2017
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774833974, 304 pages, February 2017
Ebook (MobiPocket) : 9780774833981, 304 pages, February 2017

Table of contents

Introduction

1 “Homelessness” Is an Outside Word: Understanding Indigenous Homelessness

2 Before Contact My Ancestors Travelled Constantly: Mapping Uneven Geographies of Settlement, Development, and Opportunity

3 Never Felt at Home: Pathways to Homelessness

4 It’s So Easy to Burn Your Bridges around Here: The Policy Landscape of Housing and Employment

5 They Want a Different Life: Rural-Urban Movements and Home Seeking

6 Our Home, Our Way of Life: Home, Homeland, and Spiritual Homelessness

Conclusion

Notes; Bibliography; Index

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