Enclosed are two informative articles on Attawapiskat, the isolated village on the shore of James Bay in northern Ontario whose struggle for housing and other social and national rights has become an inspiration and lightning rod for the Indigenous rights movement known as Idle No More. Note, I do not endorse the writer’s suggestion that federal government funding to the Attawapiskat governing council may have been squandered in recent years. Rallies and at least one train blockade by the Idle No More movement took place across Canada on Dec. 30 in support of Chief Theresa Spence. They are speaking out in solidarity with the hunger strike of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence in Ottawa. Her strike is into its 21st day. Read a report on the protests on this website, here.
Chief Spence is demanding that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General David Johnson meet with Indigenous leaders to discuss tackling the social crises in Indigenous communities across Canada, including the jobs and housing crisis in Attawapiskat described below.–Roger Annis, Dec. 31, 2012
In Attawapiskat, time stands still
A year after housing crisis erupted, a few trailers are only sign of improvement
By Raveena Aulakh, Toronto Star, page one, Dec. 29, 2012
ATTAWAPISKAT, ONT.— Many years ago, Helen Kataquapit lived in a house. A real house that was warm, had a bedroom, a kitchen with a stove and a washroom with running water. That memory is fast fading. The 52-year-old grandmother — who lives in a room not much larger than a walk-in closet in two trailers shared by dozens of others in one forlorn corner of Attawapiskat — knows she may never live in a house again. “I submitted my name years ago and they kept saying there will be a house, but I am single and at the bottom of their list,” Kataquapit says with a sigh. “This place has gotten worse over the years. I don’t know if anything will change it. It makes me sad, what’s happening here.”
Attawapiskat First Nation is a two hour flight north of Timmins. But it may as well be on another planet. A year ago, few could place this remote Cree reserve on Canada’s map. Then, in the middle of a desolate winter, came the news of the housing crisis and the community became the poster child of native neglect. Waves of journalists arrived on the reserve with its deplorable housing, wrote heartbreaking stories and left. So yes, this is an anniversary of sorts.
But an anniversary means nothing here. It is a place where time stands still. Nothing has changed in the past year, except for 22 new trailer homes that some lucky families moved into. Everything else is the same: poverty and dependence, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, substandard education and health care, inadequate housing and questionable governance. It is a long list, agrees Jackie Shisheesh. “It does sound tough to tackle,” she says. A band councillor from 2004 to 2007, Shisheesh says there were some happy families who moved into new houses in March but it isn’t enough, not even close.
The community of 1,900 people needs more houses, she says, because too many are living in rundown homes, and in some cases, many generations are living under the same roof. “I have two families living here,” she says with a shrug. Her house is home to two daughters, a son-in-law and a granddaughter. Shisheesh is sitting at the dining table; one daughter is on Facebook on a computer in the same room; another daughter is playing with her own daughter in the living room.
But she knows she has a house, her own place. There are families in the two emergency trailers who have been living in single rooms, sharing kitchens and washrooms, for the past three years. The trailers were donated by De Beers, which runs a billion-dollar diamond mine just up the road, after a sewage backup forced people from their houses. It was meant as a temporary shelter but as many as 50 people still live here because they have nowhere else. Sometimes tempers are frayed. Substance abuse is rampant. Those who live here seldom come out to chat with others. Most people mind their own business. The trailers don’t feel like home.
HOUSING IS A federal responsibility on First Nations reserves. In Attawapiskat, there is a huge question mark about what happened to the $95 million the reserve has received from the federal government since 2006. While Chief Theresa Spence is on a hunger strike in Ottawa, band council members here rebuffed each one of the Star’s interviews requests. Ignace Gull, a past chief of the reserve, also declined to talk to the Star.
There is also money that comes from the diamond mine. This community is about 90 kilometres east of the De Beers Victor mine. It produces about 600,000 carats of diamonds a year but it’s not clear how much money is paid to the reserve. Spence told the Star earlier this year that there is no revenue-sharing agreement with De Beers but said the reserve gets a payment from the company. She declined to say how much it is or how it is used.
Attawapiskat and De Beers share an uneasy relationship. Many people on the reserve feel the company is destroying the land. Others feel De Beers does not do as much as it can for the community. According to the De Beers website, the company gave contracts worth more than $40 million to the community in 2012. It also says it employs more than 60 full-time employees from the reserve, and another 100 from other First Nations communities.
Money has flowed into the reserve. Where it went is a mystery. Few people want to talk about that because they fear repercussions.
There are houses on the reserve with 50-inch TVs and big computers; youngsters walk around with iPods. Shiny new trucks and snowmobiles whiz along the icy roads. Clearly, not everyone is poor.
But where there is poverty, it is staggering. Some houses don’t have proper doors or windows to ward off the relentless wind. Others still don’t have running water. Many families lead a hand-to-mouth existence. Some subsist on bread, eggs and cheese — the cheapest things available at the Northern, the only store here, because it is subsidized by the government.
Adrian Sutherland, 36, a local, moved away to Alberta a few years ago and returned in 2009. What struck him was how much the community had deteriorated. “There is the housing problem, drug problem, a lot of frustration around the mine,” says Sutherland, who works for Attawapiskat Resources, a company that provides camp and catering services at the De Beers mine.
One of the few success stories at the reserve, Attawapiskat Resources employs about100 people, about three dozen from the reserve and the rest from other First Nations communities.
Sutherland is one of the more outspoken people on the reserve and he does not mince words when he says it has a lot to do with “leadership.” He says he is not talking about the federal government or the provincial ministry of Indian Affairs but leadership within the community. “We need a strong leader, need someone to make tough decisions,” he says, adding business projects are needed so that there are more employment opportunities, more money coming into the reserve.
The well-being of a community starts at the top, he says. “You are only as good as the people around you,” says Sutherland, but he quickly adds, “I am not knocking Theresa (Spence) down at all.”
TIME MOVES slowly in Attawapiskat. There are scant opportunities for employment. Some work for the band council, some for the two schools and the local hospital. Some others are employed with Northern, the gas station or the couple of cafés in the village. For about three months in the winter, a couple of dozen people work on the winter road that connects the reserve to Moosonee, Ont. That’s about it. Unemployment is roughly 70 per cent.
Many children have never seen their parents go to work because there are no jobs. Many children don’t go to school because they feel the education is substandard. Serena Koostachin, chief of the youth council and a recent high school graduate, says most young people believe schooling is a joke. “It is not as strict as schools down south . . . so most do not go to school,” says the 20-year-old. (She is the older sister of Shannen Koostachin, who spearheaded a campaign for better education for native children. In June 2010, she died in a car crash. She was 15.)
Serena Koostachin looks like a model and is mature beyond her years. She weighs her words carefully. There is little to do here for entertainment. There is a lot of bingo, some hockey. There is no restaurant, just a couple of tiny cafés. The lack of activities is a major reason people get addicted to drugs and alcohol. “Some (young people) tell me they do it just out of curiosity and get addicted,” she says. Cocaine, alcohol and prescription drugs such as Percocet are the main substances used.
Helen Kataquapit, meanwhile, could do with some good news. She had a home where she lived with a husband and four children. But when they separated, she let him have the house because the boys were living with him. She moved to Timmins, where she worked for a few years, but she always missed “the land and the bay. I had to come back.”
Her 13-year-old grandson, Tyson Sutherland, is visiting from Timmins. The two are obviously very close but feeling the cramped space. There is a bunk bed in the room, a mattress, two tables and a small chair. A scraggly curtain partially hides the bunk bed. It is not much, but Kataquapit says she will not move in with her siblings or her parents. “They all have their own problems,” she says. “I can’t impose mine on them . . . I will wait for a house, for things to get better.”
Attawapiskat: Why Don’t they leave?
Remote reserve may not be fixable. But something keeps people from moving
By Raveena Aulakh, Toronto Star, page one, Dec. 30, 2012
ATTAWAPISKAT, ONT.— If she had a magic wand, Rosie Koostachin would change many things in her community. There would be better housing, health care and education. There would be more jobs and there would be no drug and alcohol abuse. Oh, and the reserve would be better run. But there is no magic wand. Neither is one on its way.
Koostachin, a wise 42-year-old mother of four and grandmother of one, knows that: “Attawapiskat hasn’t changed in decades . . . I don’t think it ever will. It can’t. I was born here, I was raised here and I have raised all my kids here. The problems I saw four decades ago . . . they are problems we still face.”
Health care and education will always be a challenge. The dropout rate at the local high school will stay at more than 50 per cent. So will poverty. There will be no employment opportunities. Entertainment will at best be non-existent except around Christmas. The local cost of living will always be expensive (a single red pepper costs $3.99). It is the truth. Koostachin is not the only one who says so. She may be brave enough to talk openly about it but others say the same thing privately: Attawapiskat, home to about 1,900 people, can likely never be fixed. In the long run, it is unsustainable.
“But this is also our home,” says Koostachin, throwing her hands in the air. It is a conundrum.
ATTAWAPISKAT HAS a long list of problems. The community was founded in 1893 by Catholic missionaries. The steepled church, an aging grey structure next to the Attawapiskat River, remains the most striking structure. In 1901, the Hudson’s Bay Co. built a store here. Most natives lived in the bush at the time, hunting, trapping and fishing, and it was only in the 1930s that the settlement began to grow. Housing came in the 1970s, running water and sewage treatment arrived in the 1990s. It’s been unravelling since it all began.
The isolated Cree reserve’s problems exist, and persist, mostly due to its location. For much of the year, it is accessible only by air, which complicates life here terribly. For example, home repairs are near impossible because neither materials nor skills are available locally. There is no permanent doctor at the local hospital. Pregnant women must be flown either to Moosonee, a larger reserve on nearby James Bay, or to Timmins. Teachers and nurses, almost all non-aboriginal, feel marooned and don’t stick around too long.
The one non-aboriginal who has remained in Attawapiskat is a beloved member of the community. Father Rodrigue Vezina first came here 39 years ago. He has never left, except to spend a couple of weeks every summer with his family in Quebec City. The Oblate priest says he has spent a lot of time, especially during the long dark winters, thinking about the reserve’s future and how it can be improved. The answer eludes him. “Problems are not being solved . . . I wonder if they ever can be,” he says.
Vezina believes the only way that things may change here is by extensive job training so that locals can provide services in such areas as health care, construction and education. Jobs are the key to shaking up the reserve, he says. “People need to have a reason to wake up every morning.” (The reserve has almost no economy; as a result, unemployment is at 70 per cent. Most people live on social assistance.)
But Vezina, frail and thoughtful, understands it’s easier said than done. He is familiar with the difficulties faced by the elementary and high schools, where teachers usually don’t stay for more than a year or two and students don’t attend class regularly. The children feel no obligation to attend because they wake up in households where they have never seen their parents go to work. “‘What is the point?’ they think,” says Vezina. No education, no employment. It’s that simple, he sighs.
But it’s the hopelessness among the youth that really bothers Willie Sprule, who works at the Northern, the lone grocery store in Attawapiskat. He sees them hang around aimlessly at the store during school hours and tries to shoo them back to class. “It bothers me,” he says. “You know, we think more about these problems than you think we do.”
SOME PEOPLE IN the south tend to dismiss the plight of the Cree-speaking people of this reserve — and other isolated communities in the north — as the self-inflicted fate of people unable to shift for themselves and unwilling to let go of the past. It’s easy to pass judgment from hundreds of kilometres away — but it’s also tough to understand their love of this land, which can be harsh and unforgiving. Mornings are quiet and cold. One hour blurs into another, as does one day into another. The only sound, most times, is of snowmobiles whizzing by or dogs playing with each other.
This world is a dozen or so blocks of single-storey homes and little else. Why would anyone choose to live here, in this stark wilderness? It’s a question that drives Heather Kooiman, who’s from the Hamilton area, up the wall. She is fiercely protective of the reserve and its people. “Because it’s their land, where they belong,” she says. Kooiman, a McGill University graduate, is one of the nurses at the local hospital, which she admits really is just a clinic. She was here for a few months last winter and liked the work enough to return this winter. She says living here has made her realize that “issues between native and non-native people are so broken. It is so important to build the relationship between the two.” This is their land, this is how they live and this is how they want to live, she says. “It may be difficult for us to understand why they have this tie, but this is their world and we have to respect it instead of imposing our opinions on them.”
THE WORLD IN Attawapiskat is small but it’s the only one residents know, the one they are comfortable in. It’s not as if people have not tried to leave, says Serena Koostachin, chief of the youth council. They have, and it hasn’t gone well in many cases. Young people are terrified of leaving the reserve, says Koostachin (not related to Rosie). “They have seen others leave (for college) but eventually return because either they couldn’t cope with education in a new place or feel insecure without their families.”
She knows the feeling. She left the reserve after Grade 10 to attend a non-aboriginal high school in New Liskeard, Ont. Koostachin says she did miserably there and couldn’t wait to return to the reserve. She says most high school graduates who leave for college or university return within a year or so. Rosie Koostachin says it is not just people in their teens or in their 20s who come back. Families have moved away to get jobs or provide a better education for their kids but 95 per cent of them end up back in Attawapiskat. The family structure is very sound here, she says. “People help each other with clothes, food. When they move out, they find it hard to survive without it.”
Koostachin almost left the reserve once. It was in 2005, when she and her family were homeless and they were living in a house with a collapsed floor. In one of her bleakest moments, she thought of moving off the reserve. But she didn’t. She, like everyone else here, talks earnestly about how much she loves nature and the land and what it means to her. “When I go to the James Bay, it is a spiritual moment,” she says. “I’m the happiest then.”
In most beleaguered communities, happiness is a ghost. Not here. Even though hardships are piled one over the other, Attawapiskat hasn’t become desolate and tired. The suffering is real, so is the gentle acceptance of life the way it is. Despite the cold, people laugh, joke and go about their life. This is our life, says Koostachin. “We will be poor. We will always live in poverty. We know that,” she says. “But as long as we live on this land, we will always be OK.”
