No Home in a Homeland

Book excerpt: The Dene, a traditionally nomadic people, have no word for homelessness, a rare condition in the Canadian North prior to the 1990s. In No Home in a Homeland, Julia Christensen documents the rise of Indigenous homelessness and argues that this alarming trend will continue so long as policy makers continue to ignore northern perspectives and root causes, which lie deep in the region’s colonial past. Christensen interweaves analysis of the region’s unique history with the personal stories of people living homeless in two cities – Yellowknife and Inuvik. These individual and collective narratives tell a larger story of displacement and exclusion, residential schools and family breakdown, addiction and poor mental health, poverty and unemployment, and urbanization and institutionalization. But they also tell a story of 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.