"The majority of Aboriginal people in Canada - First Nations, Inuit, and Meþtis - live in urban areas. Public policy making concerning urban Aboriginal people is, however, complex, complicated by ...geographic variation, and varies greatly in both quality and quantity from municipality to municipality. The responsibilities of different levels of government are hotly debated, and there is competition between Aboriginal organizations. In Urban Aboriginal Policy Making in Canadian Municipalities leading authorities interview both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal leaders, report on research done in a large variety of municipalities, and assess the quality of urban Aboriginal policy in Canada. Individual chapters highlight the unique issues related to policy making in this field - the important role of diverse Aboriginal organizations, the need to address Aboriginal and Treaty rights and the right to self-government, and the lack of governmental leadership - revealing a complex jurisdictional and programming maze. Contributors look at provinces where there has been extensive activity as well as provinces where urban Aboriginal issues seem largely irrelevant to governments. They cover small and mid-sized towns, remote communities, and large metropolises. While their research acknowledges that existing Aboriginal policy falls short in many ways, it also affirms that the field is new and there are grounds for improvement as it grows and matures. Contributors include Frances Abele (Carleton University), Chris Andersen (University of Alberta), Katherine A. H. Graham (Carleton University), Russell LaPointe (Carleton University), David J. Leech (Skelton-Clark Post-Doctoral Fellow, Queen's University), Maeengan Linklater (Mazinaate, Inc., Winnipeg), Michael McCrossan (Carleton University), James Moore (City of Kelowna), Karen Bridget Murray (York University), Evelyn J. Peters (University of Winnipeg), Jenna Strachan (Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Kelowna BC ), Ryan Walker (University of Saskatchewan), and Robert Young (Unive
Being homeless in one's homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the ...dispossession of Indigenouspeoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous practices, languages, and cultures-including patterns of housing and land use-can be seen today in the disproportionate number of Indigenous people affected by homelessness in both rural and urban settings.Essays in this collection explore the meaning and scope of Indigenous homelessness in the Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They argue that effective policy and support programs aimed at relieving Indigenous homelessness must be rooted in Indigenous conceptions of home, land, and kinship, and cannot ignore the context of systemic inequality, institutionalization, landlessness, among other things, that stem from a history of colonialism."Indigenous Homelessness: Perspectives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia" provides a comprehensive exploration of the Indigenous experience of homelessness. It testifies to ongoing cultural resilience and lays the groundwork for practices and policies designed to better address the conditions that lead to homelessness among Indigenous peoples.
Rooster Town Peters, Evelyn; Stock, Matthew; Werner, Adrian
2018, 2018-10-16
eBook
Rooster Town documents the story of a community rooted in kinship, culture, and historical circumstance, whose residents existed unofficially in the cracks of municipal bureaucracy, while navigating ...the legacy of settler colonialism and the demands of modernity and urbanization.
Contemporary research on migration, particularly those studies drawing upon theories of transnationalism, demonstrates the ways in which social relations are stretched across spaces, allowing ...individuals to disrupt boundaries and create identities of belonging to more than one place. This research focuses on the disruption of state boundaries through migration and identity construction. In this paper we utilize elements of transnational theory and stories of First Nations migrants to explore the ways that First Nations urbanization also disrupts boundaries. Colonial perspectives and practices that confined First Nations cultural practices and identities within the physical boundaries of reserves and defined all other spaces as settler spaces created a framework for the construction of the contemporary Canadian nation-state. We present the results of eighteen in-depth interviews conducted with urban First Nations migrants. The interviews focused on understanding how migration to cities shapes relationships to the land (an important element of indigenous identity), the challenges cities present to maintaining connections to the land, and the strategies First Nations migrants use to preserve those connections. By resisting the assignment of First Nations cultures and identities to reserves, First Nations migration to cities challenges the identity of the modern state by disrupting its internal borders and boundaries.
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This study examines the role of rural reserves in the mobility strategies of First Nations homeless participants, who were interviewed in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a town in Canada's central ...prairie province. Although increasing attention is being paid to homelessness in rural areas, existing geographic work on homeless mobility has provided little in the way of a framework for identifying the paths homeless people take through different urban and rural places. Reserves are places where First Nations (indigenous) people have unique rights and/or residency. Created through colonial legislation, the expectation was that reserves would disappear as First Nations people were assimilated. However, colonialism shaped reserves as places of poverty, poor housing, and economic disadvantage, but they also became places where First Nations experienced family connections and where they had some special rights. Our research showed that many First Nations people interviewed in the city had reserves as origins or destinations in their mobility paths in the year and a half prior to the interview. Circumstances on reserves led individuals to move elsewhere, but lack of resources and the desire to maintain social connections led them back. The results show the ongoing effects of colonial history on homeless people's lives. They also indicate the importance of studying the geographic pattern and scale of homeless individuals' mobility patterns.
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Based on the evidence obtained in qualitative studies, Massey and Denton argued in their 1988 paper (“The dimensions of residential segregation” Social Forces 67 281–315) that the residential ...segregation of ethnic or racialized groups is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon and, therefore, should be measured along several dimensions simultaneously. In a systematic review and analysis of all segregation measures proposed to that date, they identified five conceptually distinct dimensions of ethnic segregation—evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering—and ‘best indices’ to measure them. This index-based approach has achieved a ‘canonical’ status and has been employed in numerous studies of segregation patterns. However, it is often overlooked that the structure of ethnic residential segregation uncovered by Massey and Denton is specific to the context in which segregation takes place—that is, the residential segregation of ethnic and racialized groups in US cities. This paper attempts to assess the utility of Massey and Denton's five-dimensional structure of segregation for the study of settlement patterns of Aboriginal people in Canadian metropolitan areas. We find that the application of the Massey and Denton model to the urban Aboriginal population in Canadian cities produces a significantly different structure of segregation.
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Recent work in political geography has emphasised how scale plays a role in constituting relationships and identities. Historically, the Canadian federal government has taken responsibilities for ...social services for First Nations people on reserves, leaving this responsibility to provinces for First Nations people in cities. This constitutes First Nations women as individuals with Aboriginal rights only on reserves, and as part of mainstream society in urban areas. First Nations women have challenged the definitions of their identities embedded in these scales of service provision. In presenting alternative geographies for organising the provision of services, they demonstrate the importance of paying attention to the diversity of women's everyday geographies in the city.
This paper argues that feminist geography can provide some useful lessons in an attempt to increase Aboriginal peoples' representation in geography. It asks the question: How can we use the example ...of feminist geography to think about a geography that is more inclusive of Aboriginal people? The paper focuses on the issues of content in teaching, drawing on examples from urban and social geography, and on methodological challenges, especially the issue of reflexivity. Feminist geographer Suzanne Mackenzie argued that an emerging feminist geography left the discipline 'conceptually unclad', challenging scholars to consider new theoretical frameworks and new perspectives. I argue that emphasising the geographies of Aboriginal people also enriches geography, including feminist geography.
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Urban researchers have long had an interest in the implications of land use change on marginalized neighbourhoods in the city. Research in the US and the UK has explored the implications of changing ...spatial patterns of food retailing on access to food stores for low income neighbourhoods, but there is very little work on these issues in urban areas in Canada. This paper examines the changing spatial structure of food retailing between 1984 and 2004 in relation to neighbourhoods containing high concentrations of poverty in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The results suggest that changing food retail geographies had a greater negative impact on access to lower cost food for poorer neighbourhoods than wealthier neighbourhoods. Saskatoon is smaller than the cities that are most often studied to determine lack of access to food retailing, and as a result the impact of the distribution of food stores may not be as extreme as it is in areas of high poverty in large cities. Nevertheless, our results, in the context of a grey literature that emphasizes more limited access to food stores in low income neighbourhoods, suggests researchers need to explore whether these patterns are occurring in other Canadian situations.
L'intérêt des chercheurs urbains concernant les implications des changements d'utilisation des sols de quartiers marginalisés au sein de la ville n'est pas nouveau. Plusieurs études aux E.U. et au Royaume-Uni ont exploré les changements de la distribution spatiale des magasins d'alimentation au détail et l'impact sur l'accès à ces magasins pour les quartiers de bas revenu. Toutefois, il y a très peu d'études sur ce sujet en ce qui regard les zones urbaines au Canada. Cet article examine les changements de la distribution spatiale des magasins d'alimentation au détail, entre 1984 et 2004, et son impact sur les quartiers à fortes concentrations de pauvreté dans la ville de Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Les résultats suggèrent que les changements des la distribution spatiales des magasins d'alimentation ont impact négatif sur l'accès a une alimentation a bon marché pour les gens des quartiers pauvres comparativement a ceux de quartiers a revenu supérieur. Saskatoon est une ville plus petite que les villes qui ont fait l'objet d'études similaire et par conséquent l'impact de la distribution des magasins d'alimentation au détail n'est pas aussi extrême qu'il est dans les secteurs de haute pauvreté d'une grande ville. Néanmoins, nos résultat souligne un accès limité aux magasins d'alimentations dans les voisinages de revenu bas et suggère le besoin d'explorer si cette situation s'applique a d'autres villes canadiennes.
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!["[W]e do not lose our treat...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0343-2521/small "\"[W]e do not lose our treaty rights outside the... reserve\": challenging the scales of social service provision for First Nations women in Canadian cities")
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