By Megan DeLaire

Canada is a nation whose popularity on the world stage rests on its morals and humanitarian reputation. However, while our nation’s history of domestic human rights abuses isn’t explicity taught in our schools or abroad, its repercussions are highly visible on the streets of our capital city where homeless Inuit people huddle.

The Inuit are the indigenous people of Canada’s northern territories. Nunavut, declared a distinct  territory in 1999,  is home to the most Inuit people in Canada. The highest concentration of Inuit outside of Nunavut is none other than our nation’s shining capital, Ottawa.

Where are Ottawa’s Inuit? The Inuit are a young demographic, with an average age of 22 compared to the national average age of 40. So they’re mostly in Ottawa’s universities and colleges right? Or maybe they’re working retail in malls like the Rideau Centre or the St. Laurent Centre.

The reality is that Inuit people in Ottawa are highly underrepresented in most areas, except on the street.
While Ottawa contains the highest population of Inuit people outside of Nunavut, Inuit only account for around two per cent of the city’s population. While Inuit are an underrepresented segment of the city’s population, they account for a large proportion of clients at urban homeless shelters like Shepherds of Good Hope.

“There’s a disproportionate amount of aboriginals in the shelter system compared to just living in the city of Ottawa,” said Stephen Bartolo, senior manager of transitional housing programs at Shepherds of Good Hope.
Bartolo said that Inuit people comprise almost 25 per cent of the downtown shelter’s population, and over 50 per cent of the population of its harm reduction program.

Shepherds of Good Hope’s  harm reduction program is a managed alcohol program which Bartolo said deals with most chronically hopeless alcoholics in ottawa: one to two per-cent of most addicted alcoholics, people who, if not in the program, will end up in hospital rooms and police cells nightly.
Participants in this program are medically assessed and administered a carefully measured doses of alcohol through the day to keep dangerous withdrawal symptoms at bay. These are the places in Ottawa where an Inuit presence is strong.

“I think the unfortunate reality is of our aboriginal population in our shelter system there is a very high correlation to addiction and trauma issues in terms of being the two predominant reasons that they’re ending up in the shelter system,” Bartolo said.

Inuit people often travel to Ottawa for relief: either in the form of advanced medical treatments not available in Nunavut, or to escape the hard reality of life in Canada’s northern territories.

Although Ottawa has always been easier to access than more southern and western Canadian cities, the city’s relationships with the Inuit intensified in the last 15 to 20 years. In the 1990s, patients previously flown from Nunavut to Montreal began to be flown to Ottawa to be treated for serious chronic illnesses like cancer.

Larga-Baffin Centre, a rest centre in Ottawa, was set up to house Inuit people specifically from Nunavut while they stayed in Ottawa for treatment at its hospitals. While Inuit people from other northern communities also travel to Ottawa for healthcare, Larga-Baffin only admits Nunavut Inuit. Still, these comprise a majority of the Inuit population of Ottawa, and this relocation of Nunavut Inuit to Ottawa for treatment has been responsible for a large increase in Ottawa’s Inuit population.

“This is where they would come from the North for their medical appointments,” Bartolo said. “That is by far the number one factor for the increasing population.”
Still more Inuit come to Ottawa to be nearer to relatives who have already relocated here. While not every Inuit person who comes to the capital city comes for medical treatment, Ottawa has become a gathering place for Inuit as people seeking treatment have chosen to stay here and their relatives have followed. Still others come to Ottawa expecting excitement and opportunity.

An Inuit woman known as Taina moved to Ottawa in 1989 for a paid vacation through her government job as a secretary in Iqaluit. She came with her daughters, two and 14-years-old, to see her sister, and never returned to Nunavut. She now resides at The Oaks, a Shepherds of Good Hope institution on Merivale Road after two decades of intermitten alcoholism, homelessness and shelter life.

Like many others, Taina believed a permanent move to Ottawa would be beneficial for her and her children. She now wishes to warn others against it.

“They think it’s probably exciting when it’s really not. If you don’t have a place to go right away you’re lost already, I mean really lost,” said Taina. “You don’t know where to go, you don’t know anybody, nobody smiles.”
“I really do not want to see a lot of my relatives here because they might become homeless.”
Taina does not personally know anyone who has moved to Ottawa as a result of seeking medical treatment here. She recalls that her newphew, eight years her senior, moved here when she was eight-years-old. Other relatives followed suit.

For Taina and her relatives, ill-prepared moves to Ottawa combined with culture shock and the sudden abundance of alcohol created the perfect storm for years of self-destruction and homelessness ultimately ending in tragedy.
“There’s no liquor store up in north Iqaluit. All of a sudden we come down here, everything’s so readily available,” said Taina. “A lot of people become homeless out there because they can not stop drinking, like me. I was living downtown for about four long, homeless years.”

Still, in spite of years of homelessness, Taina will not return to Iqaluit and considers her life in Ottawa an improvement.”I used to have a bad, bad life in Iqaluit,” Taina said. “I’m not going back. Only to bury my others, if they don’t come here to bury me.”

While it’s easy to point to substance abuse and poor planning as the reasons many Inuit people become homeless in Ottawa, to do so is to ignore the complex fundamental forces not only driving Inuit people to Ottawa, but to violence and addiction.

“There’s a lack of housing in the North so they think that the city has housing, which they do,” said Tina Ford, a housing support worker with Mamisarvik Healing Centre in Ottawa. “But right now there’s a lack of affordable housing for low-income people and so a lot of people are ending up at shelters.”

“The barriers are having addiction, having poverty and being new to the city.”

A report titled INUIT HOUSING: the personal and social dimensions of a chronic housing shortage and overcrowding conducted a case study of Cape Dorset, Nunavut and produced revealing statistics. Of 91 households studied, 47 per cent were over crowded, with 13 people living in a two-bedroom residence in the worst case. The study compares this with a national average rate of overcrowding of seven per cent.

Because of northern Canada’s cold climate, people spend much of their time indoors, sharing very small spaces with often five or more people.

When asked how having fewer people in their homes could help alleviate personal issues, 30 per cent of the study’s respondants said that less overcrowding would result in less of “People being angry,” while 19.5 cited “Problems with school,” 17.1 responded with “Depression,” and 14.6 per cent said less overcrowding would result in less violence.
Nunavut is a poor place, lacking employment, housing and funding for healthcare and other social welfare.

However, Juliet Kotierk a housing support worker for Mamisarvik Healing Centre in Ottawa cites issues which run even much more deeply than Nunavut’s current struggles with poverty. Kotierk traces the problems of today’s urban and rural Inuit to the settlement of the North by Europeans in the last century. Traditional Inuit culture is very specific to the climate in which the Inuit live, and thus deeply, deeply rooted in the peoples’ identity.

The disruption of their traditional livelihoods, naming conventions, language and community as well as unthinkable physical, mental and sexual abuse have led to a decades long identity crisis. This crisis has culminated in violence, depression, and substance abuse.

“In some of the settlements their dogs, their sled dogs for survival were shot by the RCMP,” Kotierk said. “Which is a big trauma and of course leads to a lot of distrust of the RCMP.”
Kotierk was born in Britain but lived in Nunavut for several years.  Her husband, children and grandchildren are Inuit. She states that Inuit people used to have to keep leather tags stamped with numbers, because government officians couldn’t understand their naming systems. Her husband has one.

The Canadian government enforced having a family name and a first name, as per western custom. The issue of naming became confused and convoluted. They had been given names they didn’t use, which made record keeping difficult.
Furthermore, Kotierk explained, an Inuit person’s Inuit name is not meant to be a family name but a special name to indicate reincarnation, a concept very important to the Inuit. For decades officials have been enforcing the use of those names as family names. Years of tampering with Inuit names, which are sacred and very familiar to the Inuit, have led to deep rooted issues with identity.

In residential schools there was abuse, there was the forced forgetting of native language, and destruction of Inuit culture and identity before children were sent home.

“Of course when they went back they spoke english or french and they had forgotten their language,” Kotierk said. “And they didn’t know how to parent, maybe they’d been abused and everything. So there’s a lot of trauma over these generations that hasn’t been healed.”

Kotierk argues that as a result, the Inuit suffered from low confidence and loss of power, and became angry. Kotierk and others, including Bartolo and Ford have strongly suggested that violent and self destructive behaviour in Inuit people is the result of intergenerational abuse.

Kotierk believes that healing is one of the keys to preventing future homelessness and substance abuse.
Unfortunately for the people who need them, services like Mamisarvik Healing Centre where she works are experiencing major cuts to funding due to the federal government’s most recent fiscal budget. At the end of the year the centre will lose almost $1 million.

“We’re really struggling next year. We’ve had to restructure and we’re really hoping that we can survive because people need that healing,” said Kotierk.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an official apology to Canada’s First Nations people in 2008 for the use of residential schools. In 2012, four years later, his government made massive cuts to the National Aboriginal Health Organization, responsible for organizations like Mamisarvik attempting to heal decades of dysfunction and abuse. While the Inuit live mostly in Canada’s North, so many of their struggles begin and end in our nation’s capital.