By: Stepan Wood and Estair Van Wagner
Connecting Homeless Encampments to Indigenous Land Defence
The link between homeless encampments and Indigenous land defence may not be obvious at first glance. Homeless encampment cases arise overwhelmingly in urban areas. Indigenous land defence cases arise mainly in rural and remote areas where resource extraction is concentrated. Resource extraction and land development are seldom immediate or explicit issues in homeless encampment cases, while they were the driving forces behind virtually all the cases in our earlier study on injunctions.
However, homeless encampment cases and the land defence cases are fundamentally part of the same larger phenomenon: the historic and continuing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. Homeless encampments and contested development projects are points on a continuum of the denial of Indigenous peoples’ rights, title, and jurisdiction over their ancestral lands and waters.
Further, injunction proceedings are a key legal framework through which encampment residents and their advocates assert their rights and defend their relationships with each other and with particular places. Like land defenders, encampment residents sometimes use injunction applications to try to stop evictions, but much more often injunctions are used against them to force them to leave a particular site or stop a particular activity. There are also similarities in that courts have presumed state authority and passed up opportunities to engage with Indigenous legal orders in the context of homelessness. Thus, examining these uses of injunctions alongside each other provides valuable insights.
Disproportionate Representation
Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in the unhoused population. They made up 35% of the respondents to the 2020-2022 national homelessness point-in-time survey, and 32.5% of shelter users in the 2024 National Shelter Study, while only making up 5% of the Canadian population. Indigenous overrepresentation is even greater amongst people living in unsheltered locations like encampments at 41% of respondents to the point-in-time count. In some regions Indigenous people make up a majority of encampment residents. Moreover, the actual extent of Indigenous homelessness is probably higher than official statistics indicate as Indigenous people are more likely to experience hidden and unsheltered homelessness and thus to be uncounted.
Indigenous homelessness often intersects with other forms of inequity including sex, age, disability, sexual orientation and gender expression. There is evidence that women, youth, seniors, persons with disabilities and LGBTQ2SIA folk are overrepresented in encampments, including amongst Indigenous encampment residents. Indigenous women, youth and LGBTQ2SIA folk may leave home to escape unsafe situations, only to face continuing dangers when unhoused or attempting to use shelters that may replicate colonial oppression.
Rooted in Dispossession
Indigenous overrepresentation in the unhoused population is integrally linked to the settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands and resources. Indigenous peoples who were forced from their territories often ended up with tiny reserves and settlements plagued with inadequate infrastructure and funding, including housing and clean water. Indigenous overrepresentation is also rooted in the lasting direct and intergenerational impacts of residential schools, child removal and other genocidal practices. Added to the severe housing crisis in Indigenous communities is the critical lack of supports for Indigenous people living in urban areas away from their home territories where they are more likely to face housing discrimination and core housing need than non-Indigenous people.
In this context, it is no surprise that themes of Indigenous dispossession and rights to unceded territories have been front and centre in many homeless encampments, especially in Western Canada. Encampment leaders, residents and supporters often explicitly identify encampments as cases of Indigenous land defence. They often insist that encampments are on unceded Indigenous territory on which settler-colonial government officials lack authority or on treaty territory where governments have failed to live to up their obligations. Claims of Indigenous sovereignty and demands for return of stolen Indigenous land are often prominently displayed and voiced at encampments. At least one encampment, in Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park, arose after a group of Indigenous individuals issued an eviction notice to the City on the basis that the Park was on unceded Indigenous land, in response to the City’s issuance of eviction notices to a few people who were staying in the park.
Creating and Connecting to Community
Encampments also often function as sites of cultural and spiritual support and reconnection for unhoused Indigenous people, via sacred fires, ceremonies, Elders and Indigenous mentors. Indigenous encampment residents have reported that they feel safer and healthier in encampments than in shelters, single-room-occupancy housing or the streets. A few encampments have self-identified as intentional Indigenous-majority communities. It is not uncommon for encampment leaders and representatives to invite government authorities to observe Indigenous protocols, visit sacred fires and engage in consultation and reconciliation on a basis of mutual respect rather than treating encampment residents as lawbreakers.
Evidence of these Indigenous dimensions is increasingly presented to courts in encampment injunction cases, along with evidence of Indigenous encampment residents’ experiences of trauma, loss, colonialism and racism. The courts also often hear evidence that Indigenous residents experience both emergency shelters and the metal fencing often used to corral encampments during decampment processes as a continuation of traumatic experiences of incarceration.
Lack of Judicial Recognition
Courts hearing injunction cases seldom acknowledge these Indigenous realities, even the most basic fact of Indigenous overrepresentation, but there are signs of change. In a 2021 case refusing an injunction to clear an encampment in Prince George, BC, for example, the judge acknowledged that a disproportionate number of homeless people in the city were Indigenous, that Indigenous people suffer the effects of discrimination, racism, and intergenerational trauma, and that the history of colonialism, displacement and residential schools continues to translate into higher rates of homelessness.
Encampment residents and supporters also sometimes put evidence before the courts that homelessness is a manifestation of a more fundamental aspect of colonial dispossession: the severance of Indigenous peoples’ relationships to the lands, waters, animals, plants, ancestors, kin and spirits. To stand up for encampment residents, in their view, is to stand for the restoration of these life-sustaining relationships. Thus, encampment residents and land defenders are simultaneously challenging Canadian courts to account for Indigenous law and jurisdiction.
Contextualizing the Unique Experience of Indigenous Homelessness
The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness’s Definition of Indigenous Homelessness clearly sets out the links between dispossession and homelessness. According to its author, Jesse Thistle, Indigenous peoples’ experience of homelessness is not limited to the lack of a structure to live in but encompasses multiple dimensions of dislocation of individuals, families and communities “from their relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages and identities.” This dislocation prevents affected Indigenous people from reconnecting culturally, spiritually, emotionally or physically with their Indigeneity or lost relationships.
According to the definition, this multidimensional experience of Indigenous homelessness is “the outcome of historically constructed and ongoing settler colonization and racism that have displaced and dispossessed First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples from their traditional governance systems and laws, territories, histories, worldviews, ancestors and stories.”
The Definition identifies twelve interlocking dimensions of Indigenous homelessness. The first five of these powerfully illustrate the integral connection between homelessness and the dispossession of Indigenous lands, waters and resources. They are:
- Historic Displacement Homelessness (Indigenous communities made homeless by displacement from their pre-colonial territories);
- Contemporary Geographic Separation Homelessness (Indigenous individuals’ or communities’ contemporary separation from their territories);
- Spiritual Disconnection Homelessness (Indigenous individuals’ or communities’ separation from Indigenous worldviews, the Creator or equivalent deity);
- Mental Disruption and Imbalance Homelessness (an imbalance of mental faculties experienced by Indigenous individuals and communities, caused by colonization’s entrenched social and economic marginalization of Indigenous Peoples);
- and Cultural Disintegration and Loss Homelessness (homelessness that totally dislocates or alienates Indigenous individuals and communities from their culture and from the relationship web of Indigenous society known as “All My Relations”
Not all homeless encampment injunction cases in Canada involve Indigenous people or advert to issues of Indigenous homelessness, but many do, and all arise ultimately on Indigenous land. As with Indigenous land defence, injunctions are only one aspect of how governments and industry continue to dispossess Indigenous people. Daily by-law enforcement and harassment by police, park rangers, by-law officers, and private security, the lack of basic services, and the seizure and destruction of personal possessions, are all part of a broader and compounding set of human rights violations faced by encampment residents. Nonetheless, homeless encampment and Indigenous land defence injunction cases are intertwined aspects of the larger phenomenon of colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands, waters, and resources.
