Plan to dismantle Winnipeg homeless camps a colonial relic that should be scrapped

It has been eerie watching the city issue and continue to uphold a request for proposals (RFP) to dismantle homeless camps along the river at a time when very clear links are being articulated between the history of land theft, forced displacement and genocide.

Participants in both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry Into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls have generously described, often in painful detail, the impacts of colonization on their families. Many politicians and leaders have made commitments to honour the recommendations of both processes, and previous inquiries into harm done to Indigenous citizens.

More than 1,000 petitioners have demanded that the RFP which calls for a contractor to take on a job that would include discarding the "bulky waste" that makes up "temporary homeless shelters" be ripped up.

There has been a well-attended, rain-soaked rally at city hall. Anti-poverty organizations are signing on to an open letter calling for its cancellation. Yetcouncil has not responded in any meaningful way.

This request for proposals is a massive failure of leadership in many ways, but notably for our times, intaking responsibility for the work of reconciliation.

It is important to keep pushing, and to cancel it.

RFP's roots in Manitoba's history

The dynamics of this RFP exist in many of our histories, and the ways we have lived out apartheid and oppression on these lands.

My Swedish ancestors settled along a road in the area between Minnedosa and Erickson just after 1900. Treaty 2 was still relatively fresh. My farm family lived on land that belonged to people who were now their neighbours, whose movement, economic, and social lives were now heavily controlled by the government.

We can interrupt the ancestral dynamics so many of us have been a part of, and still are It's time to cancel the RFP.

Occasionally, they would encounter one another, cutting and hauling wood at Riding Mountain National Park also Indigenous land or when farmers (sometimes my own family) would hire work teams during harvest.

I didn't hear much about these relationships growing up. Once I asked my uncle about how interactions would go between white and Indigenous folks in the community. It wasn't great.

He talked about going to the town store, where Indigenous families would sometimes wait outside for whoever was buying supplies. (Because they were asked to? Because they didn't feel welcome? He didn't say.) He said there was a lack of understanding, even fear of Indigenous folks from the white communities.

There was a trail that crossed the land my grandmother's family farmed on. I heard a few times that it led to ceremonial grounds and that it was still used in the early post-treaty days.I have heard these grounds are active now.

I wonder how interactions went as people crossed their lands for which their rights had been taken away, and encountered white families now living there. I imagine that a span of scenarios played out from friendliness or active not-seeing, to arguments or possible violence, to calling in Indian agents, the North-West Mounted Police, orlater, the RCMP.

A chance for change

One hundred years later, I live on Treaty 1 land in Point Douglas. I own my home in a community where many rent, couch surf, or sleep on the riverbank. Like my ancestors did at the farm, I sit in my house, and just outside, people walk by who are being told by the state that they can't be where they are, even though their ancestry says different.

I don't remember a summer where there weren't people living on the riverbank. On morning dog walks, it's a guarantee that I'll cross paths with folks who are getting up, readying for the day.

Our interactions are friendly, easy, but the circumstances are not neutral in the same way they weren't on the farm. Me healthy, having slept well, eaten breakfast, with the time and resources to enjoy a pet and a morning walk saying hello to neighbours living through homelessness.

This is not a comfortable reality. Inequality should not be comfortable.

Homelessness, itself, isn't comfortable either. Yet since the City of Winnipeg's request for proposals was issued, we have heard of threats of actual violence against different campsnot from other people who are homeless, but from homeowners seemingly emboldened.

Messaging from leadership how issues are explained and addressed matters and impacts outcomes on the ground. The RFP seems to be making already hard lives worse and it hasn't even taken effect.

We are, collectively,well beyond the presumed innocence of these missteps. We have been told in so many ways through inquiries, commissions, studies, and stories how death happens and that it is often the culmination of many forms of active disruption. Disrupting people's lives, making them harder, taking away agency, forcing bad choices.

People aren't vulnerable until conditions make them so. Until policies and other people make them vulnerable.

We can, and should, interrupt the ancestral dynamics so many of us have been a part of, and still are. Here is one piece of the story.

Contact your councillor and the mayor, and let them know it's time to cancel the RFP.

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