That memory is fast fading.
The 52-year-old grandmother — who lives in a room not much larger than a walk-in closet in two trailers shared by dozens of others in one forlorn corner of Attawapiskat — knows she may never live in a house again.
“I submitted my name years ago and they kept saying there will be a house, but I am single and at the bottom of their list,” Kataquapit says with a sigh. “This place has gotten worse over the years, don’t know if anything will change it. It makes me sad, what’s happening here.”
Attawapiskat First Nation is a two-hour flight north of Timmins. It may as well be on another planet.
A year ago, few could place this remote Cree reserve on Canada’s map. Then, in the middle of a desolate winter, came the news of the housing crisis and the community became the poster child of native neglect. Waves of journalists arrived on the reserve with its deplorable housing, wrote heartbreaking stories and left.
So yes, this is an anniversary of sorts.
But an anniversary means nothing here. It is a place where time stands still. Nothing has changed in the past year, except for 22 new trailer-homes that some lucky families moved into. Everything else is the same: poverty and dependence, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, substandard education and health care, inadequate housing and questionable governance.
It is a long list, agrees Jackie Shisheesh.
“It does sound tough to tackle,” she says. A band councillor from 2004 to 2007, Shisheesh says there were some happy families who moved into new houses in March but it isn’t enough, not even close.
The community of 1,900 people needs more houses, she says, because too many are living in rundown homes, and in some cases, many generations are living under the same roof. “I have two families living here,” she says with a shrug. Her house is home to two daughters, a son-in-law and a granddaughter. Shisheesh is sitting at the dining table, one daughter is on Facebook on a computer in the same room, another daughter is playing with her own daughter in the living room.
But she knows she has a house, her own place. There are families in the two emergency trailers who have been living in single rooms, sharing kitchens and washrooms, for the past three years. The trailers were donated by De Beers, which runs a billion-dollar diamond mine just up the road, after a sewage backup forced people out of their houses.
It was meant as a temporary shelter but as many as 50 people still live here because they have nowhere else. Sometimes tempers are frayed. Substance abuse is rampant. Those who live here, seldom come out to chat with others, most people mind their own business.
The trailers don’t feel like home.
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HOUSING IS A federal responsibility on First Nations reserves.
In Attawapiskat, there is a huge question mark about what happened to the $95 million the reserve has received from the federal government since 2006. While Chief Theresa Spence is on a hunger strike in Ottawa, band council members here rebuffed each one of the Star’s interviews requests. Ignace Gull, the past chief of the reserve, also declined to talk to the Star.
There is also money that comes from the diamond mine.
This community is about 90 kilometres east of the De Beers Victor mine. It produces about 600,000 carats of diamonds a year but it’s not clear how much money is paid to the reserve. Spence told the Star earlier this year that there is no revenue-sharing agreement with De Beers but said the reserve gets a payment from the company. She declined to say how much or how it is used.
Attawapiskat and De Beers share an uneasy relationship.
Many people on the reserve feel the company is destroying the land. Others feel De Beers does not do as much as it can for the community. According to the De Beers website, the company gave contracts worth more than $40 million to the community in 2012. It also says it employs more than 60 full-time employees from the reserve, and another 100 from other First Nations communities.
Money has flowed into the reserve. Where it went is a mystery.
Few people want to talk about that because they fear repercussions.
There are houses on the reserve with 50-inch TVs, big computers; youngsters walk around with iPods. Shiny new trucks and snowmobiles whiz along the icy roads. Clearly, not everyone is poor. But where there is poverty, it is staggering. Some houses don’t have proper doors or windows to ward off the relentless wind. Others still don’t have running water. Many families lead a hand-to-mouth existence. Some subsist on bread, eggs and cheese, two of the cheapest things available at the Northern, the only store here, because it is subsidized by the government.
Adrian Sutherland, 36, a local, moved away to Alberta a few years ago and returned in 2009. What struck him was how much the community had deteriorated. “There is the housing problem, drug problem, a lot of frustration around the mine,” says Sutherland, who works for Attawapiskat Resources, a company that provides camp and catering services at the De Beers mine. One of the few success stories at the reserve, Attawapiskat Resources employs about 100 people, about three dozen from the reserve and the rest from other First Nation communities.
Sutherland is one of the more outspoken people on the reserve and he does not mince words when he says it has a lot to do with “leadership.” He says he is not talking about the federal government or the provincial ministry of Indian Affairs but leadership within the community.
“We need a strong leader, need someone to make tough decisions,” he says, adding business projects are needed so that there are more employment opportunities, more money coming into the reserve.
The well-being of a community starts at the top, he says. “You are only as good as the people around you,” says Sutherland, but quickly adds, “I am not knocking Theresa (Spence) down at all.”
TIME MOVES SLOWLY in Attawapiskat.
There are scant opportunities for employment. Some work for the band council, some for the two schools and the local hospital. Some others are employed with Northern, the gas station or the couple of cafes in the village. For about three months in the winter, a couple of dozen people work on the winter road that connects the reserve to Moosonee, Ont.
That’s about it. Unemployment is roughly 70 per cent.
Many children have never seen their parents go to work because there are no jobs. Many children don’t go to school because they feel the education is substandard.
Serena Koostachin, chief of the youth council and a recent high school graduate, says most young people believe schooling is a joke. “It is not as strict as schools down south ... so most do not go to school,” says the 20-year-old.
(She is the older sister of Shannen Koostachin, who spearheaded a campaign for better education for native children. In June 2010, she died in a car crash. She was 15.)
Koostachin, looks like a model, is mature beyond her years. She weighs her words carefully.
There is little to do here for entertainment. There is a lot of bingo, some hockey. There is no restaurant, just a couple of tiny cafes.
The lack of activities are a major reason why people get addicted to drugs and alcohol. “Some (young people) tell me they do it just out of curiosity and get addicted.” Prescription drugs like Percocet, cocaine and alcohol are the main substances of abuse.
Helen Kataquapit, meanwhile, could do with some good news.
She had a home where she lived with a husband and four children. But when they separated, she let him have the house because the boys were living with him. She moved to Timmins where she worked for a few years but always missed “the land and the bay. I had to come back.”
Her 13-year-old grandson, Tyson Sutherland, is visiting from Timmins. The two are obviously very close but feeling the cramped space. There is a bunk bed in the room, a mattress, two tables and a small chair. Kataquapit keeps dishes and some groceries on one table, the other has some photos on it. A straggly curtain partially hides the bunk bed.
It is not much but Kataquapit says she will not move in with her siblings or her parents.
“They all have their own problems,” she says. “I can’t impose mine on them ... I will wait for a house, for things to get better.”
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Raveena Aulakh
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