Promoting home and self-determination: housing as an active site of engagement in Fort Good Hope

Pugsley, Aimee Louise (2022) Promoting home and self-determination: housing as an active site of engagement in Fort Good Hope. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Homelessness, chronic housing insecurity, and poorly designed policy responses pose a profound threat to the health and wellbeing of communities in northern Canada. In Fort Good Hope, a Dene community in the Sahtu Region of the Northwest Territories, the K'ásho Got’ı̨ne Housing Society (KGHS) is coordinating a community-led response to this housing crisis – a response that centres critical connections between Indigenous conceptualisations of home, community wellbeing, and self-determination. Yet, the KGHS is experiencing obstacles to this work. Using housing in Fort Good Hope as an active site of engagement, this research draws on policy scoping and semi-structured in-depth interviews to map out current barriers to the self-government of housing in Fort Good Hope, and investigate how housing policy and governance in the NWT might be adapted to better support Indigenous home and self-determination. The results show that the current system through which housing is delivered in Fort Good Hope is grounded in non-Indigenous epistemologies and characterised by federal and territorial government control, which leaves insufficient space for Indigenous worldviews, expertise and visions of self-determination. Moreover, using home to engage with holistic understandings of wellbeing and socio-cultural conditions in Fort Good Hope provides an opportunity to consider alternative pathways to Indigenous self-determination that extend beyond the state-led negotiation of self-government in the NWT.

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