Houseless on Their Homeland
While homelessness plagues all creeds and colors in the U.S., the country’s unhoused Indigenous population faces a unique response from non-Natives: ‘Just send them back to the reservation.’
By Simon Moya-Smith
I was sitting by the pool table in the lobby of the Hewing Hotel just outside of downtown Minneapolis when a massive wedding party barreled through the door like a herd of drunken rhinos, all laughing maniacally and clutching the walls.
A pair of wiggy white boys in identical suits with blue vests had managed to stumble their way to the bar, ordered a few drinks, and then set their sights on me and the pool table.
“Hey, man. Are you playing?” the bushy-bearded one asked.
“Nope,” I responded. “I’m just watching you guys.”
Bushy beard chuckled and proceeded to remove his blazer when his clean-shaven counterpart began to complain about “all of the homeless down here.”
“It wasn’t like this when I was kid,” he said. It’s gotten worse.”
Which is true. And while the plague of houselessness in Minneapolis impacts all racial demographics, the city is located near more than 10 reservations and Native communities. Sadly, this translates to a dense houseless Indigenous population in Minneapolis and across the state.
According to Wilder Research, a nonprofit that invests in studies to improve human services, while Indigenous peoples account for a mere 1-percent of the state’s overall population, 13-percent of the state’s unhoused are Native.
Back at the Hewing, the pair of drunken wedding-goers invited me to join them for a game. “You were kind enough to offer up the table,” the blue-eyed clean-shaven one said. “Grab a cue.”
We played a round of Eight-Ball before I leaned into my curiosity about his earlier comment regarding the city’s houseless. “What did you mean when you said, ‘It wasn’t like this when you were a kid’?” I asked. I apologized for eavesdropping.
“There just wasn’t this many,” he said. “And it’s too damn cold to be homeless anywhere here.”
I figured I’d drop the bomb on him and ask him what he thought about all the Native homeless throughout the state. “There’s a lot here,” I said.
“I don’t know why the city doesn’t just send them back to the reservation. They’re just right there,” he said, pointing his cue stick to the north. “Or why the families just don’t pick them up and take them back.”
Sweet jumping jeezus. Don’t let this register on an emotional level, I thought. Right. I felt every urge to leap on his neck and hold him down with my copy of Vine Deloria Jr.’s ‘Red Earth, White Lies.’
I took a deep breath, gulped the air, and responded with a level head. I told the pool shark that not every Native is from the reservation; that more than 70-percent of Indigenous peoples now live in major cities and nearby suburbs; that to round up Natives and ‘send them back to the reservation’ smacks of the days when many reservations were established as prison camps.
“My rez is officially Prisoner of War Camp № 334,” I said. “But you’ve probably heard of it as the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
The clean-shaven jackal of a pool player paused and failed to blink. Up until that tense moment, I hadn’t revealed that he was shooting pool with a bonafide Native. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew,” I said pointing to my black ‘YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND’ trucker’s hat.
He nodded, pursed his lips, finished his beer, thanked me for the game, and said he needed to get back with the wedding party which had since absconded to the rooftop bar with its 12-foot-long hot tub and views of the city.
Yet, massive numbers of unhoused Natives can be found in most major cities. In Seattle, a large percentage of the city’s unhoused Natives are Ojibwe and Alaska Native, according to Gabriel de los Angeles of the Chief Seattle Club, a nonprofit that works to house and spiritually support homeless Natives.
De los Angeles, who is an enrolled member of the Snoqualmie Indian Tribe, said houselessness and addiction are directly tied to the white invasion of their ancestral homelands.
“Homelessness is a symptom of colonization,” he said. “We had our healing practices, but they have been disrupted — we still have them, but they have been massively disrupted over the generations.”
Indeed. The first disruption of ancient Indigenous lifeways was the invasion by early Europeans, also commonly referred to as colonization. Fast forward to the 1950s and the era of the Indian Relocation Acts which, in an attempt to assimilate Natives and free their lands to natural resource extraction, e.g. oil and gas, forced Indigenous peoples off the reservation and into major cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Denver, and Seattle, among others.
Due in large to these U.S. government-sanctioned forced relocations, Natives suffered a cultural shock in the metropolis they were dropped into. While Indigenous families were promised housing and vocational training, the housing was often subpar and the trauma of being far from home, ceremony, familiarity, and traditional practices soon set in. Thusly, began a vicious, insalubrious era of Native homelessness, substance abuse, and death.
In Seattle, where the average nighttime low is 39-degrees in winter, the Chief Seattle Club has opened numerous permanent and transitional housing locations to shelter Indigenous peoples from the elements.
“The housing for them is culturally-focused so they can see themselves and see themselves out,” de los Angeles said. “We give them space. We give them support. We give them homes, not just hygiene. We are Indigenous. We are a family.”
In January 2023, in partnership with the City of Seattle, the Chief Seattle Club opened Salmonberry Lofts, a building with 76-units for permanent housing in a joint effort dubbed ‘Health Through Housing.’
Laura Comenote, who is Lakota, Quinault, and Hesquiaht, is a former gang member in Seattle and now lives in an 80-unit affordable housing project run by Chief Seattle Club.
“I used to steal liquor from my grandma’s cabinet when I was 11. I started drinking when I was 13,” she said. Comenote added that it was then she ran away from home. “I raised myself on the street. That’s where I’ve been ever since. I was just bad.”
Comenote, who was incarcerated at an early age, said she hopes to leave the gang life and alcoholism behind and, one day, open a hair salon, and she cites the Chief Seattle Club as helping her on that journey.
“I have my own apartment. I can get a job,” she said. “This is a place where Native Americans can get off the street and off alcohol and drugs and away from the things that make them drink and use.”
Today, Comenote, 53, is a representative of No More Stolen Sisters, a grassroots movement in both the U.S. and Canada to address and mitigate the plague of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. She also provides makeovers to women on the street from a makeshift salon in her loft.
“I braid hair. I do makeup. I help women on the street with new clothes. You know, to make them feel better about themselves. It’s a good opportunity for me to talk to them and just make a difference.”
In November 2022, the Chief Seattle Club opened the álal Cafe, an eatery with Indigenous ingredients, menu items, Native-made art, all housed in a ‘decolonized space.’
A portion of this article will air Dec. 7 on SiriusXM Progress Ch. 127 at 7 p.m. PST.
