Mushkegowuk Council Grand Chief Leo Friday is among the hundreds of Kashechewan residents who have been displaced since a major failure of that community’s water and sewage infrastructure led to a State of Emergency being declared and a full-scale evacuation carried out.
Niagara Falls took in many of those displaced residents and up until recently, Friday said, they felt welcomed.
However, a report on the state of homelessness presented to Niagara Falls City Council last week has left a bitter taste due to its characterization of displaced Indigenous residents.
“This community wants to be … the jewel of tourism in Ontario,” the report to council stated. “Unfortunately, a lot of the residents will see Indigenous people on the streets walking around, thinking they’re homeless people from this community.”
The Grand Chief said, “These remarks were very disappointing because essentially, we have a municipal government validating the racial profiling of Indigenous people and fuelling a false assumption that any Indigenous person seen walking around Niagara Falls is probably homeless.”
The report was authored by Ken Todd, the city’s former chief administrative officer who was tasked by Niagara Falls City Council last fall to create an action plan to deal with homelessness.
“This is a very sensitive issue for Kashechewan residents who were forced to leave their community,” said Friday. “We are not homeless. We have homes and after being away for nearly seven months our people want nothing more than to return to them.”
While Niagara Falls officials are blaming the federal and provincial governments for failing to effectively manage evacuees, the Grand Chief said, “We have concerns of our own about the two upper-tier governments failing to address the fundamental needs on First Nations which is why Kashechewan residents find themselves in the situation they’re in, forced to evacuate and currently displaced.
“If Niagara Falls feels its municipal resources are being stretched because of the influx of evacuees, then the onus falls on the federal and provincial government to help,” said the Grand Chief.
