Ontario Native Women’s Association   21
DATA & VISIBILITY
Building Homes.
Empowering Urban 
Indigenous Communities.
OntarioAboriginalHousing.ca
1-866-391-1061
@OntarioAboriginalHousing
@OAHSSC
Proud to serve the urban 
Indigenous community in Ontario, 
including the housing needs of urban 
Indigenous women, girls, and 
2SLGBTQQIA+ community members
Nishnawbe Aski Police Service is looking for 
committed individuals who have demonstrated 
knowledge of NAPS and the Indigenous culture.
If you are looking for a fulfilling career and are 
dedicated to serving and protecting the 
members of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation - 
apply to work with us today.
HIRING
WE’RE
Start your journey 
today and
Apply NOW at 
joinnaps.ca
on our own lands?” That question 
reframes the problem, highlighting the 
true complexities of documented and 
undocumented statistics.
Groot’s understanding of homelessness is 
also deeply personal. Their grandmother 
died while homeless, a reality that sits 
alongside their academic research and 
informs the urgency behind it. Their 
research follows people navigating home-
lessness across Ma-ori communities, where 
the picture that emerges is not simply 
one of housing instability, but rather of 
displacement shaped over generations. 
“Colonization has robbed us of many of 
those pathways home,” Groot says. “There 
are ways in which we have been made 
homeless through deliberate policies 
of disenfranchisement, displacement 
and theft.”
To understand why official data misses 
so much, we first have to recognize what 
that data is failing to measure. For Groot, 
home is not reducible to shelter or a fixed 
address. “Home is the ability to live with 
dignity and participate in your cultural 
ways of being. It is the ability to express 
yourself and connect where that thread of 
continuity across generations is seamless 
and unbroken,” Groot says. “Or, if that 
thread was ever severed and you were 
unable to find your way back, home is the 
ability to be woven back into that thread.”
That definition extends into environment, 
language, food, spirit and community ways 
of being that colonial housing policy was 
never designed to protect. “Homelessness 
is the theft of all of that. It is the result of 
decades – and, in some parts of the world, 
centuries – of policies that discriminate 
and break down your ability to be together 
as a community,” they say. “Homelessness 
is the destruction of community.”
Mainstream systems struggle to measure 
what does not stay still, and for many 
Indigenous people, being measured at all 
carries its own risks. “There is a profound 
fear and mistrust that has been built up 
over centuries of structural violence,” 
Groot says. “You don’t want to be counted 
by a colonial institution that has behaved 
violently across your generations and 
your lineage.”
That fear drives people out of official 
systems and into living arrangements 
that are invisible to mainstream data: 
overcrowded homes, informal stays 
and constant movement. The result is a 
persistent undercount that shapes where 
resources go and who gets left out.
Construction of Sen'ák–w towers on 
Squamish Nation land, September 2025.

View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.