Ontario Native Women’s Association   33
Beendigen is here for you on your healing journey. 
www.beendigen.com
Home is where you spend most of your 
time. And if your home is not secure, if it’s 
filled with unhealthy habits, that is going to 
affect your health as well.
- Alysha Wesley
“As we know, the rising cost of living has reached an all-time high, 
and unfortunately, to have access to a safe and secure home [that is 
actually affordable] is very out of sight.”
Corbiere’s experience reflects the growing strain for Indigenous 
youth living off reserve, where housing is shaped less by availability 
and more by cost. “For me, as someone who lives off reserve in the 
Muskoka area, the price of renting or buying a home is insane,” she 
says. “In order to have a clean, safe space to call home – just renting 
– you’re looking at a price range of $2,000 [a month] or more. In 
a lot of people’s cases, that is not even survivable if you’re factoring 
[in] food, gas, utilities and other bills.”
Even when housing is available, Corbiere describes a market that 
often forces young people into unsafe or substandard conditions. 
“I have past experiences of viewing places that were asking way too 
much for being in some unsafe parts of town and generally seeing 
filthy conditions in or around the property,” she says.
Further north, in Constance Lake First Nation, Alysha Wesley is 
navigating a different version of the same reality. “I’ve lived on the 
reserve my whole life,” she says, “so I’ve seen and experienced the 
good things of community, but also the challenges, the disparities 
that we have as well. And housing happens to fall into [the latter].”
In her community, there aren’t enough homes to meet the need. 
“It’s a long waitlist,” Wesley says. “It goes by priority, but there 
just aren’t enough homes – too many people, people who are 
unhoused and people living in overcrowded homes.”
On reserve, the barrier is not just cost; it is whether a home exists 
to begin with. And that contrast, between availability and afford-
ability, reveals how Indigenous youth experience the housing crisis 
differently across the places they live.
“It just trickles,” Wesley says. “There’s a long chain reaction. 
One thing affects the other.” In Constance Lake, overcrowding 
is a defining part of that chain. “Sometimes you’ll have multiple 
families living in one home. And our homes are not very big, either 
– they can only accommodate maybe one family. But where else 
are they gonna go?”
For some, the only alternative is leaving – a difficult choice many 
young people face. “Going to school, seeking employment or 
finding housing elsewhere means leaving a place where it’s all you 
know,” Wesley says.
Off reserve, Corbiere describes a similar sense of being pushed, but 
by economics rather than geography. “The mental health toll that 
unsafe and non-affordable housing has on our youth is felt across 
wherever you go,” she says.
Back in Constance Lake, Wesley sees how those pressures take 
shape early, particularly for children. As a school social worker 
at Mawamawmatawa Holistic Education Centre, she works with 
students navigating the realities of home before they step into 
a classroom.
“If they’re living in an overcrowded house with multiple family 
members, they’re being exposed to fighting and food insecurity,” 
she says. “When kids come to school upset, tired because they 
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