Assisting our own

Urban Migration, Self-Governance, and Native Women's Organizing in Thunder Bay, Ontario, 1972-1989

Bibliographic Data

ID4039150
AuthorsNancy Janovicek (corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume27
Issue3
Pages548-565
Publication date2003-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/aiq.2004.0077
OpenAlexW1964280769
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited7

In the 1960s, settlement patterns of First Nations peoples in Canada began to change dramatically.1 In 1966, 80 percent of the Aboriginal population still lived on reserve, but by 1991, 49.5 percent of the Aboriginal population lived in towns and cities.2 Migration patterns of women and men differed; 16.4 percent of status Indian women lived off-reserve in 1966, compared to 15.4 percent of status Indian men, a disparity that grew over time. Twenty years later, 32.8 percent of status Indian women lived off-reserve, and only 26.4 percent of status Indian men did.3 While most scholars agree that Aboriginal people have been more likely to leave the reserve because they were pushed away, there is a consensus that more men than women chose to leave the reserve seeking employment or educational opportunities. Many women who left the reserve were compelled to do so because they were fleeing violence or because they had lost their status and housing.4 Despite the disparity between women's and men's migration patterns, gender has not been central to the analysis of the urban experience of First Nations people. This article discusses how Native women in Thunder Bay, Ontario, organized services and programs to help women adapt to urban life in the 1970s and 1980s. It investigates the founding of Beendigen, an emergency hostel for Native women and their children. In 1978, Thunder Bay Anishinabequek, a chapter of the Ontario Native Women's Association ( ONWA), opened Beendigen because they believed Native women in crisis and their children, most of whom were fleeing violent families, should not be further isolated in non-Native environments.5 Beendigen, Ojibwa for "welcome," offered emergency shelter for women whose connection to their home reserve had been severed, and who subsequently faced hostility [End Page 548] in the city. Anishinabequek insisted on Aboriginal control over services for Aboriginal people, and their programs emphasized cultural retention and promoted pride in Indigenous culture. Thus, Beendigen organizers contested the assumption that deciding to move to the city indicated a choice to assimilate into Canadian society. Anishinabequek was part of an emerging movement that was struggling to define an urban Native identity that retained Indigenous nationhood. Working in an urban context, Anishinabequek engendered a conception of Aboriginal identity that opposed the view that it could not exist off-reserve. By taking control of services for Aboriginal people and basing them on Aboriginal values, and by using these services to protect Indigenous identity in the city, Beendigen organizers began to develop discourses that would become the foundation of urban self-governance. Native women's organizing in Thunder Bay developed during a dynamic period in the broader histories of the Aboriginal rights movement and the women's movement. The debates that shaped these histories simultaneously opened up spaces for Native women's organizing and constrained their political goals. To provide a context for Anishinabequek's local initiatives, I begin with a brief overview of the Indian rights movement and Native women's organizing in Canada in the late 1960s and 1970s. I then discuss the general activities of ONWA to explain why women organized independently of the Native movement. The examination of the founding of Beendigen demonstrates how Thunder Bay Anishinabe-quek and ONWA countered the negative impact of government policies that tried to assimilate Aboriginal peoples by organizing services that drew on Aboriginal knowledge, cultures, and values. This research is based on the records of Beendigen and ONWA. Few documents remain from the founding years of the shelter, and there were not many direct references to family violence in the ONWA documents in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, my interpretation of the evidence relies on oral histories with two women who were active in the founding years of ONWA and Beendigen.6 Citizens Plus, Citizens Minus Pressure

Archaeology · Bay · Business · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Population · Settlement (finance · Socioeconomics · Sociology · Thunder · Canadian Identity and History · Demography · Gender Studies

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