In Vancouver, a new type of Indigenous community is fostering resilience, health, creativity and culture through shared housing and local leadership, writes an article in the Canadian online magazine Shareable. This includes “thinking multi-generationally about present and future community needs, a level of planning that hasn’t happened previously because of the exclusion of Indigenous people from the process”, according to Carole Ann Hilton, a business leader of Nuu chah nulth descent from the Hesquiaht Nation and founding CEO of the Indigenomics Institute. Examples include the need for multi-purpose space for funerals or for dance groups to practice, and other cultural practices.
Another example is subsidized housing, which can provide security for creativity to flourish. Caroline Phelps, Artist In Residence Program Coordinator and Cultural Liaison Lead at Skwachàys Lodge, a social enterprise where hotel rooms subsidize rent for artists, describes subsidized housing as a form of cultural preservation. “We’re helping them to keep our culture alive,” she explains in the article.
Hilton continues that it is necessary to “look at a fuller spectrum of Indigenous participation”, including in decisions on “ways of seeing and using space from an Indigenous perspective”. As an example of how things could change with Indigenous participation, she cites Squamish First Nation’s upcoming major development, Sen̓áḵw. “The size and scale of a housing development of that magnitude and significance … has the ability to change the skyline of the city of Vancouver,” she said in the article, “and to really place Indigenous economic power at the center of that.”
Senáḵw is envisioned as an environmentally sustainable housing development that could be the largest net zero carbon residential project in Canada, according to the article. Hilton says that Indigenous-led design, partnership, finance, and housing is a “game changer” that highlights the growing economic strength of Indigenous communities.
