Don’t look away

She is the queen of Milton-Parc. Annisee Papialuk. For a long time, that’s what the Inuit have called her, dragging their misery through the streets of Montreal. On the back of her hand, she had “Perla” tattooed: the first letters of the first names of each of her five children who remained there, in the Far North.

Four guys, one girl. Elisapie. A long time ago, they took her away from her and placed her in a foster family, in the South. But all that is ancient history. A smile lights up her face streaked with fine wrinkles: in August, Annisee Papialuk will be a grandmother.

The queen sits enthroned on old stair steps, avenue du Parc. His kingdom is miserable. Drug dealers wait for customers in the parking lot across the street. Not far away, two Inuit are slumped on the sidewalk. Two inert bodies. Too hot, too frozen, or both. They are there, but they are elsewhere. Passers-by make a detour to avoid them. Out of modesty or disgust, they look away.

It’s been 16 years since Annisee Papialuk landed from Kuujjuarapik, a village of 686 inhabitants in Nunavik. At the time, she had traveled south to treat a broken shoulder. “That’s when I realized I didn’t really want to go home, where I was constantly being beaten by my man,” she says. I had had enough, so I decided to stay in Montreal. »

There was nothing, or very little, to welcome him.

The street did not give him a gift. In 16 years, Annisee Papialuk faced all the dangers there. She learned to play by her rules – and to earn the respect of others.

Does she miss the Far North? “Not really,” she replies. It was not a life there.

She admits it: it’s not a life here either.

A “humanitarian crisis” is raging in the heart of the Quebec metropolis. This is the shock conclusion of a report on Aboriginal and Inuit homelessness in the Milton-Parc sector released in May by the Ombudsman de Montréal.

The title of the report? Don’t look away.

Because that’s what everyone does. Passers-by, but also municipal, provincial and federal authorities. Everyone looks away. Everyone passes the buck, while Indigenous people survive in the shadow of McGill University.

While politicians swear, heart on hand, never again, residential schools.

While they promise billions to right past wrongs…

Indigenous people are suffering and dying. Here and now. In our streets. In general indifference.

I met Pierre Parent at the corner of rue Milton and avenue du Parc. In full ground zero, as locals call this intersection. The street worker was making his rounds, trying to put out fires before they got out of control.

When he started this job two years ago, Pierre Parent had an electronic bracelet on his ankle.

He grew up in a village in eastern Ontario. His father was a policeman, his grandmother, a Cree from James Bay. “But we didn’t talk about that in the family. »

He wanted to join the police; he fell into drugs. He lived in Baie-James, in Iqaluit, in the Yukon, each time abusing people’s hospitality, fleeing each time when things went wrong. “I was a master of geographic flight. »

One day, Pierre Parent did something irreparable. “A terrible crime, with which I will have to live until the end of my days. He took it for 11 years. He served 10 before arriving in Montreal, his ankle bracelet.

He got this job as a street worker. A way for him to redeem himself. “My liaison officers, they didn’t like it at all. They said to me, “You can’t go there, you hang out with drug addicts, you’re going to relapse.” »

He relapsed. Once.

In September 2020, Maurice Moushoom, an Anishinabé from Lac-Simon, fell very ill. He had lived on the streets for 22 years. “I considered him my eldest. »

Seeing him in the hospital, intubated and in a coma, Pierre Parent was projected in 2014, when he had permission from the penitentiary to go to his father’s bedside. “I really wanted to be a policeman, like my father. I had failed. The last time I saw him I was in handcuffs and he was on his deathbed. »

Maurice Moushoom died “drette là”, under his eyes. “I came out of the hospital, he got wet. I was lost in Montreal, all alone. Two days later, I took cocaine again for the first time in ten years. A terrible relapse. They turned me inside out. »

Martine Michaud talks to me about prostitution, drug trafficking, assaults, shouting, spitting, rubbish and excrement in the courtyards of residences. She tells me about children who are no longer sent to play in the alley, of elderly people who no longer dare walk.

She has lived in the area for over 30 years. For a long time, there were only seven or eight homeless people, she says. But since the Open Door shelter moved into a church basement on Park Avenue in 2018, the population has exploded. The problems, too. And the tragedies.

In the past two years, there have been at least six serious accidents involving homeless people at the corner of Milton and Parc, including one fatality: in July 2020, Kitty Kakkinerk, a 48-year-old Inuit woman, was struck by a car. A few weeks earlier, a bus had sent his half-sister to the hospital.

“We are not citizens of the ‘not in my backyard’ type,” argues Martine Michaud, spokesperson for a group of residents who filed the complaint with the Ombudsman de Montréal. We must solve the problem, she says, not push it elsewhere. What is happening at Milton-Parc is intolerable; it shouldn’t happen in anyone’s backyard.

Montreal needs a “stable and safe emergency accommodation resource that meets the needs of Inuit people”.

This recommendation is at the heart of the report by the ombudsman of Montreal, Nadine Mailloux: the creation, as of 2022, of a refuge dedicated to the Inuit.

Not a refuge that is held together by bits of string. A well-funded, well-organized center that could provide the Inuit with services and health care adapted to their needs. It exists in Ottawa and elsewhere. Why not in the Quebec metropolis?

Because we don’t have the money, basically.

“We put plasters admits Josefina Blanco, member of the executive committee and responsible for homelessness at the City of Montreal. “When we talk about resources that are open all year round, 24 hours a day, we are talking about significant and sustained investments. […] These funds, we do not have them at the City of Montreal. »

Indigenous homelessness is not Montreal’s only problem, she argues. It is up to Quebec, for example, to provide doctors, nurses and social workers. And aboriginal affairs are federal. “It is absolutely necessary that the others [ordres] of government are at the table. »

To get Quebec moving, the Ombudsman de Montréal submitted the file to the Québec Ombudsman, who undertook to investigate. We must therefore expect… another report.

We no longer have time to wait.

You don’t have to look away anymore. See beyond addiction, shouting and confrontations, says Pierre Parent. And look beyond the streets of Montreal. “It is not because the residents of Milton-Parc are complaining that there is a humanitarian crisis. The humanitarian crisis has lasted 500 years! »

The human distress expressed in the metropolis is the symptom of a greater evil in Nunavik, says the street worker.

You flee to Montreal. Several stakeholders told the ombudsman that “the improvement of living conditions in the communities of origin is closely linked to the reduction of Inuit homelessness in the metropolis”.

As long as we do not cure the evils of the northern villages, we will only apply plasters to Montreal.

The fact remains that this city must do everything to provide a suitable refuge for the Inuit and put an end to the crisis that is raging in its streets. Not in five years. Not in two years. Now.

“We need to have our own house, insists Annisee Papialuk. In the street, we get robbed, we get raped, we get killed. It’s not funny. We really need this building for the homeless. We are humans like everyone else. »

You don’t have to look away anymore. And when the queen of Milton-Parc speaks, you have to listen to her.