“Living in this kind of condition just hurts. It hurts my heart; my body,” Terrence Nokahoot said.
For the past seven years, Nokahoot has lived in a derelict, run-down home. The interior is a potpourri of disrepair, neglect, and the occasional pungent whiff of urine.
There is a hole in the floor where the kitchen counter once stood, the only sink leaks, and there are holes in every wall; one large enough to pass dinner plates from where the kitchen should be, to the living room.
The only furniture is a fridge that went unpowered for two months, a stove that had been acquired the day before, and an old tube-television with a Nintendo 64 sitting on top, a small collection of games beside it.
“It was actually worse than this when I got here. There were no windows, it was basically just the way it is, but we tried to paint it and give it a different look,” Nokahoot said.
He’s an amputee with a broken back, a fractured hip, and no tailbone; as much as he’d like to fix his home, he can’t.
“I’ve just dealt with this mess for all these years,” Nokahoot mumbled.
“Despite my best efforts, knowing that I can do anything, that I can’t help myself, I can’t go and get lumber and this kind of stuff – I don’t have the wheels. It’s hard to even try and think like that,” he continued.
“It hurts me every day when I see him. The frustration for him, he tells me ‘Dad, I want something, I want to do something,’” Allan Maxie said.
Although technically Maxie is Nokahoot’s uncle, the two are more like father and son, even referring to each other as such.
Maxie has become Nokahoot’s lifeline. He brings him food when he’s hungry and drives him two hours to Wascana Rehab Centre for his medical appointments.
“These are my relatives, my friends – to see them live like that, every day – I would never think people could live like that,” Maxie said.
Nokahoot isn’t alone. There are families living on White Bear First Nations without power, without heat, one man lives out of a van after black mould forced him out of his home.
“This is where I sleep,” said Dale Johnson, opening the sliding door to an old minivan.
“I have no heat, and no water, I have pretty well nothing,” he continued.
Unlike Nokahoot, Johnson had his utilities cut by the providers. Negligent payments cost him his power, but they’re not the reason he’s slept on the backseat of a van for the past three months.
Johnson says black mould under his flooring began affecting his health. In July 2017, Johnson says contractors hired by White Bear came to fix his flooring, but left after they removed some of the plywood and found the mould underneath, and on the foundation.
The mould was never dealt with, and a large three-metre long hole remains in what was once his kitchen.
“This house has actually been a very hard problem for me, ever since I lived here,” Johnson continued, “One light socket gave me 7.5 gallons coming out of the light socket on to the bed where I was laying one time.”
White Bear First Nations says it’s doing what it can to improve the situation, but a lack of funds limits their options.
“We don’t just have resources to go ‘okay, let’s put $25,000 into that.’ We probably have about 40 units that could be renovated and worked on immediately and be livable, but we just don’t have the resources at this point,” explained White Bear Chief Nathan Pasap.
Pasap is working creating the White Bear First Nations Housing Authority, a model he hopes will result in sustainable housing, income to building new houses, and revenue to purchase supplies to repair current houses, but it’s a project he expects to take five to 10 years.
“We’re well aware of what our housing conditions are, the overcrowding, the lack of funding, it’s a national issue, it’s not just White Bear, but at the same time it’s nowhere near where it meets the needs of our community,” Pasap admitted.
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