Understanding Homelessness for Urban Indigenous Families: How Can We Envision Gendered and Culturally Safe Responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Family homelessness is a complex and pervasive issue in Canada. Particularly troubling is the overrepresentation of Indigenous families in Canada’s emergency shelters and in unsafe/ unstable housing. Indigenous families headed by women are at high risk for racist and violent practices and particular attention needs to be paid to their gendered and cultural experiences. Western definitions articulate that homelessness occurs when an individual or family is without safe, permanent, and/or appropriate housing and are without prospects for achieving such housing. Understanding homelessness for Indigenous Peoples means regarding homelessness as a lack of housing, but also as the isolation or separation of Indigenous Peoples from their connections to land, place, water, family, each other, animals, languages, cultures, and identities (Aboriginal Standing Committee on Housing and Homelessness, 2012; Thistle, 2017). Understanding homelessness for Indigenous Peoples means examining the legacy impacts of assimilation policies of colonialism and acknowledging that current polices and practices are grounded in historical and structural racism against Indigenous peoples. This study was led by non-Indigenous researchers in partnership with Elders and knowledge keepers. The Aboriginal Standing Committee on Housing and Homelessness acted as an advisory committee. Guidance and advice was sought from study inception and design through data collection and analysis. We identified five distinct themes affecting Indigenous women in the context of family homelessness: jurisdictional separation between sectors; racism; lack of safety; the need for family and limited opportunities to heal from trauma. We argue that structural violence is present in systems and policies that impede women’s opportunities to exit homelessness and heal from trauma.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".