Meghan Sheffield and Jessica Baitley share their experiences on homelessness and belonging to place in their contribution to the first issue of the Novitas Magazine.
The first time I saw a tent being used for survival in my neighbourhood, it was among the trees on a high bank over the creek that runs at the end of my street, a few blocks down from my own home. It was a sunny morning in early spring, 2020, and I was on a walk with my children, who were five and seven years old at the time. We had been wandering the edges of the opposite bank, dropping sticks from the foot bridge, watching for salmon swimming upstream. I don’t remember which one of the kids said, “We should come camping here sometime too.”
I live with my family in a small town in southern Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. We live in a house with a yard near the downtown of our small town (population 20,000), on a street busy enough that we don’t know many of the names of the folks who live on the opposite side of those two lanes of traffic.
This place is Michi Saagig Anishnaabeg territory, home to the people named after their relationship with the big river mouths that open onto Lake Ontario and their treaties with the salmon who shared those meeting places. The land and water have been loved and tended by Michi Saagig with roles and seasons of place, a continuous temporal cycling of location, and a sense of belonging that is deeply tied to land and collective identity. I’ve learned this context from Michi Saagig scholars including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Gidigaa Migizi Doug Williams — and from the land itself.
I’m also witness to this: Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg (and other Indigenous people living in our community) are far more likely to experience homelessness and be forced to live outside here, as is the case repeated across the homelands of Turtle Island.
Living on the land, living close to the conditions of the natural world, and living in small, collaborative communities is not new here. Living under judgment, scarcity, eviction, and isolation is new; homelessness is an outcome of colonization.
My family and I live close to the wild edges of our community: the railroad tracks, the factories, the creeks, the vernal pools, the scrub brush, coyote and kingfisher, ducks and foxes. We live near places where a bit of privacy might be found or made, where the peace of wild things can be a comfort.
There are things I have learned since the housing crisis began to push people out of homes and into the streets and scrubland here. There are mutual aid projects, practical tips, and painfully learned wisdom that I might be able to share. I also feel there is some hubris in stepping into the role of expert on something I have no lived experience with. I’m anxious about taking “credit,” a fear that I think is rooted in the mindset of charity, of helping, of being heroic. I would not like to be a hero, I would like to be a node in a web. To be in solidarity, as a housed person with unhoused people, is to be learning, making mistakes, and trying to be accountable. To listen and never speak over.
Forget the tips; what I want you to find here is a love story. I’ve fallen in love with the place I live and the people who live here. I know the names of my neighbours, housed and unhoused, and they know mine. That’s how our story begins.
In January 2023, on the coldest day of the winter, I was part of a small group of community members who helped some friends move their belongings from a shelter, one they had built by hand and lived in for seven months, into a motel room on the other side of town.
The shelter was insulated and warm enough that on that winter day, our friends came out through the doorway and put their coats on only once they got outside. It was heated by a lantern made with a metal frame, a single candle, and a sand floor.
I took photographs that day, knowing that it was an ending of some kind. My friend Lyss was there with us, and she told our friends that, as relieved as they and we all were, it was okay to leave space to grieve. That night, in the motel room, our friend Jess began to write.
“We had only been in our new motel room for about an hour when it hit us! The sounds were different, the smells were different, EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT!! and nothing really felt safe or sure anymore. Even adjusting to sleeping on a bed again was incredibly uncomfortable. We felt so stupid as we were so lucky to be given this opportunity to be INSIDE again and here we were complaining and feeling sad about the home we left behind. Although our tent was no one’s idea of home, it became ours.”
I’ve also fallen in love with our shared love of this place, something I know because I have been able to see this place and the many sacred places within it through the eyes and hearts of my friends and neighbours, and I feel that love is all the more precious because it is shared. We live in a complicated time; our shared when, but where? This place is and has always been life-giving.
Late last summer, an encampment of people with no other place to go was created on a larger scale than ever before on a piece of unused, government-owned land. In that place, amidst crisis and community, the trees offer beauty, witness, and shade. The rowan tree, ancient protector, is at the place where the lawn meets the driveway. The first aid kit nestled in between the trunks of the willow tree was that old medicine.
“Compared to everywhere else we had been, we felt the safest in this spot. It was the one spot that felt the most like home, like it was a secret spot that only we knew about. It kept us safe during one of the worst winter wind storms I had ever seen. There were wind gusts over 100km/h. The storm uprooted three trees right by us and somehow we made it through that and every other storm with no damage, we were able to stay warm, and most importantly we were together and safe! There were also beautiful moments – we got a huge amount of snow one night! It was a full moon so you didn’t need a flashlight to get around, there was easily an inch of snow sitting on top of every branch and it was still lightly snowing! It was literally like a winter wonderland!”
To show love, to be in reciprocity with the beauty and challenge and heartbreak of these times that we live in, is to be in it together. To be committed to a place and its community in an ongoing, long-term, future-dreaming, and past knowing way. Despite rumours that the unsheltered people in our community come from elsewhere and may even be “bussed in from the city,” so many of us, living indoors or out, are homegrown, sometimes generations in, sometimes generations since time immemorial. We belong here, or try to.
In the past few years, my most committed practice has been one of non-abandonment, in spite of settler conditioning that rewards movement and loose ties, and in spite of well-funded campaigns to dehumanize certain humans. Through training as a birth doula, through deepening abolitionism, through writing to neighbours who may disappear overnight to the jail 100 kilometres away, through conflict and challenge with the people I’m organizing with, non abandonment arises again and again as a deeply radical position. What happens if we stay?
To practice both non abandonment and reciprocity means acknowledging and holding space for urgency and very real emergencies. It means being aware of the privileges I hold and rely on (how it feels to drop someone off at the end of a meeting, after dark, into the outdoors, in winter, knowing that I’m going home to a warm house where the lights are already on). It means honouring the good that people find in their own lives.
“Amongst our friends that would frequently come and spend the night or just come and crash with us if they got stuck out in the elements, we also collected some wildlife friends that decided to stick around. Our first little critter was what we initially thought was a chipmunk, in between the insulation in our tent that turned out to in fact to be a WEASEL!!! Thankfully he never decided to venture inside our tent, but he spent every night running around like crazy through the tunnels he drove us crazy creating.”
Mutuality is for everyone, and understanding the needs of others in my life helps me to better see and articulate the places where I need help. We all have gifts, and we all have needs. I am one of many, many interconnected beings practicing caring for each other together. My phone’s got the group chats to prove it.
Mutuality also means that it’s my friends and community who may be asking for help and who also most stridently keep my priorities in check. I have known tenderness and concern when I’ve got a migraine or my kids are sick. There is a fierce commitment from my friends who are living outside that my kids come first—that all of the kids in our community come first.
So what can be done? How do we show up?
I can be on call for rides. I learned from Shannan Martin this great line that I am able to say and mean from the bottom of my heart: “I can’t right now, but go ahead and ask me every time.” I have underlined this out loud with some of my friends, who feel bad for asking when they know I might be busy. “You never have to feel bad for asking, because I will always just be honest with you about whether I can do that or not.”
There are other helpful skills that I have picked up between caring for my children, who do most of their learning at home, and doing my paid work.
I have learned basic first aid and wound care, in part through online training, through word of mouth, from observing a street nurse when I can, and in part from doing hands on attempts because it’s better than nothing. There is so much that can be done that is ready and waiting, that is imperfect and full of tenderness, that is better than nothing.
I have learned skills for a first aid situation responding to toxic drug poisoning, whether from fentanyl and other opioids or from other additives in the unregulated drug supply. I have administered Naloxone and carry it in my purse and in my car.
After a failed political campaign to demand the municipal government allow people to “shelter in peace” in tents due to the shortage of shelter beds, I felt defeated and powerless. I began to put bottles of water at the edge of our lawn, where it meets the sidewalk. I wrote a sign “free water” and taped it to the side of the tote bin. The tote bin became a cooler. Our next-door neighbour offered a wood cooler box he’d built with his teenage son, and then the cooler could be reached at a comfortable height.
Friends, neighbours, and strangers deliver contributions to the door or directly to the cooler: water bottles, home baking, granola bars, socks, gatorade, clementines. Some months back, on the day government cheques landed in bank accounts, I answered a knock at the door to find a friend who was living outside, holding a $50 bill out to me. “this is for the box.” he’d had $343 deposited in his account at midnight, meant to cover his needs for a month, and he was offering me fifty dollars. It felt like too much, and I said so. “Do you know how often I’ve been so hungry? And I’ve come here?” I honoured the gift. I took the cash.
There is no way to be an expert in being a neighbour; there is no way to know you’re getting it right. There is only the showing up over and over. It’s possible to gain some experience and become more familiar with the unfamiliar over time. There are powerful social messages that keep us apart from each other and increasingly well funded campaigns claiming that humane treatment of people who are unhoused or people who use drugs is dangerous or harmful. We all need to practice (over and over) letting go of “approval” and instead listening to the people around us.
My old neighbour Brad was one of those people who didn’t mind his own business in the best way. For almost ten years, he lived on the corner of our block and said a friendly hello to every person who walked by, chatting with every child, decorating to the max for every holiday, and pointing out when the kids were ready for a bike the next size up. “I’ve got one for him; come by and I’ll set you up.”
He fixed my daughter’s scooter; he noticed when my son was ready for a bigger bike; and once, when he came upon my kids jumping off the porch railing, he advised them that holding onto a garbage bag might make a good parachute for a few seconds. He was the best dang no hands cyclist the kids of this block have ever seen.
After Brad lost his housing, we only got closer, often working together on community projects that dreamed of making our town better and safer for everyone. He rode his bike around town with his guitar on his back and a hat meant to impress or crack a smile.
He went from vintage Burberry to a faux fur, faux Guy Fieri visor. He kept fixing things for anybody who needed them. He always reminded everyone of when and where the next church lunch was being handed out or where to meet the community-run overdose prevention site on Friday nights. He looked in on the older guys who live alone in rooms.
He died this spring, just a few blocks from the home where he raised his kids and kept an eye on the neighbourhood. He was found next to his bike, at that wild edge, at the vernal pool where the ducks paddle, where the street ends at the railroad tracks, where the blue vervain grows and the feral apple tree blooms.
He wasn’t an expert or a hero. He was the best neighbour, and everyone was his neighbour. He loved this place.
“My favourite was an owl that sat over our tent every night. I don’t really think that he liked the guys as he would swoop down at them every time they walked in off the trail and send them screaming and yelling like school girls. I never had that problem with him though. Every time I came or left from the tent I would hear it hoot until I was out of earshot and then I would slowly start to hear him as I returned. It was almost a comfort in a way as it felt like he was always keeping a watchful eye on us.”
Jess and her partner are back outside, living at the encampment. That’s where Brad was living too, when he died.
We were all together at his funeral, everyone dressed up, brushing tears through the speeches. We ate old fashioned finger foods and desserts made by the ladies of the Lion’s Club. Folks posed for portraits on the lawn out front before the rain began to fall.
On the ride back to the encampment, a bunch of giggling friends crowded into my car, joking about who should be buckled into the baby seat. I offered a ride, and I received so much. Even amidst that loss we were all feeling, we were in from the rain, and we were together. We were headed home.
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