N’Amerind is a venerable friendship centre in the Ontario friendship movement. It's one of the first. It's becoming more actively engaged in housing and housing delivery in the city of London, which we're very pleased about, and the executive director there, Al Day, is doing a really good job around the urban indigenous homeward bound project.
Friendship centres grew out of the migration of indigenous people from reserves into the cities, particularly following the wars. They came about as a result of people needing to get together to identify where services could be found that would meet the needs of the community, and grew to become social gathering places with a major cultural function. Across Canada friendship centres have been major players in the creation of housing service corporations in cities and towns. A number of smaller indigenous housing delivery organizations emerged directly from friendship centres in the sixties, seventies and eighties—more in the seventies, eighties, and nineties—to directly address this problem of people not having adequate housing, and particularly not having housing where they would not face discrimination from landlords on a regular basis. Racism in the housing market certainly continues to be a challenge across Ontario. Access to housing and access to affordable housing is difficult to begin with, and it's made more difficult because of the racism of landlords.
We know that some of our sister organizations, one of them the Ontario Native Women's Association, did a little experiment a couple of years ago in Thunder Bay. They sent a visibly indigenous woman to ask a landlord if something that was advertised was indeed for rent, and then got the answer “no”. Then a white woman asked 30 minutes later and was told to come to see it. We know that housing continues to be a significant challenge in our communities beyond simply the affordability issue. Friendship centres have stepped into the breach and are beginning to deliver.