Surviving in the city

>> Montreal's Native Friendship Centre celebrates its 25th anniversary

by JOHN EDMONDS

When Ida LaBillois-Montour started at the Native Friendship Centre in 1974, she was a 17-year-old CEGEP student looking for men. "My mother told me, 'Go down to a meeting of that group of Indian students down near Concordia--you'll get some free food. And there'll be men!'" says Ida. "So I went down with a few of my girlfriends. We went up the stairs and we walked in the door. In one room there was the food and the men, and my friends went straight to it.

"But in the other room there was a bunch of people speaking. They were meeting about what the aboriginal community in Montreal needed, and what we should do about it. I went straight into that meeting." Ida says it reminded her of her life back home, at the Listuguj Micmac reservation, on the Gaspé coast near the border with New Brunswick. "I was editor of the school newspaper, I was on sports teams, I had my friends and family--I did so many different things. But when I came to Montreal I was no one."

Since then the picture has changed: Montreal's Native community has grown from a few thousand people--mainly passing through town, often to study--to its current total of about 16,000, many of whom have settled here. The Native Friendship Centre (NFC) is celebrating its 25th Anniversary in its third location, a former bank on the corner of St-Laurent and Ontario. And Ida is the executive director. Married with kids, she's got her man problems figured out. And now she's someone--so much so that people never stop asking her to do things. It's a burnout job, she says, but she sticks to it. For though the centre is only a few years away from paying off its mortgage, the current of Native politics and social problems is unrelenting.

One-stop service centre

The Native Friendship Centre of Montreal is the heart of a diverse community of people of North American Indian, Inuit and Metis descent from across the continent, who now live in Montreal--a community that most Montrealers know almost nothing about.

"This is the first place that most Natives will come to when they come to Montreal," says Ida. "It's our place. It's also like a bridge or gateway between two worlds. We help people from outside the Native world understand Native people. And we help aboriginal people who come to the city understand how to function here."

The centre has communal dinners once a month, organizes an annual Pow Wow (this September in the Old Port) and hosts bingo and other gatherings--all strictly drug and alcohol free.

It also addresses the grittier realities of life. According to Will Nicholls, president of the NFC, "All the problems you find on reserves--poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, high suicide rates--you'll find them in the urban community as well." To address these issues, the centre has a huge variety of programs. These include computer training, legal advocacy, helping people find jobs and housing, HIV/AIDS counselling, and letting homeless Native people use the centre as an address to collect welfare cheques, among many others. Even with a budget of between $800 thousand to $1 million a year, the NFC is hard pressed to provide adequate services to those in need. "But we don't say no to people," says Ida.

The centre also has many programs for youth--led by its strong youth contingent, the Aboriginal Youth Council (AYC). The council has numerous committees and projects, one of their goals being to create an urban survival guide. One of the AYC's members is Léo René Martel.

"When I first came to Montreal, I was in crisis--identity crisis. I was on the street, and I did all kinds of things. So now I can help young people who are on the street, because I know what it's like," he says.

Léo was part of the provincial Youth Summit in Quebec City last February. "We had high expectations and a strategic plan. But when we got there only two of us were allowed to speak. And we were each given only two minutes to talk about the concerns of urban aboriginal youth!" says Léo. "So next year we're planning our own summit."

Assimilation a two-way street

Léo, who was adopted by a non-Native family when he was a child, says, "The centre was the first place I went that was really a Native place." He says that his adoptive father helped him learn about being Native by taking him to the Museum of Civilization in Hull. Later on, Native elders helped him further along the road.

As Léo's case shows, the centre is a gateway between two worlds in another sense: a gateway back to the Native world for those who were swept away from it.

"A lot of Native children were adopted by non-Native families and came to Montreal. A lot of them were adopted by Jewish families and lived in the West Island," says Ida. (The names of NFC members include Rubin, Segalowitz and Rosenberg.) "And also Germans loved to adopt Indian babies."

Tanja Steinbach, the NFC's socio-cultural events coordinator, was of Micmac descent, but was adopted by a German couple. "I lived in Germany until I was 11," says the McGill social work graduate, "and then I came to Montreal." Tanja says she went through the usual adolescent angst and ended up becoming a single mother. Three years ago she found her birth mother--her blood connection to her Native heritage. She's never been to her mother's Nova Scotia reserve, and German was her first language. But now she considers herself Native--largely due to the existence of the Native Friendship Centre.

Follow the money

The centre's work, however, is mainly funded by government money. And where there's money, politics is never far behind: in this case the politics of a tug-of-war for resources between the centre--in fact the whole network of native friendship centres across Canada --and the Band Councils.

"We used to control the Aboriginal Employment Services, but now the program is controlled by the chiefs," says Ida.

A more significant example is a May 1999 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, called the Corbiere decision. In this case, the court ruled that the term "and is ordinarily resident on the reserve" in section 77(1) of the Indian Act violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The section related to voting rights in Band Council elections. The upshot of this is that off-reserve Natives--who in Quebec mainly live in Montreal--will soon have the right to vote in Band Council elections, even if they haven't been back to the reserve in years. The Assembly of First Nations believes that the decision will have a significant impact on Native life, as do the individual chiefs themselves.

"It'll definitely have an effect on the elections," says Listuguj Chief Allison Metallic. "But what we're more concerned about is the provision of services."

"When people have a vote," affirms Ida, "they'll want services."

With only so much money to go around, the choice of which entity gets money for those services--be it Band Council or Native Friendship Centre--becomes a potentially divisive issue.

The more things change...

But it won't be the first change that Montreal's Native community has dealt with, nor the last. Ida likens the NFC to a bridge between the two worlds. It's a bridge under which a lot of water has flowed in the last 25 years.

"I remember during the Oka crisis, we organized food shipments into Kanesetake when it was under siege," Ida says. "There was one guy--we called him the Sausage King. He would have coils and coils of sausages--almost 200 pounds--wrapped around him like bandoliers, to bring to the people inside the barricades. We drove trucks of food in. They were always searched. Once the police said that we tried to bring in a load of guns. But they lied." She tells other stories. "There was a young guy, new to the city, who offered to go get me my lunch. I told him I wanted a club sandwich. So he goes off, but comes back five minutes later and says 'What's a club sandwich?' So I tell him it's chicken, bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, and bread. So he comes back over an hour later with a couple of shopping bags full of ingredients, and says, 'Hold on a moment. I'll be back. I forgot to get the chicken!'" she chuckles.

But the tales of suicide, substance abuse, violence, racism and AIDS aren't so funny. And at the NFC, they've seen and heard a lot of sad stories--or experienced them themselves. This constant contact with the unhealed wounds of the Native experience can be a real drain on centre staff and volunteers, Ida says. "Sometimes people burn out, and they have to go away for a while. But then they come back. This is their home. If there's one thing about Native people, one thing we've always had in our bones," she says, "it's community." :

more news...