Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector, Canada

Abstract

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.