Chief Kemp Goes “On The Record” With His Softwood Square Timber Housing Project

By Alison Brown

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“We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”.. A. Einstein

Chief George Kemp Is Chief of the Berens River First nation. It is his 2nd term as chief. He grew up In Berens’ River along the Eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg. Chief Kemp spent 14-15 years working in the logging industry on that side of the lake. Subsequent to that, he completed his university education and received his law degree from The University of Manitoba. He graduated with a double major in Political Studies and Philosophy. He has spent a lot of his time working in Economic Development. Trying to improve the living conditions of remote communities is one of the key issues he focuses on.

I met with Chief Kemp in Toronto at the Assembly of First Nations Conference on Economic Development.

Chief Kemp: I think everyone in Canada knows about the housing shortage in First Nations communities, especially remote communities. It is the biggest problem that we face, just to live comfortably. For instance at our reserve in Berens River we have one situation were there are 21 people living together in a three bedroom house. Two weeks ago there was a house that burned down at the Sandy Bay First Nations, south of Winnipeg, there were 14 people living in that house and 2 kids died in that fire. The local media there portrayed it as “How come those natives can’t spend their money wisely and build proper houses for themselves.” The attitude that somehow we are at fault for this “Blame the victims” is unfortunately prevalent. The truth is we are hemmed in by a housing policy based on requirements set up by Indian Affairs and C.M.H.C. bureaucrats.

There are 29 remote communities in Manitoba. Manitoba and Ontario have the most remote communities. These communities have more people living on reserve than communities that are connected to a road system. So the housing shortage problem is more acute in remote communities. Being connected to the provincial highway system in the south of Manitoba especially, means there has been a lot of migration to the urban centers like Winnipeg. So for non-remote communities there is less stress on families. But, no jobs and no housing, poor housing etc. on reserve also promotes migration from First Nations everywhere to urban centers.

I am here in Toronto to talk about a project I am undertaking where we will make housing based on using the local resources and manpower. Doing this we will create jobs and create an economy, rather than what is going on now. Under the present system Indian affairs and C.M.H.C., outsiders, put together what they think is the best and the cheapest method of housing for First Nations. The Indian affairs department controls everything in our lives, including defining us as being an Indian or not being an Indian, and those types of things. These policy makers sit down and put these policies together and I know for a fact none of them have ever lived in a remote community.

We are forced to live with their decisions, so I have to get through to them in their towers in the city or where ever they make policies that their policies just aren’t working. There is a better and cheaper way and a way that makes more sense to build housing and especially for remote communities. That is why I have developed the square timber project.

Under the current system, the conventional housing programs that they have for First Nations communities are often based on housing pools as a tribal council model. Us, belonging to a tribal council of 8 bands we have it split up so 4 get housing one year and 4 don’t and then they switch it around. Based on that Berens River band with 3200 members in our band, we get 2.5 houses per year. So every 2nd year we get 5 houses to build. When those 5 houses come in every 2nd year it’s only the big families the most critical, stressful family situations that get the housing. This forces a lot of the young people to stay and live with their parents or whoever they can live with in order to continue their life on the reserve. Often these people are over 30 or 40 years old and homeless in remote communities with no hope of ever having their own home; it is very demeaning.

On our reserve 25-30 people are born every year. We only get the 2.5. House’s under the current system so we will never catch up, in fact the situation is getting worse.

Many people just give up, leave the reserve, and end up living in slum housing in Toronto Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Vancouver that’s what’s going on there. And of course this means a whole set of other issues and problems which I won’t get into here. But it is Reality!

My project goes against the grain in terms of housing policies in this country. I’m trying to do it in a way that creates jobs and also creates an economy.

A lot of remote communities that I am talking about are in the Boreal forest and we have trees right in our communities. So this project is sustainable in many ways.

Shaping the Logs

The Boreal Forest has reached its life expectancy and the wood is starting to show signs of decay and it’s starting to deteriorate. So the natural progression from here is a big fire. I will be utilizing wood that’s on its last legs you may say, harvesting it.

There is a hundred years of cutting, annually on a sustainable basis, in the woods around Berens’ if we were cutting wood for a big pulp mill or something. We are just scratching the surface for this project. The trees we are cutting like the Jack pine they grow like poplar they regenerate quickly and just grow themselves without the need for tree planting programs.

Its good we are taking the older trees out of the forest, the young jack-pine tree, twenty to thirty years old, produces 30 percent more oxygen than a full grown mature tree so when you have young growth its actually better. It’s better for the animals too because young shoots come up and that’s what the moose and other animals thrive on. In old growth forest like Algonquin Park in Ontario they send loggers in to harvest it and then the new growth feeds the animals, and spurs new animal populations. This is just part of the natural cycle. Fire is as well; we are just taking it before the fire comes. It’s going to come, so hopefully we can get this project going.

We have 2200 people living in Berens River, on-reserve now. When you calculate it out to 5 people in a small 3-bedroom house we are 160 houses short, since we only have 280 houses in Berens River now. This sort of crowding leads to all kinds of bad stuff, abuse, family strain, and family breakdown. The situation has been like this for the past 20 years.

As I said before, we can’t get housing on the reserve unless it goes through the department of Indian affairs. In Manitoba the situation is what I would call a self-defeating policy. In Manitoba, we have to have a letter from Indian Affairs called a ministerial guarantee and then we can go to the banks and C.M.H.C. with this and finance our housing allocations under what is called Section 95 housing or in other words, housing for people living on social assistance. In many remote communities, of course 90% of the people are living on social assistance. Therefore, everything is approved based on that letter and based on getting loans against my future monies coming from I.N.A.C. to build those houses. So I am bootstrapped to the Indian affairs program that limits me to 2.5 houses per year. But as you can realize, our population growth is 10 times higher than our annual allocation of Section 95 housing. These policies are a joke and people in this country wonder why housing is such a problem.

So Indian Affairs policy makers in Manitoba have turned around and gone a step further and made it worse. In Manitoba, Indian Affairs will not pay a First Nation for housing they build or purchase outside of their Section 95 policy and ministerial guarantee system with the banks. So there is no room for a First Nation to go out on their own to solve the housing crisis on-reserve. We could build houses on-reserve on our own if Indian Affairs would simply pay us for the houses we supply to their clients in their social welfare system. I say this tongue in cheek because it is Canada and Indian Affairs that has created the welfare system for our people.

My point is, if you could turn around and charge Indian affairs shelter allowance say 500 dollars a month in Manitoba, you would have a revenue stream to get your own loans to finance your own housing programs for on-reserve social clients. This would go along way to help ease the housing shortages in many remote communities in Canada and especially in Manitoba. Under the current system, it’s really about taking money out of one Indian affairs pocket and putting it in another Indian affairs pocket. It is totally an in-house system of housing at Indian Affairs based on what I would call extreme communism (lol). With my square timber housing project, if I build ten houses for welfare clients and then I send them the bill for shelter allowance for say 500.00 per month, they will deny that because we are building outside of the Indian affairs program with our square timber housing project. On the other hand, those same houses built under the current Section 95 housing policy, the bank will get paid for financing the project due to the ministerial guarantee. But I don’t care about getting paid by I.N.A.C. our people need houses, and we can fight about this issue later but I need to prove a point here!

This fight with Indian Affairs has been going on in Manitoba for many years. But here in Ontario they work differently. They do pay for shelter allowance! So my square timber project makes sense especially here in Ontario because the Ontario I.N.A.C. policy allows First Nations to charge monthly for housing built outside of the Section 95 program. Isn’t that incredible? In Manitoba, I.N.A.C. policy says, no, they don’t recognize houses built outside the ministerial guarantee. But Ontario does. So if I was in Ontario. I could put together a business plan and go to the bank and say I can invoice Indian affairs $500 a month for these homes to pay for the project. Give me a loan based on this and we can build them, it would be that easy. But in Manitoba we can’t do this, so I’m just going to go ahead and build these houses.

For the past twenty years there have been threats to challenge Indian affairs on these issues but anybody that has challenged Indian affairs hasn’t had a project on the go or the houses standing and a bill in their hands to Indian Affairs for them. I intend to hand in invoices to I.N.A.C. for these houses and fight politically to get our own self-made housing project recognized as affordable housing that makes sense in a remote community setting. As long as it’s the case that you are arguing with Indian Affairs on paper with no houses built, you could talk for the next 100 years with I.N.A.C. and they will never change the policy in Manitoba. This has been the case so far.

So I’m hoping to create a beach head here for attacking the Manitoba I.N.A.C. policy and I want to have as much media coverage on this issue as I can in terms of exposing just how wrong headed this housing policy is at Indian affairs and make a project that does many things for people. The current houses we get from Indian Affairs now are basically stick-frame houses wrapped in plastic, basically a glorified sauna when you think about it. In the winter you’re sweating and there’s mold and people are getting sick, babies are getting sick. The overcrowding makes it worse creating too much moisture .The house just can’t help but sweat. The temperature outside is often below -40c in the winter. These are all compounding factors in northern remote communities. Imagine with 21 people in a house; the cooking is continuous, showering, mopping floors and so forth, so no fan system can keep up with the moisture being generated. This scenario leads to housing decaying and molding at a faster rate than main stream housing in Canada.

It’s also problematic just to get the building materials into our remote areas. In a lot of remote communities there is a band office and not much more. So when you get materials sent in, the materials are shipped from Toronto or Winnipeg. I know one first Nation in our area where there where 3 semi loads of gyp-rock or drywall that came in and the truckers didn’t know what to do with them, there is often no warehousing in remote communities, so they unloaded everything on the ground in March and drove away. Of course the band has no way of protecting the sheets of gyp-rock and then the rains came, they got wet and they had to throw them all away. So I don’t know what more I can do to explain to Indian affairs that there’s a lot of waste happening.

The way houses are built now Indian Affairs has what they call a bidding system. So the lumber companies will give you a quote of $150, 000 per house and they’ll win it based on that; which is basically the material costs only and not getting the materials in there and in storage. Most remote communities are connected by winter roads so the materials would take about 3-4 trips at $5,000- $10,000 a trip to get the stuff in there. So you’re looking at $20,000 just in transportation cost, of course that’s not included in the quote. So the band has to somehow pay for that. All these remote communities are going broke trying to do that. So when you have a project that’s on the books for $150,000 its actually $250,000 when you tally it all up. You end up with a three bed room house that’s going to last maybe 10 years, under the present conditions, with an average of 10 to 15 people living in it. To an ordinary person, it is obvious this situation is unacceptable but to Indian Affairs, the situation is part of their “goal keeper” vision; keep the costs of those Indians to a minimum despite health hazards and waste with our housing policies. Ordinary Canadians have to standup and make the Federal government accountable for this intolerable state of affairs.

Some of these bands have waited 3 years to complete a housing project because they only got half the materials in and then the winter roads went. Winter roads are unpredictable. Tomorrow they can be all shut down and maybe a week later it will cool off and you can make the trip again and then it’s the end of the season. So you have half the materials and the road goes and then what are you going to do? You have to wait till next year and get some more in and wait again. So what I’m saying is we have the materials right here. The big stuff you don’t have to fly in and you can build houses!

So at the end of the day I want to show Indian affairs you can build these houses if you get a small sawmill like I got that does not cost very much to own and operate: Utilize the local timber; you don’t have to use the gyp-rock

We have to look within and one of the big things I see is we can utilize the natural resources that’s there to build housing, and instead of costing 250,000 that mostly goes out of the community we can work within the community for less and build these houses for half the cost. The difference is these will be good quality houses. The square timber house I am planning, if it’s built right, will deal with that molding problem. It will be a safe house that will last a long time and be affordable from a remote community perspective; of course if a remote community can afford such housing, imagine what that means for the rest of Canada’s First Nations.

The ways houses are built now are on top of the ground, the frost shifts them so none of the doors will close right during the winter time. We have a lot of heat loss and hydro heating bills are a disaster. The current C.M.H.C. housing policy does not allow for wood stoves to heat them anymore because of the fire regulations, so we are stuck with baseboard heaters. Wood stoves are good because they reduce molding by recycling the air as the fire burns in the stove; the moisture is removed by a wood stove. But now, we have huge hydro bills with these baseboard heaters and every spring I’m faced with a huge crisis where people owe three, four, five, thousand dollars in hydro bills. My housing plan will address these problems with the type of square timber house we are designing for our remote community. Hopefully we can also market these houses to anyone.

I see a day in Berens River where there will be a major crisis in housing in fifteen to twenty years. I’m prepared to fight this thing politically now. The present housing stock built in the last 10 years is garbage and these houses are already molding and falling apart. Hopefully, Indian Affairs and Canadians will wake up and implement changes now to correct this looming problem of mismanagement by the government.

Cutting the wood

I have spent most of my life in forestry and logging and I feel I know what I’m doing in this situation. When I got in as chief we were 4 and a half million dollars in deficit and we were at 30 percent deficit. According to Indian affairs your only allowed an 8 percent deficit and then they put you into a program of third party management, where they pay off all your bills for you and pay some accounting firm $300,000 a year to police that. They gave me a chance as a new Chief and now we are down to a 6 percent deficit. So I feel good that we can pull this project off and I have come to this conference to look for new opportunities. I’m looking to see if any announcements will be made through Indian affairs about more infrastructure money and so forth. So far I haven’t seen anything really. There was an old trick started when Paul Martin was finance minister and then Prime minister when they announced a huge pile of money for Indian people for housing or sewer and water. But the money doesn’t leave the treasury board .It looks good politically but it’s very damaging to us. It makes it look like those Indians are getting all that money and yet it never moves from the treasury board and 6 months later they announce the same money again. This sort of thing has been going on for the last 10- 15 years and now the Harper government is starting to do the same sort of thing. It is really part of the “goal-keeper” policy at Indian Affairs!

People have to be made aware of these things. You know there’s a big concern about the economy right now and spending money to try to keep things rolling. So who knows, maybe there is something here for me and if there is great and if not that’s fine too I’m just going to keep going with my project. In Berens we have homeless people living in shacks with no heat and no water and no hydro just living in a shell at 40 below I have no idea how they do it. For those people I have to get some thing going that’s why these 10 or 15 square timber houses are so important to me. This is a first step, and from there we will see if I can expand it to 20 houses per year, and in 8 years we will have it caught up .I want to build these houses so they are expandable using post and beam construction. I have a master plan of how this thing should unfold if all goes well. A plan where I don’t necessarily need Indian affairs help to do it. What I do need some help in is to find some people that can be committed to help and fund my project to help with costs. We are a relatively poor band and totally dependent on Indian Affairs funding and other government funding. But we have to take this step and I am appealing to people out there in this country who can help us in any way they can; money and expertise, etc. etc.

But, I’m not here begging either, I believe as treaty people, we were a nation at one time and we never gave that up, that’s why we signed treaties. Under treaty we made a deal with Canada except Canada has never honored that deal. We should be the richest of the rich in this country not the poorest of the poor. I shouldn’t have to be here looking like I’m begging for help. It should be the other way around.

If you look at every treaty especially on the prairies from North west Ontario to the Rocky Mountains the numbered treaties they call them 1 – 11 they all say the same thing; That the tribes of Indians and those who live among them, can count on the bounty and the benevolence of the Queen. The Bounty is all the wealth that we created for the queen; we now call that the crown and the crown in right of the provincial government. So the trillions of dollars created by this country’s GDP in terms of natural resource extraction; If we could only get 1 percent of that the wealth, we would not have to listen to Canadians say we are a burden to the taxpayer, but we get nothing from our natural resources. The treaties as interpreted by the Canadian government to make us a third party to our own wealth that’s not the way it was supposed to go.

So when the treaties were signed in the 1870s on the prairies all Canada really wanted was land for farming to create a farming economy across the land. So the treaties speak about land and the sharing of lands. Therefore, the treaties in the 1870s were totally silent about the natural resources under those lands or on those lands and nothing says we gave up the waters as well. So as part of the grand plan out west the federal government outlawed Indians being able to have any legal representation or lawyers till 1961 and this was written in the Indian act. So, in the 1930s they passed the Natural Resources Transfer Act and they locked it up into the constitution of Canada and took away all of our natural resources and wealth. This gave the provinces all our natural resources without our knowing or consent and locked it into the constitution to make it very difficult to fight. It’s illegal what they did to us. So all the oil in Alberta we own technically, and all the timber in Canada for that matter; we still own it all. It’s important for people to understand these things. Today our Grand Chief in Manitoba for example won’t speak up and fight this issue because today some leaders have their hand in the till of the federal money trough, and you can’t bite the hand that feeds you.

For example, you look at what happened when Ovid Mercredi was the National Chief. John Chretien slammed the door in his face and cut his funding as National Chief, and the Assembly of First Nations (A.F.N) budget went from 23 million to 3 million in one year. Mercredi went to South Africa and met with Desmond Tutto and Cretian cut the funding because Ovide was speaking out about these things to the world. Today Canada refuses to adopt the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights because of things like the 1930 Natural Resources Transfer Act that stole our wealth and this theft continues today. Canadians must understand this and if they did, they would not see us as a problem, we would be helping Canadians with our wealth; this was the way the treaties were suppose to work. We pay our own way and solve our own problems!

I come to these conferences for 25 years and everyone talks a good game. But where are the changes on the reserve at the grass roots level? I don’t see them.

There’s a lot happening that looks good but not a lot is happening on the reserve.

In the urban setting with casinos you are seeing success at an urban level and people look at them and go “Hey those natives are really progressing” but that template can not be applied across the country. The concept of Privatization of homes on reserves comes from a city model, and it makes sense in the city because land has a certain value because of its urban setting. I have told Indian affairs housing that in a remote community there is very little market value for houses. You can build a 200,000-dollar house and 5 years from now it’s still only worth 5,000, so why bring in these policies if they only work in urban settings and not remote community settings.

The Department of Indian affairs has absolutely no vision and its only there as a goalkeeper for the treasury board; its there to block anything that may look like it will increase costs for the “Indian problem”. But without a vision, Indian Affairs policy and programs are doomed to failure for another 140 years. Now, look at the Dept of Agriculture that was created out of treaties in the west to create a “social” farming economy for Canada. They have an agricultural agreement that every province and territory signed on to in 2005 called “A Vision for the 21st Century”. So, if you look at the agriculture department and see what goes on there in terms of vision and support there is about 50,000 farmers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and 116 thousand Indians in Manitoba alone. And if you look at what we get in terms of support from Indian Affairs or as some would say; the taxpayer and compare that to what the farmers get in western Canada, Canadians should be shocked at the cost of supporting 50,000 social farmers. The cost is not 9 billion per year but the number would be in the trillions per year for a mere 50,000 people. So what we get from Indian Affairs; it’s a pittance, and people point to the Indians and say oh those people get to much government help. But for the theft of our natural resources we should be the richest people in Canada, not the poorest!

I invite Canadians to read the treaties and find this out for themselves. Try and find in the Treaties; No. 1 to 11 where it says we gave up the natural resources and you will not find it. The treaties on the prairies all the read the same and the two groups mentioned are the farmers and the Indians. Then think about all the roads, railways, shipping ports and other wage and price subsidies that Canada has developed for the farmers in the last 140 years; the figure would be mind boggling in terms of support for our social farming economy. Once Canadians understand this, then they would know who the real cost to the taxpayer is; it is not our people.

Having stated all this I am not appealing to the government to help me with my proposal in the sense that I am begging for money for my square timber project. I am rightly owed housing money by Canada. I hope Canada and Indian Affairs would come to their senses and assist me to show them what type of housing policy makes sense in a remote community. But if not, perhaps there is a person out there that can help me.

Meegwetch. Chief George Kemp. Berens River First Nation, Manitoba.

Chief Kemp will be in Toronto again April 27 and 28 for the Third Annual National Conference “Developing Aboriginal Renewable Energy Projects” Novotel Toronto Centre Hotel.

All mail regarding this project will be forwarded to Chief Kemp and can be sent to

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