Shelter

one night when i used to live in willow river my mother came home with these three white guys who were drunk my sister and i were sleeping upstairs in our bedroom god is it all maybe you can say something about it i don't want to say anymore let's just say what happened let's just go well anyway these these these three white guys that my mom came home but they were drunk well so was my mother too and uh well my sister when i told him my sister and i were sleeping upstairs well one white guy came upstairs and he was look checking in the bedrooms and he checked he came into our bedroom and he seen my sister there so he started feeling rough you know and i i was small that time and i was scared so i didn't know what to do so i just laid real still you know watched all this thing go around and then he went downstairs and another white guy came up this time after he came with that second white guy the other one came up too and um he said to that second white guy you better hurry up because i want to have my turn before that old lady you know catches us and they're all raping her how did that make you feel about white people i don't like them ever since i was small i didn't like them and i was afraid before to admit it to anybody but now that everything is so outspoken today i you know i really let it all out what i like and what i don't like this is a film about several women who worked in the summer of 71 in a women's emergency shelter well what i heard about the shelter before i came was that there were women who could tear down doors and it was quite violent and usually there was fights going on and when i came down here and got to know the people that were living here they just seemed as though they were normal people and that the fights that did occur occurred out of certain circumstances rather than just people being aggressively violent but if this is a film about those who came to find out about transient women it is equally a film about what or more correctly whom they found a typical day in a shelter begins at about six or seven o'clock in the morning we come home from the disc attack and we we're not drunk we raise trouble or some of us are just come home and go to sleep and wake up about see about two three o'clock if we have no money like you know we ask the workers if they got any money you know in other words we bump from the workers if we can't get that food that money from the worker but when we just don't eat anything we just go to sleep back to sleep if we're up we watch a late mood the movie in the afternoon then we go back to sleep or else we wash clothes sometimes if we're i'm going to get up and then that's about it i guess we just stay in and wash clothes and sleep it's mostly sleep well when i was a transit woman i i used to find i found it very um at first it was quite exciting and then it got the point where it was a very lonely very lonely way to live very frustrating um i was depressed a lot of the time and then other times you you know you'd be very excited and very happy it was one extreme to another it was never one happy medium either you were very happy you were very depressed we were very lonely but it was never a combination of feelings together it was all and with the other women that i some that i stayed with and some that i traveled with or were you know were in one particular place with i found that that was all we all felt like that you know you you hated to get up in the morning because um the mornings are very lonely and you nothing to do everybody's everybody's going someplace everybody's doing something doing something creative or something instructive and we had nothing to do and then about one o'clock you'd start coming to life because not because of what you were going to do that evening you know like it's uh but it was just the idea that you had something to look forward to at the end of the day or you know something look forward to it during the day you get very excited getting ready for it and then you probably find yourself most the time very bored once you were there trying very hard to appear that you were happy and excited about it i think the biggest problem facing an airport when they come into the city from the reserve it'd be a place to stay and not knowing anybody and that i guess that's about it so they all they always go to drinking and when they go to bars you like they meet other people and usually it's the wrong kind of people they meet especially like they usually go down skid road you know because that's where you find a lot of native people down there well in the last three or four years a lot of interest taken in transit women i don't know how this really started it seemed like everybody started all the same time you know everybody wanted to do his this good thing there was a lot of women on the street and there's things like um there was halfway houses and soup kitchens for men but there was nothing for women and at that time i met other women that were you know saying it's not really it's not fair and why men get all the breaks and we couldn't even stand the soup line with the man and we talked to other people and found out that a lot of people were you know wanting to do something and at that at that time everybody was wanting to do something you know it wasn't necessarily just women but it was you know poor people and indians and all this stuff and one of the things that came out as a group that i was with was there was a need for women a place for women to stay you know we started out with uh talking about a home and then talked about an emergency shelter you know where uh just for overnight stands kind of thing well when i think of native women getting a job i think it's sort of hard there are more jobs for native men than native women well there there's quite a lot of things that i'd like to be that that men you know that men do and uh the trouble is is that don't hire i am women for them but it if i could easily be a daughter i see the problems as the problem of being a woman and being in lower class and poverty in that as women they are the women here are exploited as women as as other women are as women of other classes are in job-wise and childrenis kind of things and in the in their lower class in that they have to exploit themselves as women to get jobs for example well just hustling guys or using using their body to get to get money i think the primary problem here is not so much that people are i mean the people here are women or that i'm a woman but i think it's economic because if there wasn't the economic problem then there wouldn't be the woman problem that there wouldn't be the competition in which a woman i mean a man makes all the money so that a woman has to get the leftovers which means like you know selling her body in order to get it so [Music] i dance for the money you know i dance but i'm saving i get the money by using my body but not it's it's different than hustling and rolling a guy way different because i don't do it i don't do it for the enjoyment or anything i just do it for the money and now the rumor is going around saying that i'm a strip striptease and while myself i know it's not true when i dance up there i just don't dance for the enjoyment well i'm not proud of being up there [Music] and i found that because situations you had to take care of pragmatic things like cleaning food money you know individual problems that you couldn't deal with any of the larger problems that exist or that you know perpetuate the problems but what actually occurred was that they weren't really interested in doing any projects which were pretty rinky dink anyway because we didn't have supplies and that i became bogged down with getting things like toilet paper and kotex and milk and cups and just policing the place so that the idea of encouraging self-respect was nil because of the immediate needs such as food shelter clothing and problems with money that came up then also when i went down the idea was that i would see other volunteers and workers coming in and trying to instill in the girls a sense of cleanliness and the need to get a job whereas i thought that was fruitful so i thought it would be best to make the way they were living more enjoyable if they were going to stay out all night then they should be able to sleep all day so they have more energy and then try to get them over to the y so that they could have food and also since most of them shoplift and hustle money they seem really naive in what they do and that it's sporadic and they don't have any real education and how to do it so they don't get caught up [Music] thank you how are you doing i'm glad you're doing fine do you need any cigarettes and the uh good boys give it to you and you don't i want the other little children but [Applause] it's pretty cool but it's sort of a waste to spend 10 days in here should is your dad working well i guess we gotta split [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] bye well out in the country there's not much to do you know but we used to ride at the back of the truck and we'd be going up and down like that and everybody's he'll go up and down up and down man [Music] [Music] we're going to pick berries to almost fall around the field and then the grass oh we had all kinds of things to do you know like ride horses when i get married i want to live in the country and i want to live i don't live like you always like you know i like i'd like to go and move up to small boys or something like this but then i'd have to you know like i'm so used to city life i would have to try and get used to that you know there are ways and that like i'm used to saying going to dances at night and over there mcnabbit to dances just just living so well when i came into to working at the shelter i didn't i just thought that i would be dealing with people within the shelter referring them to to doctors and to other agencies but now i see that there is a need for native women to organize to fight people who are [ __ ] on them like indian affairs and welfare i mean like most of the people here like they have a concept of red power and the idea that you know developing red power really seems beautiful to me so that they can see you know when a policeman hassles that there's this idea that they have power as a group and i think it's beginning to form well when people read power organize other indian other indian people i think it's really you know um really good when they do this you know because they're trying to fight for something they want well the incidents that i've seen and that i've been involved with a little bit made me hate the white people when i was younger and i've been hating them ever since since i can remember but now i'm learning to you know learning to know that all of them aren't the same like you know there are some good ones and some bad ones and then you know i'm trying to get involved with the good ones stay away from the bad white people i think that in order for the white people to who you know and the white people who want to help us we've got to learn to help ourselves first and then we can learn to accept the help from the white people i'm a stranger like yourself [Music] i'm sorry i can't help you i hope you find your way the city gets so lonely i don't think i'm gonna stay friendly faces familiar places these are what i need [Music] friendly faces familiar places these are what i need and someone waiting there to say hello too [Music] do [Music] friendly faces familiar places these are what i need [Music] [Music] friendly faces familiar places who could ask for more and someone waiting there to say hello to friendly faces familiar places [Music] friendly faces familiar places [Music] friendly faces familiar places [Music] do you