Thoughts and Prayers in Cabot Square
Thoughts and Prayers in Cabot Square
After another street funeral and more pleas for help, is anyone listening?
Saali Kuata hadn’t planned on making a funeral speech, but the words came pouring out of him.
“I want you to be painfully aware and listen when we hold this moment of silence. The city will not stop for our grief. The city will not stop at our deaths. The city will not stop even though the deepest sadness fills our hearts.”
Of all the newspaper columns and social media posts, of all the thoughts and prayers from politicians who didn’t turn up to the service, it was Kuata’s short, blistering statement that best captured the tragedy of Elisapee Pootoogook’s death.
Elisapee was stranded in Montreal two weeks ago and looking for a place to get out of the cold. So she crept into an unfinished condo building across from Cabot Square as night fell over the city.
They found her body there the next morning and delivered it to the medical examiner. Construction of the condo resumed in short order. No, the city did not stop for Elisapee. As mourners gathered at Cabot Square to pay their respects on Nov. 22, the rattle and scream of power tools made that painfully clear.
Like Elisapee, Kuata is Inuit. He performed a drumming ceremony with Mariam Imak to honour her passing.
“Our truth, as Inuit, is unity. That means seeing yourself in others,” Imak said. “You are that other person sitting on the side of the road. You are that person who maybe has an alcohol addiction because they’re survivors of residential school, the sixties scoop, the dog slaughter.”
“When I see another Inuk that’s on the street — whether or not I know them personally — I feel it on a deep level. So we have to stand with each other in these moments.”
Elisapee was born 61 years ago on a fjord just south of the Hudson Strait. Her generation saw the government outlaw their way of life. Federal agents shot hundreds of sled dogs to prevent the Inuit from living on the land and created towns for them to live in. They brought Christian missionaries north and forced children into abusive day schools.
The first homes came to Elisapee’s village the year before her birth; wooden shacks without electricity or proper insulation. It was Canada’s way of cutting the Inuit off from the tundra and sea, where they had harvested fish and game for thousands of years. And then, almost overnight, they found themselves in cramped, poorly ventilated homes where — to this day — airborne diseases like tuberculosis spread at a rate 100 times higher than in the south.
Montreal offers a momentary reprieve, but it isn’t always so welcoming.
Landlords sometimes refuse to rent apartments to Inuit, police statistics show Inuit women in Montreal are over 12 times more likely to be stopped than whites, and there’s a concerted effort by developers to “clean up” parts of the city where Inuit hang out.
It’s little surprise that, to the very end, Elisapee struggled to find a home between these two worlds. She was meant to be treated for meningitis during her final trip south and catch a flight back home to Salluit.
“Life was not kind to Elisapee but she was still loving and gentle. They never took that away from her,” said David Chapman, who manages an Atwater Ave. shelter Elisapee frequented. “She would come down here for medical treatment and wind up on the streets, sleeping in the metro station even though she was so frail. We would get her back on a plane home and run into problems up there too.”
By the time Elisapee died, she had drifted in and out of homelessness for years, self-medicating with alcohol to numb a lifetime of surviving: genocide, domestic violence and the cruelty of street life.
“Overcrowding, abuse, trauma... there were things she confided in me that I’ll never share with anyone else but her life was a constant struggle,” Chapman said. “And she faced it as best she could every day. No one should have to live like that and no one should have to die the way she did either.”
***
“Gazette man!”
Putulik greets me like this every time we meet. Without fail.
I used to call him “Inuk Ringo Star” because he had a mop-top straight out of A Hard Day’s Night but his hair is short now so it’s back to Putulik. I’m not sure he knows my real name or that I no longer work for the Montreal Gazette, but Putulik makes me smile when he shouts those words.
We met at a street funeral four years ago after Siasi Tullugak was found dead outside a Chomedey St. townhouse.
She was 27, a sweet kid who’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people. Siasi started working in the sex trade just before her death, which police had initially ruled a suicide. That ruling came under scrutiny after some investigating by reporter Brigitte Noël and I.
Sources told me Siasi was seen with a man — described by some as her pimp — who had threatened her life just hours before they found her. There was also a police report, leaked to Brigitte and I, which details how Siasi called 911 on the eve of her death, claiming someone was trying to force her into an alley.
This did not strike either of us as the behaviour of a woman who wanted to end her life.
But she was an Inuit sex worker without more than a few dollars to her name. So the police marked it off as a suicide and moved on to the next case. It was only after news reports about the pimp and 911 call that they reopened the investigation three weeks later.
By then, witnesses went into hiding or fled the city for fear that they might be next. Siasi’s pimp was never arrested or charged in the case. He ended up in prison after sexually assaulting a woman in 2018.
Putulik was there at Elisapee’s service, flowers in hand, head bowed and ready to speak a few words in Inuktitut about his old friend before a crowd of nearly 100 gathered at Cabot Square.
Years of street life have imprinted themselves on his body. Putulik’s brows are thick with scar tissue, he has the remnants of a gash carved into the side of his head, and he walks with a bit of a limp.
Still, you can count on him to be there when the community needs him. I’ve seen Putulik at too many of these to count, including at his own mom’s service two years ago. She died at LaSalle Hospital after suffering a stroke and a series of brain seizures.
Her name was Kupa and, though she lived in poverty, her granddaughter Annie said Kupa would slip her five bucks whenever they saw each other. At Elisapee’s funeral, a few rows back from Putulik, Annie pulled me in for a bearhug.
“Where the hell have you been,” Annie said. “When am I gonna meet your kid?”
Annie was a regular at street funerals too. Both her parents were homeless so she grew up in foster care. There was a time when we all feared Annie would age out of the system and wind up living in a shelter, but she fought like hell to get her life together. These days, she’s a street worker helping out homeless Inuit.
Lizzie took to the stage with an Inuktitut copy of the Bible, read a few verses and retreated back into the audience. She could usually be counted on to provide humour in the darkest times. I’ll never forget how Lizzie comforted Marc Crainchuk’s family after he froze to death under the Ville-Marie Expressway in 2017.
That afternoon, at his memorial service, she stood at the front of the old Anglican Church on Dorchester Blvd., scrunched her face and sauntered around like a giant angry baby.
“He was grumpy but it was like a nice grumpy,” she said, milking the scrunchy face for a few more laughs. Then she began to cry. “He cared more about others than himself.”
By then, Lizzie had gotten off the streets and into an apartment in the east end. Some nights, she’d hitch a ride to the homeless encampment where Crainchuk slept and bring him supplies.
I wrote about Lizzie’s eulogy for a piece in the Montreal Gazette but spelled her name wrong. A few weeks later, she snuck up behind me and whispered “It’s Lizzie with an i-e, not Lizzy with a y.” Before I could turn around she was back across the street.
She was quieter than usual at Elisapee’s funeral.
“Elisapee had a loving heart. She always had a story to tell and when I’d ask if I could do anything to help, she’d say, ‘Darling, don’t you ever worry about me,’” said Heather Ravel, a Gwich’in woman. “I remember I gave her my coat, my mitts and whatever I could because she was struggling. But it took some convincing for her to accept that.
“When I finally got off the street, she came to stay with me for a few days. She slept most of the time because it was a rare moment she was indoors in a safe place. She was so grateful. I’ll miss her.”
Like Elisapee’s path to the streets, Ravel didn’t choose to fall on hard times. She was one of thousands of Indigenous children snatched from their parents and forcefully adopted into white families during the Sixties Scoop. She came to Montreal by way of the Yukon and found people just like her when she wound up at Cabot Square.
There’s a community around Cabot Square that’s been around for decades. It isn’t always healthy and there is the odd outburst of violence, but it’s the closest thing many of these people have to a family. Elisapee belonged to that extended, occasionally dysfunctional family.
“A lot of hearts are broken right now,” Elisapee’s son-in-law said at the funeral. “I ask my friends that are in the street to be more vigilant. I beg you, watch out for one and other. Never leave no one behind. Under any circumstance.
“This was a very important woman, you see? To my wife, to her grandchildren. I trust in God to bring comfort into our lives in the days, in the hours, in the moments to come. We need it.”
He pointed at the condo buildings across the street, the ones that will soon be occupied by a wealthy new class of resident in west downtown.
“I pray he puts love in their hearts.”
***
At the entrance of the unfinished condo where they found Elisapee, a billboard depicts life at 1111 Atwater. “The exclusivity of life at the summit,” the sign reads.
Next to the slogan, a woman with flowing brown locks and an auburn dress looks over the horizon. She has the poise of a Greek goddess — standing 15-feet tall without a trace of emotion to wrinkle her perfect white skin.
If this is life at the summit, it’s built on a haunted foundation.
A cold wind pushed at Rita Novalinga’s back when she took the stage for Elisapee’s memorial.
“The wind is with us, maybe it’ll help get our message out,” said Novalinga, who works on finding solutions to homelessness with the Inuit-owned Makivik Corporation. “Elisapee was Inuk like a lot of us. She was just as much a part of this city as all of you standing here. Like all of you, we breathe, we live, we love, we want happiness and everything a human being wants.”
Novalinga paused and pointed to the construction site where Elisapee died.
“A few years ago this was a children’s hospital. Now it’s four condominiums coming up and somebody perishes from the cold. I will not accept that. My family in the north won’t accept that. Up there we have homeless too, but we take each other in because we have no choice.”
After buying the old Children’s Hospital in 2016, Devimco Immobilier announced it would build a $400 million mixed-use complex to attract young professionals to the neighbourhood. But the project would include 176 social housing units. Now that the condos are almost complete, Devimco reneged on its promise. There won’t be any social housing units after all. Instead, the firm will pay the city a $6 million fine to keep the poor from living in its luxury towers.
Inuit have been woven into the fabric of west downtown for decades. Just a short walk from Cabot Square, on Tupper St., the Northern Module was a resource centre for parents with a kid in the Children’s Hospital. A few buildings over, the old YMCA and a nearby boarding house provided cheap accommodations for Inuit passing through the city.
The old hospital even had a bronze Inukshuk out front as a tribute to the Children’s ties to villages along Quebec’s Inuit coast.
But everything changed when the hospital moved further west in 2015 — developers bought up hundreds of millions in condemned buildings and turned them into something glamorous. Suddenly, the part of town avoided by polite society was flush with new money.
Since the new Children’s Hospital relocated, there wasn’t much of a point to keeping the Northern Module there either. It was moved near the airport and the old boarding house was condemned and sold.
There are still a few flophouses and drab apartment towers on de Maisonneuve Blvd., but they’re on their last legs. Cabot Square is one of the last vestiges of the old neighbourhood — the half-dozen blocks between Guy St. and Atwater Ave. used to be home to hundreds of people struggling to get by. Squatters would hole up in the abandoned Seville Theatre on Ste-Catherine St. or at the old Franciscan Church by the highway.
The theatre was razed and the church burned down 11 years ago. Now there are condo towers and a Starbucks in their place. Of course, the arrival of new homeowners has injected life and jobs into the neighbourhood. It’s also pushing the unhoused further into the margins.
Twice in the last four years, developers forced the neighbourhood’s only homeless day-centre to move. The church that housed the Open Door — one of Elisapee’s haunts — shut down in 2017 to make way for a luxury housing project. After a new shelter emerged in an old McDonald’s restaurant across from Cabot Square two years ago, the building’s owners sold it to cash in on the real estate boom.
Soon there won’t be any resources near the park where so many of the city’s Inuit congregate. Instead, they’ll have to walk under the Ville Marie Expressway, past the hidden encampment where dozens sleep every night and into the neighbouring borough for a warm meal and a few hours of respite.
Meanwhile, those who frequent Cabot Square say they’re facing more aggressive interventions from security at the Atwater Metro station where Elisapee used to sleep to get out of the cold. Chapman says Elisapee was kicked out of the station on the night she died.
“They don’t want us here, we’re bad for business,” said one Inuk woman, who did not want her name published for fear of reprisals. “This has always been a place we could come to find family members or ask about people who went missing. It was a place we could be left alone. Not anymore.”
***
The moment of silence came but, just as Kuata predicted, the city kept moving.
Commuters pulled their collars up as they scurried across the frigid park and into the metro as delivery trucks honked at jaywalkers outside the construction site.
This year began with a street funeral and it’s ending with another. Last winter Raphaël André froze to death outside a shelter on Parc Ave. His body was also found near a construction site. He was Indigenous too. And a lot of the people at his memorial were there on Nov. 22 to say goodbye to Elisapee.
A lot of the same things were said at his service. Why do Indigenous people account for less than 1 per cent of Montreal’s population but 10 per cent of those living on the street? Why do women like Elisapee keep dying in unspeakable poverty? What more has to happen for things to change?
André died, in part, because the shelter he frequented had to limit its services after a COVID-19 outbreak. In response, the provincial government added more beds to the city’s emergency shelters.
But that wasn’t enough. Hundreds still found themselves stranded outdoors every night — in alleys, tent cities under highways, and some have even set up in the forests near Angrignon Metro.
It was the doggedness of Indigenous women like Nakuset, Michèle Audette and Mary Goodleaf that may have saved more people from meeting the same fate as André. They cobbled together a warming tent, money for Indigenous outreach workers, food, and enough volunteers to keep the people at Cabot Square from dying in the cold.
Whether you were Indigenous or not, if you got through last winter at Cabot Square, it wasn’t the city or the province that bailed you out. It was these women.
The project has been so successful that it went from being just a three-week pilot project to a resource that’s been open seven days a week for 10 months. But with another winter at our door, the tent is facing its worst crisis yet.
“We’re running out of money,” said Nakuset, who runs the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. “If that happens, we’re screwed. Not just the Indigenous people on the street. Everyone.”
I don’t like to end these stories on such a bleak note, so here’s something that gives me hope.
When the federal government set up shop in Elisapee’s village all those decades ago, it was with the goal of assimilating and destroying the Inuit. When you take the language and customs of a people away, it’s only a matter of time before they disappear.
But the Inuit aren’t dead or anywhere near it. Two generations after the dog slaughter and federal day schools, Imak and Kuata are reclaiming some of what was taken from Elisapee.
Imak recently completed a one-year course at Nunavik Sivunitsavut — a downtown college that combines Quebec curriculum with Inuit teachings. It was at the college that she learned about Inuit tattoos — a spiritual tradition banned by missionaries. Each of the small markings poked into Imak’s face, from the lines on her lower lip to the dots that crown her head, are part of her story.
“We moved down here when I was two but I managed to keep my language,” Imak said. “I got back in touch with the cultural practices when I enrolled at Nunavik Sivunitsavut. It’s holistic and inclusive and it’s helping us reclaim something we should have never lost.”
Kuata is a circus performer who uses the acrobatic arts to tell stories from the north. His circus troupe, Tupiq ACT, is the first of its kind in Nunavik.
Here’s one more positive thing.
When Crainchuk died four years ago, maybe 15 people attended his service. It was, to be fair, a loving tribute to the man. But it also felt as though, outside of that old Anglican Church, he had never even existed.
Lately, it’s not just the victim’s street family that shows up to a street funeral but sympathetic neighbours, politically active youth and people who found out about the event on social media. As mourners marched from the park to the condo tower with wreaths and flowers in hand, an eldery man sang Gospel hymns.
Dozens stomped and clapped along until finally they arrived at the site of Elisapee’s final moments on this earth. They laid the flowers down under a photo of Elisapee.
The city never stopped, but the people who loved Elisapee won’t let it keep going down the same path.