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Fire forces Attawapiskat evacuation as problems plague native communities

CBC News speaks with Mike Grant, a disaster management volunteer with the Canadian Red Cross in Attawapiskat

About 70 residents from the Attawapiskat First Nation should be ensconced in Kapuskasing hotel rooms by now. The evacuees were flown nearly 400 kilometres south on Saturday, after fire destroyed the former mining-camp trailers that served as their temporary homes.

It's the latest crisis in the remote James Bay community in northern Ontario, which in 2011 became a national focal point in the debate over living conditions in Canada's aboriginal communities.

CBC News reported Attawapiskat leaders declared an emergency Friday after fire raced through a complex of inter-connected trailers that once belonged to De Beers, which operates a nearby diamond mine. The company donated them in 2009 as temporary housing after the community's sewer backup made many homes uninhabitable, exacerbating Attawapiskat's already serious overcrowding problem.

The fire was apparently started by an unattended lit candle being used after a severe winter storm with 90-km/h winds knocked out power to the community of 2,000 earlier in the week, the web site Netnewsledger.com reported.

"Fortunately nobody was hurt or killed because it would have been a real disaster if this happened when people were sleeping," said Charlie Angus, the New Democrat MP for the James Bay region.

"That's always been our fear in those trailers — a night fire."

[ Related: Who is to blame for the crisis in Attawapiskat? ]

Attawapiskat in 2011 became a symbol of the dysfunction in Canada's First Nations, propelling fresh debate over the quality of aboriginal governments and their relationships with Ottawa.

The community was facing a severe housing shortage that forced many residents to live in tents and shacks with no heat, power or indoor plumbing. The situation triggered a flurry of finger-pointing. The Conservative government said it had poured more than $90 million into Attawapiskat and Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused its leaders of mismanaging the band's money. The fight moved Attawapiskat's elected chief, Theresa Spence, into the spotlight. She defiantly rejected results of a 2012 audit that found no paper trail for millions of federal dollars.

Spence staged a six-week hunger strike at a camp within sight of Parliament Hill at the height of the Idle No More youth-led protest movement's demonstrations across Canada. Spence won re-election to another three-year term last summer.

CBC News reported in August that progress was being made to reduce the housing problem but dozens of people were still living in the old De Beers trailers. Angus said the complex of trailers, with rooms designed for single workers, was housing whole families in "holding cells."

"There are four toilets and a couple of showers and one kitchen facility for 80 to 90 people," he told CBC News.

[ Related: N.B. clash, UN investigator’s visit highlight Canada’s chronic inability to solve aboriginal problems ]

Unfortunately, Attawapiskat is just one First Nation community with a shameful housing problem. As CBC News noted in a 2011 feature story, thousands of the half-million people who live on Canada's 3,100 reserves are living in substandard mould-infested homes, often with no water, sewer or even electric power. Many must boil their drinking water.

Third-world living conditions in one of the richest countries on the planet, combined with lack of employment in the more remote communities, have fostered drug addiction, violence, sexual abuse and suicide.

And when a crisis hits, things get even worse. For example, many residents of Manitoba's St. Martin First Nation, flooded out of their homes in the spring of 2011, are still living in Winnipeg hotel rooms two-and-a-half years later.

The entire reserve was condemned but now there are disputes over the location of the new community, which some experts say is just as prone to high water as the old one, the Globe and Mail reported last summer.

Meanwhile, CBC News reports several houses at the old reserve, with belongings of evacuees still inside, have been destroyed by fire. RCMP suspect arson in at least four of the nine fires.

The isolated Innu community of Davis Inlet, NL, provoked a national outcry a decade ago over widespread gasoline sniffing by children, along with the familiar list of troubles that plague First Nations.

The federal government moved the entire community to a more accessible mainland location but the National Post reported last year that residents apparently were not able to leave their troubles behind. Gas sniffing persists and it may even be worse.

“We’ve picked up kids down here as young as age six or seven years old,” RCMP Sgt. Faron Harnum told the Post. “Before it was older teens and young adults, which is still unacceptable — but a little easier to take than little kids."

Will Canadian politicians and First Nations leaders ever be able to set aside their bitterness and cynicism long enough to really resolve this country's national disgrace?