It should be no surprise that homelessness is a major problem. According to Newstoryhomes.org, 2% of the world’s population is homeless. Two percent may not sound like much, but when you do the math, it’s nearly 154 million people. Around 14% of the population of Utah is unsheltered. That’s over 2,000 in Salt Lake County alone, and over 3,000 people state-wide.
The Cougar Claw had the opportunity to speak with Carl Moore, one of Utah’s leading human rights advocates. Moore, a member of the Hopi and Chemehuevi nations, shares his position on this issue. “A lot of people have this misconception that homeless people are drug addicts or alcoholics, they want to be homeless, they want this lifestyle, they’re lazy, things like that.” Moore works to help people understand the reality of homelessness so that they might rethink the stigmas that society has pushed upon unsheltered people.
“People come into homelessness because of something traumatic that happened. I know a lot of younger people have been kicked out of their homes because they come out as LGBTQ. That’s a traumatic event. Their parents disowned them, so they ended up on the streets. Sometimes people have work-related accidents, like they fall off a ladder, hit their head, and can’t work anymore. Then they can’t get another job because of their disability. Sometimes people have become homeless because their landlord kicked them out for some reason. It could be a dumb reason, but they’re still homeless because they couldn’t get their deposit back. Sometimes people try to self-medicate because of traumatic events, and it creates a landslide because now they’re addicted to alcohol. But it’s important to understand that another event pushed them into that.
“The Lakota people have a saying, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, which means ‘all my relations’. If you look at the medicine wheel, it has four colors on it. The four people groups, the four directions. We’re all related. We, as human beings, are related to the plants, the animals, the lake, and the trees. Out of that comes a responsibility to take care of each other. That’s how I got into homeless advocacy.”
Moore explains that unsheltered people are more discriminated against than any other group, which adds to the already countless dangers of being homeless. “We have what we would see as marginalized groups; black, LGBTQ, indigenous, undocumented immigrants, Islam, and women to name a few. All of these groups are marginalized, but when you take any one of those groups and you put them in a homeless situation, it adds another category of marginalization.”
Along with the dangers brought by factors such as weather and starving, unsheltered people have to worry about camping abatements organized by the city. An abatement is when homeless people are made to vacate a site and remove their personal property in order for the city to clean the area. Unfortunately, these abatements often dispose of unsheltered peoples’ supplies, making it hard for them to survive.
Moore is the co-founder of two Indigenous-led nonprofits, Pandos, and SLC Air Protectors. “My number one passion is educating people and alleviating stereotypes about indigenous people and now about the unsheltered population. When I do interviews with unsheltered people, I like for them to tell their stories so that other people can sympathize or empathize with them and what they’re going through. Any one of us could be homeless. A lot of us are really close to a traumatic event or a cataclysmic event that would throw us into that situation.” Along with being a co-founder of these organizations, Moore works with Our Unsheltered Relatives (OUR’s) every Saturday to feed unsheltered people, as well as with the 2nd & 2nd Coalition to put on movie nights where unsheltered people can feel loved and respected.
Moore reminds us all to have empathy for those who are struggling, and to care for everyone as if they were your own family. After all, anyone of us can fall into a situation where we rely on someone else’s compassion.
