Reporters, humanitarian workers and government officials descended on the small aboriginal community of Attawapiskat this week in response to the northern Ontario reserve's deepening housing crisis.

It was not the first time that journalists had turned their cameras on Attawapiskat. Earlier this year, CBC was in the community filming a special documentary series called 8th Fire: Aboriginal Peoples, Canada and the Way Forward.

The four-part series begins airing on CBC television and Radio-Canada on Jan. 12, 2012, and is hosted by Wab Kinew, a CBC journalist originally from Onigaming First Nation, an Ojibwa community in northern Ontario. It will examine Canada's fraught 500-year-old relationship with indigenous peoples and introduce viewers to a new generation of aboriginal Canadians who are reclaiming their culture and their confidence.

Shannen's dream

The video above is from the third episode in the series, titled Whose Land is it Anyway? It was filmed in June 2011, directed by Michel Philibert, and produced by Marie-Claude Pednault and Claude Gagnon.

Shannen Koostachin at the National Day of Action on Parliament Hill in May 2008, a rally calling for better schools for First Nations children. The Attawapiskat teenager organized children in her community to lobby for a school to replace the portable classrooms she grew up attending. She was killed in a car accident in 2010. Courtesy of 8th FireIt explores some of Attawapiskat's past and current struggles and tells the tragic story of Shannen Koostachin, a teenage girl from Attawapiskat who led a highly publicized fight to try to convince the federal government to build a new school in her community. The new school was to replace the grade school that had closed because the site it stood on was contaminated.

Shannen was killed in a car accident in 2010 at the age of 15, and Attawapiskat children are still attending elementary school in prefabricated, portable classrooms.

As part of the 8th Fire project, CBC and Radio-Canada will launch a website of the same name in mid-December that will present dozens of original videos by aboriginal filmmakers from across the country. You can preview one of the videos about the northern Ontario First Nations community of Pikangikum here and visit the project's Facebook page.

Attawapiskat is a Cree community a few kilometres upstream from James Bay on the Attawapiskat River, 500 kilometres northeast of Timmins, Ont. It has had a chronic housing shortage for years, one that was exacerbated two years ago when several families had to move out of their homes because of a sewage backup. Existing housing stock on the reserve is overcrowded and in poor condition; several houses have been condemned and had to be vacated.

Because the band council that runs the reserve cannot afford to build enough new housing, and does not currently have enough land on the reserve to build the subdivision it says it would take to accommodate everyone on its waiting list, Attawapiskat residents have resorted to makeshift solutions. More than 100 people have been living in wood-frame tents, repurposed garages and sheds, and two large trailers that were donated by the De Beers mining company, which operates a diamond mine 90 kilometres west of Attawapiskat, to temporarily house the people displaced by the sewage backup.

Below are some facts of interest about the community and its current housing shortage.