Indigenous children are, to put it mildly, overrepresented in Canada’s child-welfare system. So parents and activists are going to great lengths to protect their kids.
Jen, who wants to remain anonymous, is a pregnant mother who is not reporting the baby to the authorities for fear of having the child taken away. Photo by John Woods
What impact her life changes might have on skeptical child-welfare officials, she doesn’t know. But this time, she’s not taking chances. When she gives birth shortly, she will have the help of a midwife, who will eventually register the birth of the baby. But by that point, she believes, it’s unlikely child-welfare authorities would find out about it—unless someone blows the whistle on her. And if she does receive a knock on the door, she figures she won’t be as vulnerable.
Their demands, and the sheer weight of the statistics, have thrust government into arguably its greatest challenge since it came to grips with the residential school disaster.
So many children died in residential schools that by the 1920s the Canadian government stopped recording the deaths and began using unmarked graves. “It suffices for us to know, however, that of a total 1,537 pupils reported upon nearly 25 per cent are dead, of one school with an absolutely accurate statement, 69 per cent of ex-pupils are dead, and that everywhere the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis,” Bryce found.
Jen is Anishinaabe from the Ebb and Flow First Nation, a community about 240 km northwest of Winnipeg, but has spent most of her life in the province’s largest city. She has seven children, but lost custody of four to her former partner. The daughter she lost to foster care, now 17, struggles with drug addiction; Jen’s oldest daughter, 22, has her own family. Yet people who meet Jen are struck by how articulate she is.
A spokesperson for CFS cited a range of concerns within a family that might result in infant apprehensions, including addiction, homelessness, a history of neglect, abuse and “inability to parent.” Immediate or extended family are given priority as caregivers, the official said, but the statistical picture is nevertheless harrowing. Provincewide in 2017, 354 newborns were taken into care before they were 31 days old, and 86 per cent were Indigenous.
The tribunal’s findings were profound, pointing to a host of social factors that play a role in Indigenous children being placed in foster care, from poor housing to a lack of clean drinking water in First Nations communities. Ottawa chronically underfunds the agencies it charges with providing child-welfare services to First Nations children, the tribunal found, creating “incentive to bring children into care.
One of those grannies was Candy, who has spent seven years fighting to get four of her grandsons back . As a survivor of the Sixties Scoop, Candy shares her grandsons’ scars from foster care, noting the boys were all five or younger when apprehended.—his non-Indigenous foster parents would mock him by tying it in pigtails. She says they were abused with sticks and not allowed to enter the living room because they were “dirty Indians.
But this is a crisis with many systemic factors. “The funding for Child and Family Services doesn’t directly address the drivers for overrepresentation, and nor should it,” says Tara Petti, the CEO of the Southern Authority, one of the four umbrella networks that oversees front-line CFS agencies working in Indigenous communities. The disproportionate numbers, Petti says, has “a lot to do with the socioeconomic conditions created through poverty and through our history.
Lee was two years shy of 18 and had run away from foster care in Winnipeg. He and his two younger brothers, who are still in care, were taken from their mother 10 years ago. West Region Child and Family Services supported Lee in Serpent River, Tamara says, and last September he finally aged out of the system.
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