Bennett – growing up in ‘care’

I grew up in care myself. So my mother died of Leukemia and I grew up in care from the time I was 12 until I was 18. So that was a time period of segregation from family members, and so a really crucial time in a young person’s life because you’re just beginning to recognize you have agency, that you have your own ability to think for yourself and what your future’s going to look like. And your independence, how do you exercise that, right? 

So I grew up in care, you know, separated from my community, my family, my culture, my language. And so that was a really important thing for me to consider when I was working on my Ph.D. Because most kids who are in care, especially youth, we don’t ask for their opinion, we don’t ask them what they want to see for their future because they’re always being told what to do. 

So when I embarked on my Ph.D. I wanted to look at the experience of youth who are in care, and now we have youth who are on extensions of care, and I wanted to look at their experience going through the child welfare system. Why did they come into care? What do they understand about why they came into care? I also wanted to know what their challenges were, but I also wanted to know what are some of the opportunities that they experienced because they were in care. And then I also asked them how have you maintained your connection to family, to community, to culture, to your language and to land? Because that’s really important to understand how all of those things operate for our kids in care. 

And also my last question I asked them is how do you know you’ve reached adulthood? Because our kids are always being told when they’re an adult. We have that magic number, 18. When you reach the age of 18 that’s when you become an adult. But for many kids, not just Indigenous kids, in the whole wide world there is a change, right? A lot of young people do not see themselves as adults when they turn 18. And it was the same for the young people who participated in my research. I did digital storytelling with them. I wanted to use a medium that most of our kids are attracted to this day, right, technology, and so I wanted to teach them how to develop a video that-where they tell their own stories. 

Like, I always do narrative inquiry; that’s my go-to methodology. But I can’t tell their stories as effectively as they can tell their stories. So that was the approach that I took. But for many of the young people who were involved in my studies, they come from First Nations communities. They know that. They have never stepped a foot in their communities. 

And we know many of these reserves are really arbitrary creations. They’re not really the homelands of their families. These are boundaries that have been created by the Federal Government. But for many of these kids they have never stepped foot in their community; they’ve never been to their community. They’ve lived their entire lives in the city so they’re disconnected from the culture, they’re disconnected from the land. 

And the thing is we know now too that culture is life. If you want to see some movement happen for young Indigenous people, you get them involved in their culture. And that’s where you’re going to see some phenomenal changes in the way that they view themselves and the way they view the world around them. And if they have a strong sense of identity and that being Indigenous is okay, you can see them just basically fly. You know like, it’s amazing the change that will happen for them. 

But we don’t have that happen for our young kids in care. They unfortunately are disconnected from their families, from people in their communities, from the land. They don’t even speak their language. And again, like I said, they have never been to their traditional lands.