Bennett – impacts on Indigenous families - part 1

There were something like 22 First Nations child welfare agencies that partook in collecting data on looking at why First Nations children come to the attention of child welfare. And certainly what came out of all of that research was recognition of Indigenous people have always known all along about why we are over-represented in the child welfare system. And certainly what came out of that research is recognition that the primary reason that First Nations children come into care is because of neglect. 

And what is neglect? What you unpack it, it is things like poverty, it is things like housing issues – both on-reserve and off-reserve, as well as substance abuse amongst some of our parents. And of course that substance abuse is connected to historical factors around residential schools, the ‘60s Scoop, and just exactly involvement with child welfare systems in our country. 

And also too when you look at the substance abuse of our parents, they’re coping with things that they have no power over. And certainly, for many of our parents there is no power over the experience of poverty, right? And so it just becomes one of those things where they are not appropriately coping with the life that they find themselves in. 

And certainly the colonial gaze has been on our First Nations families and we’re always being monitored. And consequently people have no problem reporting on our families.  And we already know that child welfare is a pipeline to poverty, to homelessness, to prison systems, and again to the system being involved in their lives and the lives of their children subsequently, to their own experiences. So we see history being repeated with generation after generation of our kids who’ve been through the system.    

Colonization and continuing colonization, colonialism, it still impacts our families. And it’s forgetting that the things that have been imposed against Indigenous people come from an ideology that’s based on violence. And certainly settlers’ societies really – and the ideology that they’ve brought to this country has really been detrimental to our communities. 

Residential schools certainly has fractured our ability to maintain the family and community units. And so it’s recognition that colonization is a big factor still that impact our Indigenous families. And part of that is recognizing too is that Canada became a country based on treaties, and treaties are about relationships. And those relationships have not been honoured. The treaties last for as long as the river flows and the sun shines, and we certainly know that’s still the case today, although with some of the pipelines and whatnot there is threats to our waters and our water systems. 

So it’s recognizing that there are historical relationships that are still in existence today and they need to continue to be honoured. We are on Treaty 1 territory and you know our ancestors sacrificed so that we would share with the people who were displaced or looking for opportunities in the New World. And we were generous in showing those settlers how to live on our land. And we agreed that we would share. And that’s what the treaties are based on. 

But unfortunately the way we have been treated is not based on that concept of sharing. Instead we’ve been met with you know violence, and certainly many of our kids who were taken and abducted from their families and put in residential schools were very traumatic, and also recognizing too that our families are structured very differently from settlers’ societies.