Blackstock – leap or shuffle

There’s this calling in the colonial context that First Nations should be patient with the government as they remedy these human rights violations, particularly for children. I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree that patience is a virtue in this situation. Children only get one childhood and particularly an early childhood. During some of their most important years in their development. They’re going to affect them throughout their life course and indeed into the next generation. They can’t wait five, six years, a decade, 20 years for the government to get their act together. So, when it comes to remedying inequalities for children, I think you need to do it in a leap and not in a shuffle. Not one year at a time, not one budget at a time, it’s something that needs to be done right now.   

In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that Canada was consciously racially discriminating against little children, First Nations children. And that that racial discrimination had the effect of incentivizing their placement into child welfare care because they were denied the basic services that all other Canadian children take for granted. And what does that mean, placed in Child Welfare care look like? Well, we had a spreadsheet filed as evidence at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that was a federal government document. This document talked about the experience the First Nations children in child welfare care in in a way that children themselves would think of it. Which is how many sleeps until I see my mom? When we added up the number of sleeps that First Nations children on reserve, only in Canada had spent in foster care between 1989 and 2012, it was over 66 million nights or 187,000 years of childhood. That’s the price of waiting and being patient with first steps by the government.