Community-based child welfare for aboriginal children: supporting resilience through structural change.

• Author: Blackstock, Cindy

Abstract

Available data suggest that First Nations children, youth and families in Canada continue to experience multiple and disproportionate human rights violations stemming from colonialism. First Nations child and family service agencies began developing in the 1970s to affirm community-based systems of care and stem the tide of children being placed in non-Aboriginal homes. Although these agencies have demonstrated significant success there are key barriers which limit their efficacy, such as the imposition of Euro-western legislation, inadequate access to financial resources and the continued marginalisation of indigenous knowledge within Euro-western social work. This paper describes the contemporary lived experience of First Nations children, youth and families in Canada. It identifies the conditions that support First Nations child and family service agencies to implement community based responses to child maltreatment that honour the strength, wisdom and resiliency embedded in indigenous ways of knowing and being. Future directions, such as mobilising a movement of reconciliation in child welfare as a means of dislocating Euro-western social work values, policies and practice that aggress indigenous ways of caring for children, will be discussed.

INTRODUCTION

"Help Me" wrote Richard Cardinal in his own blood while this 17-year-old Metis boy committed suicide after spending 13 years moving in and out of 28 foster homes, group homes and shelters in Alberta (Obomsawin 1986). Although Cardinal's death drew attention to the significant over-representation of Aboriginal children in state care, 20 years later the problem has become far more serious, with Aboriginal children representing approximately 40% of the 76,000 children and youth placed in out-of-home care in Canada (Farris-Manning and Zandstra 2003). Although there is a lack of information on placement trends for Aboriginal children off-reserve due to variations in provincial data collection mechanisms, Department of Indian Affairs year-end data suggest that the numbers of status Indian children living on-reserve increased 71.5% nationally between 1995 and 2001 (McKenzie 2002).

Overall, we estimate that there may be as many as three times more Aboriginal children in the care of child welfare authorities now than were placed in residential schools at the height of those operations in the 1940s (Blackstock 2003). This is particularly concerning because information suggests that many Aboriginal children resident off-reserve continue to be placed in non-Aboriginal homes (British Columbia Children's Commission 1998). Moreover, as the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child notes in its concluding remarks to Canada in 2003, Aboriginal children continue to face significant and disproportionate levels of risks in other areas such as education, youth justice, health and poverty. In keeping with the Committee's concern for Aboriginal children, over one-third of the concluding observations for Canada make specific mention of Aboriginal children (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child 2003a).

The reasons for the disproportionate removal of Aboriginal children from their families are poorly understood. Furthermore, much of the existing resiliency literature places the child as the primary locus of analysis as opposed to exploring the implications of cultural, community and family resiliency as central factors. This paper draws from a number of sources to examine some of these mechanisms. We begin by making the point that diverse Aboriginal nations have demonstrated resiliency for thousands of years prior to the arrival of colonial powers, and certainly by surviving through the myriad of traumas brought on by colonisation. We further discuss how residential schools, out-of-community foster and adoptive placements have historically shaped Aboriginal communities' experience of, and relationship with, child welfare services. We then present a profile of the contemporary experience of Aboriginal children and families who come into contact with the child welfare system through an analysis of data from the Canadian Incidence Study on Reported Child Abuse and Neglect.

We have structured our argument to demonstrate that the risks posed to Aboriginal children were often the result of structural decisions made by those outside of their communities. In the process, generations of children suffered severe and long-lasting threats to their wellbeing, both psychologically and physically. Consistent with Aboriginal holistic approaches and structural social work theory, we believe that child, family and community resiliency are interdependent, and thus culturally based family interventions must be coupled with culturally based community development approaches to redress structural challenges to the safety of Aboriginal children. Finally, we discuss how culturally based community development frameworks could better address some of the current structural barriers, including inequitable service access and the implications of systemic causal factors on child maltreatment assessment and response.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Carbon-dated evidence suggests that Aboriginal peoples have lived on these lands now known as Canada for over 10,500 years (Muckle 1998), raising over 525 generations of children before child welfare and social work were even founded. Their emotional, physical, cognitive and spiritual ways of knowing and being guided the resilient development of hundreds of generations of Aboriginal children who were healthy, proud, contributing members of society, living safely at home in their communities. Yet consistent with patterns of colonialism, today this knowledge is too often viewed as ancillary to the "legitimate" knowledge of the child welfare system and to child resiliency. As the history below describes, Euro-western-based social work in Canada frequently embodies an unearned arrogance expressed through statute, funding regimes and social policies that directly regulate and shape the way in which Aboriginal peoples (and Aboriginal child welfare agencies) can care for their children.

The first colonists arrived on the eastern shorelines of what is now Canada in the 1490s. Reports indicate that initial contact between Aboriginal peoples and the colonial powers was mutually beneficial as the relationship was centred on trade activity but this rapidly changed as colonial aspirations moved to settlement, resource extraction and the elimination of Indian peoples from the land (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples [RCAP] 1996). The impacts of colonisation on Aboriginal peoples cannot be underestimated. RCAP estimates that the population of Aboriginal peoples in Canada decreased 80% from the time of contact to confederation due to intentional and unintentional introduction of disease, bounty hunting and starvation. Some peoples such as the Beothuck in Newfoundland became extinct. This prolific loss of life was coupled with forced displacement from traditional lands and the assignment of Aboriginal peoples to small reserves, where maintenance of traditional sustenance was often not possible. The result was an erosion of communal cultural knowledge and ways of life that had sustained generations of Aboriginal children and the introduction of multi-generational grief and trauma and displacement.

Beginning in the 1800s, the Government of Canada (aided by the Christian churches) strengthened its assimilation efforts through the operation of residential schools for Indian children (Milloy 1999). The primary objective of these schools was to eliminate any vestige of Aboriginality, replacing it with a Euro-western culture, knowledge and spirituality. As Indian parents would seldom voluntarily send their children to these often-distant schools, the Government of Canada amended the Indian Act to force Indian parents to send their child(ren) aged 5-15 years to the schools. The penalty for failing to comply was incarceration and fines that often could not be paid because Aboriginal peoples were typically living in abject poverty.

The conditions at the schools were abysmal because they were built of the cheapest possible materials, run by untrained staff, and often overcrowded due to government financial inducements to increase enrolment. Sexual and physical abuses were prevalent, as were preventable deaths from disease (Milloy 1999). These conditions were known to the Government of Canada as early as the 1890s (RCAP 1996, Milloy 1999). In fact, Dr P.H. Bryce, Chief Medical Health Officer for the Government of Canada, found in 1907 that the death rate at the schools from preventable disease was a shocking 24% per annum, increasing to 46% if the children were tracked over a three-year period (RCAP 1996.) Bryce's report was released to the government and published in the media, yet the only response the government had to the report was to eliminate the Chief Medical Health Officer position (RCAP 1996). The schools continued to operate under these conditions for decades, with many schools opening cemeteries on school grounds to bury the children (Milloy 1999).

Generations of children attended these schools. Separated from family, cultural and traditional teachings, the impact was devastating at the personal, kinship and community levels (Fornier and Crey 1997). Children in residential schools did not experience healthy parental role modelling and as a result had a diminished capacity as adults to care for their children (Bennett and Blackstock 2002). Although the schools began closing in the 1940s, it took over 50 years for the last residential school to close in Saskatchewan in 1996, making it a very recent experience for many Aboriginal people (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada [INAC] 2003a).

ABORIGINAL CHILD WELFARE IN CANADA

The division of constitutional powers in Canada is such that the provincial and territorial governments carry the legal mandate...