Assembly of First Nations leader - "Aboriginal children deserve the same rights as all others"
Aboriginal children deserve the same rights as all others
Phil Fontaine, National Post - April 15, 2008
Jonathan Kay's column "A toddler martyred to Native identity" (April 1 - see below) ignores a number of facts and contains errors. With proper research, Kay would have found the truth about why the tragedies he cited have occurred.
First Nations children are being exposed to risk because the federal government severely underfunds First Nations child and family service agencies. According to the 2005 Wen: de Reports, First Nations child welfare agencies receive 22% less funding per child than agencies serving other children. As Billie Schibler pointed out in her 2006 report, Strengthen the Commitment, underfunding has overstressed the system, leading to a lack of prevention mechanisms and, in many instances, overburdened workers. This is why, in 2006, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission urging the government to do the right thing. It is our position that all children must be equally valued, their systems equally funded with equal resources to protect them.
The true reason a large number of First Nations children are in care is neglect due to poverty. The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (2003), the Wen:de Report (2005) and the 2006 Schibler Report all point to widespread poverty deficits in physical and social infrastructure as a key factor.
A second reason First Nations children are often put into care is because they cannot otherwise access much-needed medical care due to provincial-federal disputes over who should pay their medical bills. The AFN's position is that all children should have timely access to medical care, which is why the AFN has urged governments to adopt Jordan's Principle, a policy that says governments should ensure a child's medical needs are met first, and argue over who pays the bills later.
Many Canadians see meeting basic needs of children such as safe drinking water and access to medical care as a right, regardless of their culture or where they live. Yet, Kay argues against the funding that enables these types of services on reserve, calling it "subsidizing misery." Does Kay believe First Nations children are less deserving than others?
Finally, the right of a child to be raised in their own culture is not "politically correct," it is an urgent need, recognized by the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Canada is a signatory. Assimilation is indeed a "wrenching and painful process," but as survivors of residential schools and the 1960s Scoop -- which saw thousands of First Nations children removed from their culture -- tell us "life" does not "go on."
A 1995 study, Native Canadian Children in American Adoptive Homes, found that more than half of 1,000 scooped aboriginal children experienced identity problems as adults and one-third had lost touch with their adoptive parents. I invite Kay and all your readers to watch the 1986 NFB film about Richard Cardinal, a Metis adolescent who committed suicide after being removed from his family and placed in the care of foster parents and group homes.
The answer is not to take a step backwards and reinstate these cruel policies. I would remind Kay that the 1985 report by Justice Edwin C. Kimelman that led to the creation of First Nations child and family services five years ago, was scathing on how aboriginal children were being treated by the mainstream system, calling it "cultural genocide."
First Nations are not alone in understanding the mental health of children is linked to cultural identity which is why the Jewish community has been inspired to establish Jewish Child and Family Services in Winnipeg and Toronto.
It should be the duty of all journalists to separate stereotypes from facts, and avoid using unnamed sources as evidence. Whether Kay ignored the body of evidence I have cited by accident, in a rush to meet his deadline or because evidence does not support his personal views, only his conscience can decide. But he does so to the detriment of hundreds of First Nation children who need equal opportunity and protection.
I assure you that the AFN, through its regional counterparts and our Leadership Action Plan on First Nations Child Welfare, will continue to advocate for enhanced provisions so that the health and well-being of fewer or no children is jeopardized while they are in care. - Phil Fontaine is National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, www.afn.ca
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A toddler martyred to native identity
Jonathan Kay, National Post - April 01, 2008
It's heartbreaking to study the details of Gage Guimond's last days. But it's something Canadians need to do. The Winnipeg toddler's death is not just an excruciating human tragedy. It is also a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with native policy in this country.
Gage was born in July, 2005, and was abandoned by his mother before his first birthday. A foster family was found--by all accounts, a safe home run by competent parents. But child services workers instead turned the boy over to his paternal grandmother, a former criminal and suspected alcoholic.
According to documents recently obtained by the Winnipeg Free Press, child service workers visiting the grandmother's home determined that she'd left the asthmatic child with "an older gentleman and someone sleeping on the floor." During another child services visit three months later, the lice-ridden child was found amidst the "aftermath of a drinking party," featuring "people sleeping in the living room and other areas in the home." The actual care of the boy apparently had been outsourced to a 15-year-old uncle.
Gage then was given over to his great-aunt, a former car thief who'd been imprisoned for assault. A month later, the day after his second birthday, he died-- allegedly after falling down the stairs. (Child services workers subsequently rescued Gage's sister from the same home, covered in bruises.)
Why had Gage been removed from his foster family, and placed with such dubious relatives in the first place? Readers who know anything about the intersection of identity politics and child services policy probably already suspect the answer.
Aboriginals represent 14% of Manitoba's population, but account for about 70% of the province's child welfare caseload. (On some reserves, more than 40% of children are in foster care.) In 2003, the province devolved child welfare services to aboriginal agencies -- the idea being that First Nations case workers better understand the unique needs of aboriginal children, and can be counted on to protect native culture by prioritizing family reunification.
Ultimately, those politically correct intentions paved the way to Gage's grave.
Gage's mother was a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation, an Anishinaabe First Nation located east of Lake Winnipeg. Sagkeeng Child and Family Services -- the native-run child services unit charged with Gage's case -- apparently didn't want the child raised outside the boy's clan. "The family is very important in native culture," a well-informed source told me. "Reunification can become an obsession." (The foster family was Metis. "As far as the Sagkeeng are concerned, they might as well be white," my source told me.)
I have not had the opportunity to review the primary documents reported on by the Free Press. But the available evidence suggests Gage was put into a dangerous environment -- despite appalling evidence of alcohol abuse and squalor -- simply because it was deemed (as the jargon goes) "culturally appropriate." Effectively, Gage Guimond was martyred for the cause of native identity.
This isn't an isolated case. Last year, Mia Rabson and Lindor Reynolds of the Free Press spent three months investigating Manitoba's devolved child-welfare system. In many cases, they found poorly trained caseworkers shuttling a skyrocketing number of children from broken home to broken home. Guimond's death is just the latest tragedy. In 2006, police found the remains of five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair, a former foster child who'd gone "missing" after being returned to the custody of her birth mother on Manitoba's Fisher River First Nation reserve. In 2005, a 14-year-old native prostitute hanged herself after being moved over 60 times among foster homes, and sent 17 times to her addict parents.
Last week, in response to the Gage Guimond scandal, Manitoba's NDP government introduced legislation that would ensure a child's "safety" -- not just his "best interests," as the law currently holds -- is explicitly entrenched as the goal of child-placement decisions. I hope the bill passes. But I also hope the issue spurs a wider dialogue about native policy. In his senseless suffering and death, Gage personifies Kacheshewan, Peguis, Natuashish, Yellow Quill and a hundred other dangerous and dysfunctional native communities whose populations are languishing under similar pretexts. White society tolerates their misery -- subsidizes it, even, by pouring billions into their reserves --because the alternative, assimilation, is deemed too offensive a concept to contemplate.
But would it have been so bad if Gage Guimond had been "assimilated"? Is a healthy, happy future something to be disdained simply because it's provided to a child by a family with the wrong-coloured skin?
Assimilation can be a wrenching, painful process. But at least life goes on. Perhaps that is the modest goal we should be working toward -- protecting life itself-- rather than grander sociological projects. However precious culture may be to natives, it cannot possibly be as precious as a two-year-old's beating heart.