A sign of an orange shirt is attached to a fence during a Truth and Reconciliation walk in Saskatoon in September, 2022. Orange Shirt Day marks an opportunity to reflect on what happened to Indigenous children forced to attend Indian Residential Schools and Indian Day Schools.Heywood Yu/The Canadian Press
How many more Indigenous children have to die because they are living away from their families, languages and cultures, before we collectively act?
How many more will take their own lives, or be denied medical care, or be neglected and even abused by those appointed to take care of them, before courts, governments, federal agencies and First Nations leaders stop arguing over what is best for them and get to work?
Today is the fifth National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, also known as Orange Shirt Day in Canada. It’s a day to reflect on what happened to Indigenous children forced to attend Indian Residential Schools and Indian Day Schools, run by Christian churches and funded by the federal government. Thousands of children did not come home from these so-called schools, the last of which only closed down in 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 report found that 3,200 children died at these institutions – a number that has only increased as communities investigate their missing children.
Then, starting in the 1960s, Indigenous children have been taken from their families and placed in foster care, far from everything they know. In this way, state welfare agencies have become an extension of the residential school system.
What to know about National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and Orange Shirt Day
This Orange Shirt Day, we honour the children we have lost to residential schools and those who have survived. But we must also place special attention on the Indigenous children still with us, and who are in desperate need of family and community protection right now. According to Statistics Canada, there was an increase in the existing overrepresentation of Indigenous children among foster kids in private households from 2011 to 2021, from 47.8 per cent to 53.7 per cent. Just over half of First Nations (50.6 per cent) and Inuit children (51.6 per cent), as well as 63.4 per cent of Métis kids in care, lived with non-Indigenous foster parents in 2021.
A recent $8.5-billion agreement with Ottawa, negotiated by the Chiefs of Ontario and Nishnawbe Aski Nation, could change things. The deal, which came after a nearly $48-billion child welfare reform package fell apart when it came to a vote at the Assembly of First Nations, would allow services to be provided in First Nations communities directly, preventing children from going into foster care in the first place or reuniting them with their families.
Yet, that $8.5-billion could be in jeopardy due to opposition from parties, including the First Nation Child and Family Caring Society, which was part of the original human-rights tribunal case against Canada’s child-welfare system. That is a shame.
“[The deal] puts First Nations in the driver’s seat, in terms of who will provide needed prevention services to First Nations kids to keep them out of care,” said Maggie Wente, the lead lawyer for the Chiefs of Ontario in the negotiations. “It is in jeopardy because some parties to the litigation are waiting for perfection, as opposed to taking yes for an answer.”
People attend the second annual Orange Shirt Day Survivors Walk and Powwow on National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg in September, 2022.JOHN WOODS/The Canadian Press
Our children can’t wait for change any longer.
It has been sickening to read the reports about the two Indigenous brothers who were placed in foster care, before the Children’s Aid Society moved them into the Burlington, Ont., home of Brandy Cooney and Becky Hamber. The couple was supposed to treat these little ones with care and love, because that is what you are supposed to do for children. But that is not what is alleged to have happened. The oldest boy, who was 12, died in 2022; when he was found by emergency crews, prosecutors say, he was locked in a small basement bedroom, and he was wet and emaciated, weighing as much as a six-year-old. The two women are now on trial on charges of first-degree murder, as well as forcible confinement, assault with a weapon and failing to provide the necessities of life in relation to the younger brother.
This is far from the first report of alleged abuse stemming from Canada’s child welfare system. How does this keep happening?
Since the dawn of the Canadian state, Canada has treated Indigenous people like children, as if we are not able to make decisions for ourselves – not in education, in health care or how we care for our children. Only recently has this started to change, including with the passage Bill C-92 in 2019, which recognizes the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to exercise jurisdiction over child and family services.
In Ontario, that $8.5-billion agreement must pass. Then, leaders in our country and our communities have to fix what’s broken.
Indigenous families and communities need to be empowered to protect their own children, and to be in charge of what change looks like – how services should be provided and by whom. The fighting – even among our own leaders – must end. Our children deserve better.