The stunning number of First Nations kids in foster care is a new touchstone for Indigenous activists—and for rebel parents. Kyle Edwards, writer of this piece, has been nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists award.
The baggy sweater from the University of Manitoba makes Jen’s baby bump unnoticeable at first glance—and that might be the point. She’s eight months pregnant and weeks from now, in the comfort of her home in Winnipeg’s North End, she plans to give birth in secret. Doing so will avoid the sort of alert her last birth triggered, she hopes, and help ensure that her next baby is one Indigenous child who doesn’t disappear into foster care.
What impact her life changes might have on skeptical child-welfare officials, she doesn’t know. But this time, she’s not taking chances. When she gives birth shortly, she will have the help of a midwife, who will eventually register the birth of the baby. But by that point, she believes, it’s unlikely child-welfare authorities would find out about it—unless someone blows the whistle on her. And if she does receive a knock on the door, she figures she won’t be as vulnerable.
Their demands, and the sheer weight of the statistics, have thrust government into arguably its greatest challenge since it came to grips with the residential school disaster.
That understanding of history wasn’t far from Jen’s mind two years ago, when she asked a relative to seek guardianship of her daughter should the child be apprehended. She was aware that she’s had an open CFS file since 2006 and wanted no surprises. Jen says there have been times when she thought her file was closed, only to discover the opposite; she’d get phone calls from the agency telling her it would remain open a little longer. Maybe, she thought, the system would respect her wishes.
Jen met her current husband in 2014—“He swept me off my feet,” she recalls—and soon they’ll give their two-year-old a baby brother. Her husband, who features in his nation’s sun dances marking summer solstice, has given her a spiritual and cultural connection, an aspect of her life she’s only now discovering.
Mary Burton and Michael Champagne, the founders of Fearless R2W are photographed at Turtle Island Recreation Centre in Winnipeg Friday, December 8, 2017.In 2007, the Assembly of First Nations and Blackstock’s organization filed a human rights complaint against the federal government for underfunding child-welfare services for Indigenous children.
One of those grannies was Candy, who has spent seven years fighting to get four of her grandsons back . As a survivor of the Sixties Scoop, Candy shares her grandsons’ scars from foster care, noting the boys were all five or younger when apprehended. Still, Burton and Champagne say the fear in their neighbourhood can be paralyzing. And anyone who has dealt with or worked for CFS in Manitoba, has, at some point, uttered the phrase, “There’s no system in Canada like Manitoba’s.” Its CFS division oversees a byzantine web of agencies under the auspices of four authorities guided by provincial legislation. The province and Ottawa share funding responsibility for Indigenous foster care.
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