Truth and Reconciliation???

It’s Truth and Reconciliation Day. A day where we recognize the children who were taken from their parents and homes, and sent to residential schools where many never returned from.

A day where we acknowledge that the government committed cultural genocide, where it’s mainly government employees who get a day off of work with pay and children are still being stolen daily, by Indigenous child welfare societies. Strange…

Bill C-92 was passed to law, which is now An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families. This is because Indigenous children are still being taken. Yes, granted many with cause, also many who could remain with their families with some sort of supports in place. Right now, let’s talk about the ones who can’t go home.

Child welfare societies are supposed to operate under the pretense that they are there to support the healthy well being of children and families. Indigenous children already have the history of the damage done to families members in the past which keeps cycling forward perpetually, because if nothing changes, it all stays the same.

So, in some strike of brilliance, someone decided that it would be in the best interest of FNIM children, that their supports be carried out by their own dedicated child welfare society. I suppose that in theory, that may have seemed like a good idea. That was just a theory obviously. Then down the line, when that wasn’t working so well, as Bill-C92 was being developed someone thought that it would be better for bands to manage their own child welfare files. There is that theory again…

No one stopped to realize that the smaller and tighter the circle of care got, the less oversight there is. You can’t direct the wellbeing of children and families when there is bias, and conflict of interest. There are people out there right now, who are claiming to know what is best for a child, based on the fact that their great grandparent was born on a reserve. They’ve never met the child, they don’t know anything about them except for what a file says, that file has been copy and pasted with the same updates year after year. Many times showing that the child hasn’t changed since they were two years old, although they may now be six.

Biological parents are being given unlimited time to heal and get right, so that maybe they might be reunited with their children. What happens to the child who is apprehended at or close to birth, or under 2 years of age? Never really knowing their biological family, because they weren’t able to parent for one reason or another. In a good foster placement, children bond with the families who are raising them. It is absolutely wonderful if a child can thrive in a healthy placement, while their parents get well. This is assuming that while the parents are getting well, they are nurturing their children and developing bonds with them consistently, so that they can reunite as a family. But how often does that happen?

The usual scenario outside of the families who just need some supports to get on their feet, is that the child seems to just be dumped into care and forgotten. Usually some sort of agreement is signed without any sort of legal consultation or judicial oversight, the decision making gets done by the child welfare society involved, let’s not forget that they now get to collect the funding that is attached to each one of these precious little souls. The children are now swept into the vortex of Indigenous Child Welfare, until they age out.

Every now and again, you have a family who really wants to give the child that they have been raising permanency. They want to break the cycles, and see the child who they love really thrive and succeed. In this case, they seek legal advice, and decide that they would like to file for some sort of permanent order that takes them out of care and allows them to fully parent the child.

You would think that this might be the happy ending that an agency would be hoping for, right? You have a child who can’t go home to their biological family, and the family who loves them wants to give them the life that they deserve. Apparently not… In that case the agency will swiftly remove them from the home, no matter how happy they were, no matter how good it was for them, they get placed “wherever”, and usually they start contacting the bio family who hadn’t had anything to do with the child, so that they can enact their parental rights.

In one case, the filing parents were able to keep the child throughout the whole legal ordeal. The agency involved did horrific things to the child, and both the biological and the caring families.

The band concerning the child, who knew nothing about the child, paraded through the court and meetings at the child welfare office. Touting that they knew what was best for the child. This was just a cover for the fact that the agency was paying for all of their trips, mileage, gas, accommodations and food. The same was done by the so called family who were trying to take the child from the caring family, as well. The child was subjected to visits with strangers, which had lasting negative affects, the caring family was harassed and tormented by the child welfare workers, and the bio family who were already fragile with their own issues, were manipulated and lied to.

In the end, the bio family member was just trying to bring the child in, because they found out that they could get funding to add on to their house. They had been asked if they wanted placement of the child when they were a baby, but declined because it was too hard. They also did not want to take the child if they weren’t getting funding as a foster parent.

The bio parents eventually disappeared again, as they usually did. Right from the beginning they were not prepared to raise any children. Before the agency broke it apart, the child would have had the ability to maintain a healthy relationship with the bio family, that would have been at their pace and abilities. At the end of it all there was none.

Through three levels of court, the foster parents won full custody of the child. The case is being cited in many other child welfare and custody cases.

Now, when a child welfare society even thinks that a foster parent wants to obtain permanency outside of the agency, they simply just take the child away from them. Children aren’t being able to bond and heal, the cycles perpetuate.

I’m not really sure how the “Scoop” ever ended, or how they can say that “Every Child Matters”.