Failing Aboriginal Children

"It's an interesting process with respect to First Nations. We [the provincial government] are accountable, essentially, for children in protection and that gets delegated to First Nations authority. But the funding is from the federal side, so the accountability is to us, but the funding is from the federal government.
"We have a number of people working with them directly as role models and mentors. We've been working with those boards and we have a very good relationship and we're doing a lot of work with them on processes and procedures."
Dave Hancock, Alberta Minister of Human Services

First Nations children are over-represented in their high numbers in the province's child welfare system. Of all children in the care of the province, fully 68% are First Nations children. First Nations are jealous and protective of their sovereignty. For they are, after all, nations, and they consider themselves to be fully capable of administering all of their own services. Funded, of course, by the province and by the federal government.

Which is to say funded by the tax-paying component of the Province of Alberta and all Canadian taxpayers in general. With the exclusion of aboriginals living in tribal First Nations reserves. Native Canadians living on reserves do not pay taxes; they are excused from this onerous civic obligation because they are First Nations; the first nations to live on the land we now call Canada. They were first, all others mere late-comers and as such colonialists.

Aboriginals living on reserves need not pay taxes, in fact general tax revenues are the means by which the federal government is able to pay huge sums of money to all First Nations reserves. Where housing, schools, medical services and all other civil infrastructures are paid for by the universal collection of taxes and reserve-transferable funding. One might think that people who have lived forever on the land know how to raise their children and how to employ themselves gainfully, living off the land.

The traditional way of living is always extolled as hugely desirable for any number of reasons; not the least is that it represents a noble way of life and a way in which ancestors can be honoured. The mystery here is why people who declare themselves to be sovereign, capable and spiritedly proud of their heritage are so fiscally dependent, and so sadly incapable of looking to their own devices. The worst thing is the common failures in raising children in secure and loving homes.

Perhaps it is a matter of transitional values being so utterly confusing. Too many families raise too many children on reserves with no regard to those children's welfare; they are not adequately cared for, fed, valued, educated. Their exposure all too often is to alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse and a nasty lifestyle of semi-abandonment. Which accounts for the numbers of aboriginal children in care.

Ian Jackson / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO   The home of Ethan Yellowbird is pictured after his fatal shooting July 11, 2011 at the Samson Cree reserve. 

Just as First Nations strenously object to their children being adopted outside their First Nations communities, they also insist on administering themselves the many types of civil programs that exist within their communities to provide social welfare, as is done elsewhere, in all other communities. The trouble appears to be the lack of accountability, of professional behaviour, of commitment to the welfare of the children they are tasked to support.

A recently-released report on the activities of the Kasohkowew Child Wellness Society which manages child welfare in the Samson Cree First Nation is a case in point. A 13-month-old girl in their care died as a result of gross incompetence in best practises relating to child welfare. "An ordinary reasonable caregiver with average education would have sought medical intervention for a child with symptoms of pneumonia serious enough to have caused her death", wrote Judge Bart Rosborough.

He made a number of recommendations in the interests of providing better health-care training for foster parents, for the child died in the custody of a foster parent. A foster mother who, in fact, worked as a caseworker at the same child welfare agency that managed the child's file. The little girtl had been in and out of hospital ten times prior to death for respiratory problems, including pneumonia and a bout of meningitis being suspected as well.

The judge pointed out inequities in financing care for aboriginal and non-aboriginal children. At the time of the enquiry he sat on, the Samson Cree Nation had two thousand children, and 322 of them were under permanent guardianship orders. The disparity in funding is a grave problem. On the other hand, he saw misuse of funds at the time of the baby's death, with staff members sent on expensive out-of-country 'educational' seminars.

Funds being diverted to activities described as "cultural activities", were also mentioned. Where choices were made to fund these types of events even in the face of case workers being fired because of tight budgets. Another issue was impossibly sloppy filing where one client's files could be scattered over a number of different places, difficult to pull together for a well-rounded picture of the client's history and needs.

All of the recommendations issued by Judge Rosborough had been accepted, said one of the women who sits on the board of directors at the Kasohkowew Child Wellness Society.