Listen, here’s what indigenous people need
Stop removing our children from their families, writes Chelsea Vowel.
One conversation has been happening a lot lately in the media, centring around relocation and how indigenous peoples need to assimilate into urban society if we are ever going to be successful. This line of thinking is literally as old as Canada, and frankly, it’s very stale.
Here’s what various studies, commissions, reports and indigenous peoples themselves have said we need. Print this out and tape it to the company fridge, because this is the conversation Canadians really need to have.
For more than 150 years, indigenous families have been forcefully disrupted. Generations of children were torn from their parents and placed in residential schools, the results of which are documented at length in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing today, indigenous children have experienced the highest rates of removal from their families by child welfare agencies. For decades, the only reason for these removals was the racist belief that indigenous children would be better off with nonindigenous families. Current removals aren’t much different, fuelled by the poverty many indigenous families find themselves in, a twisted punishment for not enduring generations of abuse without exhibiting trauma.
It will take generations to repair the damage done to indigenous families, but this healing cannot even begin until the removals stop. The most pressing issue facing indigenous peoples today is the continuing loss of our children, and Canada must move heaven and earth to ensure this violence ends.
Whatever you think that might cost, it will always be less expensive than a failure to act.
Reserves were created to be economic and social wastelands, holding cells for inconvenient Indians, until the project of assimilation could be completed. They were never intended to be viable communities, and the fact that they continue to operate as designed is no fault of indigenous peoples. Despite these worst-laid plans, our communities are also sites of resilience and strength, places where our cultures and languages continue to exist.
They are places for extended family and kinship supports. In a sense, they are what remain of our homelands, after colonialism claimed the rest of the land and resources.
Limited to such tiny geographic areas — about 0.2 per cent of all land in Canada — First Nations will never thrive. Thus, land and resource redistribution must be on the table. Indigenous communities need larger land bases, and the ability to benefit from the resources on those lands, as they see fit. This is the path to selfsufficiency.
Moreover, indigenous peoples are often the first victims of environmental degradation, living with the aftermath of irresponsible resource development. Indigenous peoples must have more than the right to be consulted on these projects — they must also have the right to say no, with the power to implement and enforce their own environmental regulations, as Canada has proven itself to be incapable of doing so at an acceptable level.
Current systems of education are deliberately assimilatory, as their whole purpose is to churn out productive Canadian citizens. These systems deny indigenous peoples the richness and strength of our cultures by ignoring them almost completely. Indigenous children who are inculcated with a sense of worth, and who are rooted in their culture, thrive.
The Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey system, the Kahnawake Survival School and the Akwesasne Freedom School are just a few examples of school systems designed and delivered by First Nations. They have been widely successful, and their graduates often outperform their nonindigenous counterparts. This model of indigenous control of indigenous education must be allowed to spread.
Lastly, Indian Affairs is bloated, inefficient and inherently racist. It controls Indian Act governance, which was implemented to undermine indigenous sovereignty; complaints Canadians have about Indian Act governance are unjustly hurled at First Nations themselves rather than at Indian Affairs, who holds the legal, policy and purse strings.
Indigenous communities need the time, opportunity and resources to re-implement self-governance.
Êkosi.