Cowessess regains control over its children’s welfare
COWESSESS FIRST NATION, Sask. — As the leaders of three governments visited a place where traditions were broken and lives were taken too soon, Sekwen Agecoutay hoped the power of that hallowed soil would save her son’s generation from enduring what her ancestors did.
She was one of 150 people who came Tuesday to watch Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commit $38.7 million over two years to help her First Nation support its children in need of protection, as Cowessess becomes the first in Canada to take over jurisdiction for child welfare using a 2019 federal law.
Along with Premier Scott Moe and Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme, Trudeau signed a co-ordination agreement to make that responsibility a reality. The three leaders then went to the gravesite near the former Marieval Indian Residential School where an estimated 751 unmarked graves were discovered last month.
Agecoutay’s grandparents went to that school. So did her mother, and her aunts. Some didn’t make it out, she said. When she looks at that gravesite, she feels devastated at the loss. She hopes it leaves a lasting impression on Trudeau as he grapples with the legacy.
“You can feel it,” she said. “Instead of just hearing it on the news or in his office, he’s actually on the soil and can actually think about the heartbreaking truth … This is reality.”
Agecoutay was briefly in foster care with a non-Indigenous family. She has strived to reclaim traditions that were stripped from her ancestors, so she can pass them on to her own six-yearold son and, through him, to his descendants. She hopes Trudeau’s visit will be a first step in understanding what needs to change.
“No one deserves to get ripped from their family at such a young age, and to get their whole heritage stripped from them,” she said.
Even before he left for the graves, Trudeau was adamant that what happened to Agecoutay’s family must never happen again.
“Kids need to be kept by, protected by, supported by, taught by their community,” he said, just before signing a co-ordination agreement that will ensure the transition toward Cowessess’s own child welfare legislation, passed in March 2020 and put into effect this April.
Trudeau said his government’s legislation “will ensure that, as we move forward, kids will get the support they need, the protection they need, driven by their own communities in their own languages, their own cultures — that no kids, finally, will be removed from the communities that they’re a part of. That is the goal.”
Moe called it a “groundbreaking” achievement. Delorme said his First Nation is regaining control of something it never really relinquished.
“Today is a historical day, because we never gave up the sovereignty of our children,” he said.
Tuesday’s ceremonies began when Trudeau arrived at Cowessess in a seven-car motorcade, after landing in Yorkton that afternoon. He entered a teepee with Moe and Delorme, reportedly to listen to prayers blessing the agreement.
After exiting, the three leaders sat to watch traditional dances in the Cowessess Pow Wow Arbour. When Trudeau faced the community and began to speak, he quickly acknowledged the recent resurgence of pain.
“Even as Canadians from coast to coast to coast are shaking their heads, feeling guilty and terrible about the shameful past that we are coming to grips with as a nation, it is something that communities like here in Cowessess have known for years, decades, generations — the harm done by residential schools,” he said.
That harm has lasted generations. Indigenous kids still make up more than 80 per cent of children in care in Saskatchewan, and more than 50 per cent across Canada. Trudeau said the work of reconciliation will require deep, transformative change.
“The work of reconciliation must and will transform all of Canada, and all Canadians,” he said.