QUEST FOR JUSTICE
Advocate has paid personal price in fight for aboriginal child welfare,
Cindy Blackstock is a successful person by any measure. She was raised in a nurturing family by a Gitxsan father and Caucasian mother, earned a multitude of degrees and honours and has the satisfaction of knowing her work as a First Nations activist makes a difference in the lives of children.
She was well known among her peers. But two months ago, she won national and international acclaim with a victory on behalf of indigenous children before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, showing they were being shortchanged by Ottawa. And yet, there is a hole in her own life. “I have a longing to know about my culture,” she says, in a phone interview from Ottawa, where she’s executive director of the advocacy group First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada.
She wants to know more about the Gitxsan people of northern British Columbia. She was born in the reserve town of Burns Lake, but grew up off-reserve throughout the North.
The issue came up when I asked her to name a few historical First Nations icons and she remarked she wasn’t able to go back past the turn of the 20th century. The teaching of indigenous history in Canadian schools is generally not on par with the story of Confederation or the building of the railroad from coast to coast.
“I find my situation is more the rule than the exception among people of my generation,” says Blackstock, 51. She adds that when then prime minister Stephen Harper apologized for the residential school system that robbed First Nations children of their heritage, he said the schools “sowed the seeds for generations to follow.”
Blackstock understands that in her gut. “One of those seeds is the cultural erosion” that also affects children who didn’t go to residential schools.
Moreover, she grew up with “symbols all around that Indians were not worth as much as everyone else. You were expected to grow up and be a drunk and be lazy,” she says. There were separate entrances for aboriginal people at taverns and she was treated differently, depending on whether she was out with her mother or father. On the playground she was called “squaw” and felt she “wasn’t worthy of respect.”
As a small child, she didn’t know this was racism. “You don’t know what it’s called; you just know what it feels like,” she says. “I wondered, ‘What have we done wrong?’ ”
She has a stubborn streak, however, and parents who taught her to work hard, deal with difficulties and focus on character. Her dad was a forest ranger who shared the beauty of the northern forests and her mother stayed home for Cindy and her brother and sister. (The controversies of her life have taught her to be careful about giving up too much information about her family, including their first names.)
“I would be crying and my mom would say, ‘You need to stand up for yourself’ . . . I think that was really the difference for me . . . I thought, ‘I am going to walk with my head up.’ ”
That difference, followed by career opportunities, gave her another advantage. She explains: “I am blessed in that I have been mentored by elders across many nations and, so, while I may not know the specific ceremonies, I am getting better at understanding and living the values.”
It was a foundation upon which, in later years, Blackstock met the biggest challenge of her life. Advocacy gets personal Ask Blackstock if she has children and she comes back with an unusual response: “Single and no kids, except the 163,000-plus that I’m honoured to work with on equity issues.”
It’s no exaggeration. She’s referring to the First Na- tions children at the centre of the recent landmark decision by the Canadian Human Rights Commission that successive governments racially discriminated against them by paying less for child welfare services.
The ramifications of the January ruling have yet to play out, but it is clear it would not have happened without Blackstock — at least not now.
Far from basking in her success, she worries that history will repeat itself. She knows she has to keep fighting hard to see concrete results.
She wasn’t alone, of course. Teams of lawyers, her colleagues at the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society, and the Assembly of First Nations were all involved in filing the 2007 human rights complaint against the attorney general of Canada, representing the department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (now called Indigenous and Northern Affairs). But Blackstock became the symbol of this nine-year battle, for which she paid a high personal price.
The story began for her 30 years ago when she found her true purpose in life.
She was a child protection worker for the B.C. government, 21, based in Vancouver and tasked with keeping families together in hard times. She began to notice how much less Ottawa spent on child welfare services for indigenous children, resulting in more of them being sent to foster homes, often with non-indigenous families.
“I realized I needed to help the children,” she says simply.
Everything she did was to make her more effective. She already had a degree in social work and took a master’s at McGill, before eventually defending her doctoral thesis, on the inequality in Canada’s child welfare system, at the University of Toronto in 2009. Currently, she’s studying online for a master’s in jurisprudence in children’s law and policy at Chicago’s Loyola University.
The non-profit advocacy group she helped launch in 1998 has quantified the gap in spending on behalf of First Nations children at between 20 and 30 per cent less. The government disputed that fact before the rights tribunal, arguing the matter is more “complex” than such statistics suggest.
The tribunal says there’s no clear definition of child welfare services, but essentially they are designed to protect the well-being of children. It’s more complicated on reserves when needed health and other services usually aren’t available and the system is bogged down in jurisdictional disputes about money.
Blackstock cites the case of a 4-year-old girl who had complications after routine dental surgery. “Something went horribly wrong and she wasn’t getting the critical care she needed,” she says. It took private citizens’ donations of money while Health Canada and Indian Affairs bickered over the bill.
She insists that “this proven gap (in funding) is widening, not getting smaller,” and points out that in 2016, indigenous kids are three times more likely to be in foster care than they were during the worst period of residential schools.
The price tag for Blackstock was the loss of privacy. While she worked on the case against the Canadian government, the government spied on her illegally. She learned about the surveillance by the Justice and Indian Affairs departments when she obtained a 2,500-page file on herself under the Privacy Act, filled with snide comments about her by assorted bureaucrats.
The privacy commissioner ruled the government went too far in surveillance, which included her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and ordered it to cease. Blackstone donated the $20,000 she was awarded to children’s charities, but didn’t take legal action. She says the government “was well aware I was scheduled to be the first witness in the human rights case. The idea of witness intimidation was never looked at but is one I think should be explored more, to protect others testifying against the government.
“The whole retaliation experience (spying) was shocking and scary but I knew my job as an adult is to stand up for kids, especially kids who are suffering,” she says. “I hope the government never does this to anyone else ever again. The money spent following me around (more than $5 million) would have been better spent on helping the children.”
She sees being taken away from a child’s perspective. Federal files (obtained only after long delays and legal scuffles) show that the163,000 children spent 66 million nights away from their families. Blackstock measures that in “sleeps” and imagines what is must be like for little kids wondering when they will see their parents again.