Start integrating Indigenous peoples and principles into community-controlled delivery of child and family services in the NWT, says Dehcho Grand Chief Gladys Norwegian.
“For years we, First Nations, have been saying we want control of our own programs and services and trying to make it based on our values and principles,” said Norwegian.
Give communities a greater say in Indigenous child welfare, says Dehcho Grand Chief Gladys Norwegian in a letter to Premier Bob McLeod and Health and Social Services Minister Glen Abernethy.
Norwegian penned a letter to Premier Bob McLeod and Health and Social Services Minister Glen Abernethy because she felt that after the Auditor General of Canada's report on child and family services, it seemed that “knuckles were rapped and life goes on,” she said.
“The majority of the children taken away were Indigenous and they were put at risk. I wanted to tell them there seem to be serious deficiencies in the Department of Health and Social Services,” she said.
As the Dehcho leads itself into self-government, Norwegian expects the community will take on a greater share of service provision with an emphasis on preventative supports for families.
Dene Nation Chief Norman Yakeleya supports greater Indigenous self-determination and authority over the safety of children, he said.
“When you see more than 95 per cent of children in care are Indigenous, that’s an emergency situation. Give communities the means to support families and children, rather than putting a child on a plane and sending them out,” he said.
After the health minister survived a vote of non-confidence over the state of child care in the territory, he vowed to fast track improvements to services, staff recruitment and retention.
The department is looking to increase positions in some of the communities where the number of children in care is the highest, said Abernethy.
Despite the department’s struggle to retain staff and a typical 20 per cent vacancy rate, in-territory professional programs to enter social work are increasingly scant. Training Northern social workers is just one possible solution to ending high turnover, she said.
The Aurora College social work program offers a diploma but year one will not be offered in 2018 and 2019. The GNWT decided in February 2017 to cut $1.9-million from the program, citing low enrollment, which contradicted a sweeping review of the college that said the program should be expanded.
“We need Northern experience,” said Norwegian. “They’re looking for people with degrees. Efforts should be made to make the diploma program encouraging for people to move on and get their degree.”
Cutting the program was “ironic,” said Norwegian, adding that some Northern and Indigenous applicants haven’t been hired to provide services despite taking the social work program.
“At the end we just want healthy people – happy people feeling good about themselves and knowing their identity and not being embarrassed about who they are,” she said.
“Can you imagine being a child yourself and being exposed to a lot of loud arguments in your household, then someone comes around to rescue you from that environment and finding out the home you’re being put in is not that safe?” said Norwegian.
Dene Nation Chief Norman Yakeleya agrees that family services provision should be reclaimed by and for Indigenous people, who make up the majority of apprehensions in the territory.
Communities have “perfectly educated, well-suited, skilled people that can look after children. They may not have university degrees or college diplomas. However, that’s the issue. We are trying to measure up to another society’s credentials,” he said. “How come governments don’t measure up to our level of adequacy?”
Once a child enters the child and family services bureaucracy, it is difficult to take them back out and communities need a greater say in their own children’s lives, he said.
“Residential schools are alive in well in child welfare agencies. There is family separation, the disconnect from their culture, language, their traditions, their food and the events. Everything is a separation from their culture and who they are as an Indigenous person,” he said.
In Alberta, the provincial government is working alongside Indigenous governments to reform its child welfare system, said Yakeleya.
In October, the province announced Bill 22 would overhaul child welfare, requiring the province notify an Indigenous child’s band if there is an application for private guardianship, implementing mandatory home inspections and strengthening requirements for reporting injuries and death.
The NWT's child and family services workers are supposed to conduct home inspections and follow up with youth in care, but the compliance rates for that policy are deficient, the Auditor General's report found.
Health authorities placed 63 per cent of children without performing basic checks and conducted even fewer required screenings on foster homes this year (66 per cent) than in 2014 (69 per cent). It only conducted annual reviews on 11 per cent of homes, the report states.
Indigenous governments need a say in child welfare and will not want to inherit the territory’s broken systems, said Yakeleya.
“We want to work with the territorial government but they’ve got to be willing to sit down and say, ‘let’s do something creative. Let’s look at our own regional child welfare agencies,’” said Yakeleya.
The GNWT should initiate discussions with regional chiefs including the prospect of more direct nation-to-nation funding from the federal government, he said.
“It’s not working, so we need to make some radical changes.”