Grandmothers' perspective on children in foster care focus of Master's documentary
- Morgan Esperance | November 08, 2016
From writing her first story on the grandmothers in the Indian Communication Arts (INCA) Summer Institute, and a 5 minute television piece through Indigenous Circle at CTV Regina, Alina Perrault creates a 22 minute documentary in the Master’s Program at the School of Journalism called, ‘I Miss You’.
Alina’s film was presented at a showcase at the University of Regina on Wednesday, October 19, 2016.
After travelling across Canada, she felt the calling to move back to the prairies and do something great. The story of the grandmothers was something Alina wanted to express to everyone and the over representation of children in the foster system.
By participating for a year in the sharing and healing circles, Alina got a better understanding of what the grandmothers went through first hand and became close with them. The huge percentage of Aboriginal children in foster care reminds the grandmothers of almost a second coming of the residential schools and the 60s scoop.
This is where the grandmothers step in: they want to care for their grandchildren instead of the foster system. Alina explains that the grandmothers are the transmitters of culture, they want to be there for their grandbabies but the financial supports aren’t available to them.
‘It’s been a very personal documentary…I looked into my own past, and for me I come from a family where half my family is First Nation and the other half is French Canadian,” says Alina.
For Alina, she never got the chance to meet her grandmother because her mother was taken into Residential School and later adopted into a new family. So she often wonders about her biological grandmother and how she would have been.
“I began this project not knowing my kokum, not knowing my grandmother, but leaving with many kokum’s, and leaving with many grandmothers.”
Alina is the first Indigenous woman to graduate from the first graduating class of the Journalism Master’s program at the University of Regina. It is up to her as a master’s student to promote her film, which she has by sending it to film festivals, and APTN.
Her main goal is to use it as an educational tool to get the word out of intergenerational trauma. She says,
“It does exist, and to know that there’s a deeper story to why these kids are in foster care, and to put faces in these statistics.”