Comment: Taking our children
- Paul Chartrand | June 20, 2015
Who knows best what is good for children? Is it ‘Father knows best’? Is it perhaps the bond between mother and child? Is it the family? Or is it the government worker or the higher-up bureaucrat or the politician? Put another way, what is the proper role, if any, of the state in deciding the fate of children? What are the boundaries, if any, that insulate the family from state interference in their relationship with their children? This issue sleeps behind the work of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian Residential Schools (IRS) which released a summary of its final report early in June.
In its 1996 final report Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) recommended the establishment of a public inquiry to, “investigate and document “the origins and effects of residential school policies and practices…” to “conduct public hearings across the country with sufficient funding to enable the testimony of affected persons to be heard…” (The full text of the RCAP and TRC recommendations are published at eaglefeathernews.com)
The TRC was established as part of the Indian Residential School Agreement of 2007 by the parties which included the federal government and the Assembly of First Nations. Its mandate reflects pretty much the recommendations of the RCAP on the IRS issue so that the TRC stands as one of the rare instances where the RCAP approach has been substantially adopted.
An investigation of “the origins and effects of government policies” respecting the IRS should tell us a lot about the question raised in this commentary. The TRC has released a summary only of the full report which will be published later. Will the TRC report lead to shifts in government policy about the state’s role in taking children away from their families today and in the future?
The TRC pinned its approach to the IRS issue on the idea of ‘cultural genocide’ which has a contested relationship with the status of the international crime of genocide. The IRS policy of forcibly taking children from Indigenous families to pursue the goal of assimilating Indigenous people into the state’s imposed culture and system has its parallels in other former British colonies like the USA and Australia. In the latter the issue was the subject of a report entitled ‘Stolen Generations”. The Australian High Court dodged the question of genocide.
The TRC has quite properly brought home to the minds of many Canadians the horrors of the policy of taking children from their families through the testimony of survivors. In the many comments so far published the one that stands out for me is that of Marilyn Simon-Ingram. A woman in her 80s she related her personal experience and said “Kill the Indian in the child worked the opposite. It killed the child in the Indian.”
That comment brought back my memory of hearing an inmate serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary during RCAP hearings. A tall big man he recounted in tears his life in many foster homes where he suffered horrible abuse. Later I visited a women’s prison and heard from the inmates that the state was taking their children away to put in foster homes. At the federal pen we had noted that most of the inmates present had been through foster homes.
The policies of governments today lead to indefensible rates of state apprehension of Aboriginal people. Criminals and innocent people are taken into state custody in numbers that shock the conscience of sensible people. Jails for children are called Youth Centres. State agents with the backing of social workers and judges take children from their families and put them into the homes of strangers or in hotels as done in Manitoba and soothe the public conscience with the expression ‘children in care’, a term of political propaganda as effective as the ‘justice system’ for the criminal law system.
Let us hope for the sake of the children, which the survivors of the IRS were when they were taken by the state, that the work of the TRC will lead to national introspection about the reconciliation of the respective roles of the state and the family in caring for children. That is a reconciliation that is long overdue. And that is the truth.
Click here for more coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.