Around the same time, four small, federally funded New Brunswick First Nations child-welfare agencies were formed. Generally, these agencies deal with communities whose populations include fewer than 250 children. In all, there are thirteen First Nations child-welfare agencies in Atlantic Canada, the mandates of which present a seemingly impossible paradox: following provincial child-protection rules that view the child’s needs separately from culture and community while focusing on healthy, safe families and children using a First Nations community-based perspective, determined in consultation with chiefs. They work to prevent neglect, abuse, and addiction, rather than only reacting to these problems once they occur. But the task is monumental, and staff members frequently burn out and move on. These organizations inherited the ongoing ravage of colonialist education and control as well as disputes between provinces and the federal government over who pays for what.
Contemporary Challenges
According to the Department of Community Services in Nova Scotia, of 1,315 children in all forms of government-administered care, 282 are with Mi’kmaq Family and Children’s Services (MFCS). That’s 21.4 percent, compared to 4 percent of all children in the province who identify as First Nations. As recently as 2010, there were 396 children with MFCS. As in every other part of the country, there are a disproportionate number of Aboriginal children in care in Nova Scotia. But according to the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services (DCS), these statistics can be interpreted differently. “Because there are more Mi’kmaw children available for adoption than there are Mi’kmaw families available,” says Elizabeth MacDonald, spokesperson for DCS, “Mi’kmaw children often remain in foster or kinship care longer—while awaiting adoption by an available Mi’kmaw family—than children of other ethnic origins.” Still, hundreds of Mi’kmaw children have been taken from their homes into government care.
In 2005 the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada brought together experts from across the country in First Nations child welfare, community development, economics, information technology, law, and social work, to attack this national crisis from every angle. They surveyed workers at First Nations child-welfare agencies, including those in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. In these three provinces, more than 10 percent of First Nations children were in child-welfare care, compared to less than 1 percent of non-Aboriginal children, and were 15 times more likely to end up there. As a result of these numbers, Mi’kmaw families report being hesitant to go to MFCS or the justice system in cases of domestic abuse, for fear of losing their children. When St. Francis Xavier’s Canada Research Chair on Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Communities, Jane MacMillan, did a study on Mi’kmaw family violence, Mi’kmaw participants told her that violence is common in their communities, is rarely reported, is getting worse, and is driven by addiction, loss of culture, and poverty. Poverty on the reserve, even now, is often used as justification for removing children from homes. Many blamed these things on the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. “People don’t know how to parent,” participants said. And as a result, neglect is the main reason MFCS removes children from homes.
Pre-colonialism, family violence was extremely rare in Mi’kma’ki, and when it happened the whole community got involved to help the children and sort out any conflicts, usually with a talking circle where everyone had a chance to speak. But now, even violence-prevention and other community-building programs offered by MFCS are sometimes avoided because of the organization’s association with taking children from homes. These community programs are the very things that can keep families together. Besides taking children into protective care, MFCS provides support programs for youth leaving foster care, summer camps for kids in care, and family healing centres providing shelter for abused women and their children.
Compounding these challenges is the fact that First Nations child-welfare agencies in Atlantic Canada are chronically short of cash and overworked. The funding formula from Aboriginal Affairs allows a cost-of-living increase in funding, but there hasn’t been one in nearly twenty years. In that time, prices have increased more than 20 percent, which amounts to a $10 million loss to these agencies in Atlantic Canada. Meanwhile, the workload keeps increasing. It’s not just the number of kids in care, it’s also the number of reports of abuse and neglect that must be investigated by these small agencies. Nationally, there are more than twice as many investigations involving Aboriginal kids as non-Aboriginals.
And yet, First Nations child-welfare organizations receive 22 percent less money per child than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. Contrary to popular belief, this lower rate of government support is the case for all services. According to the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada, “The average Canadian gets services from federal, provincial and municipal governments at an amount that is almost two-and-a-half times greater than that received by First Nations citizens.” Federal funding is given the same way residential school funding once was—on a per child basis. Agencies get money for each child in care, which leaves very little to focus on keeping kids out of care—that is, with their families. In some cases, children are temporarily placed by agencies into group or foster homes in order to get funding. Too often, these children go back and forth between foster care and home.
To complicate matters, the provinces and federal government continue to argue over who pays for what, and too often children wait in dangerous situations for the red tape to get sorted. Aboriginal Affairs claims that under the constitution the provinces are responsible for child and family services. The feds fund the basics, and the amount is their choice to make, but the provinces should cover the rest. “Provinces delegate authority to agencies and are thus responsible to ensure that the agency operates pursuant to the established standards,” the Department has stated. The Province counters that Aboriginal peoples are the federal government’s responsibility. Period.
Whole Families
Despite enormous challenges, agency workers have had success placing Mi’kmaw children within their own culture, in kinship care with extended family. In Nova Scotia, workers are required to do so whenever possible. “We make every effort to place Mi’kmaw children for adoption with families where at least one parent is Mi’kmaw, and that happens for over 78 percent of Mi’kmaw children in care,” says Elizabeth MacDonald, a spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Department of Community Services. And when workers remove a child who speaks Mi’kmaw from the home, they must place him or her where the language is at least understood. However, foster parents receive provincial government money to help take care of foster children, but when Mi’kmaw children are placed with kin, those extended family members do not receive the same funding. In many cases, these families are already struggling to pay the bills, and another mouth to feed with no financial help is a huge burden. Neither the federal government nor the provinces have stepped up to address this challenge.
Even when placed with Mi’kmaw families, children in care are more likely to abuse drugs, become tangled up in the criminal justice system, and have health problems. But with insufficient funding, it’s difficult for overwhelmed workers at First Nations child-welfare agencies to address the root causes of neglect and family violence. In response to these criticisms, Aboriginal Affairs changed the way it funds MFCS in 2008 to allocate funds for prevention work in Aboriginal communities. As a result, MFCS got a $1.9 million increase in funding that year. But in determining the amount of annual funding, Aboriginal Affairs guesses how many children will be pulled from their homes based on the previous year. In reality, the numbers change each year, and there’s no reason not to fund the work based on actual costs. MFCS continues to evolve in an effort to be more community and culturally based, using time-tested customs to resolve conflicts and build healthier families and communities. Workers visit people’s homes to support them there, providing parenting and life-skills training.
For a time, the MFCS Family Group Conferen
cing program, based on traditional healing and talking circles, effectively addressed and curtailed family violence at an early stage. In this program, counsellors sit with immediate and extended families to work out a plan to protect and care for the children. But according to a former staff person, Nova Scotia’s Department of Community Services audited and took over every private children’s services society in the province except MFCS. It then cancelled the Family Group Conferencing program and tightened rules on kinship—or extended family—fostering, making it even harder for these arrangements to work.
The First Nations Child & Family Caring Society notes that much more preventative work could be done to keep families together and safe. With full funding, workers might—possibly in collaboration with respected Elders—do outreach on fetal alcohol syndrome for pregnant teens, give parenting lessons incorporating traditional parenting styles, facilitate marriage-preparation workshops, provide daycare services and babysitting courses, give cooking classes using traditional foods, teach Mi’kmaw language classes and addictions counselling. Unfortunately, judging by ongoing jurisdictional struggles between Aboriginal Affairs and the provinces over who pays for services for First Nations peoples, and also by the fact that on a dollars-per-person basis no group in Canada is less well served by government programs, governments still tend to see First Nations as a liability, an expense to be minimized.
Lasting Hurt
“I’m not a survivor. I didn’t survive. What you see is what’s left.”
–Testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, Halifax, 2011
Sex Abuse Revelations
Although some within the churches and at Indian Affairs had always known of sexual abuse at residential schools, they managed to keep the public in the dark until 1990. An earlier light had fallen on rampant abuse of Catholic Church wards in 1988, when an east end St. John’s orphanage for boys made national headlines. Several men who had attended the school as young boys alleged that nine Catholic Brothers physically and sexually abused them. It would prove to be the first domino in a long and protracted series of abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church and its congregations in Canada.
The next several dominos involved residential schools, including Shubenacadie. In 1990 Phil Fontaine went public about having been physically and sexually abused—along with all of his male classmates—at Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Pine Falls, Manitoba. He said he later learned that girls also experienced horrific abuse. As it turned out, Fontaine’s experience was a common one. In a 1995 study, nine former Indian Agents said they’d known of physical abuse at the schools. Two knew of sexual abuse. Those who’d reported the abuses to Indian Affairs received no responses. Some had gone so far as to meet with church officials, but the churches would either do nothing or simply move the offending priest to a new assignment.
As the head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Fontaine was an influential and high-profile person with much to lose. Yet he took the risk of being the first to openly and publicly discuss abuse at residential schools. He called for a national inquiry on the issue. Within a year, two former priests at a British Columbia residential school were convicted and sentenced for the sexual abuse of four boys during the 1960s. The principal at the school was also charged with assaulting five former residents, and raping one of them. He claimed there was consent. He had fathered the girl’s child. The charges were eventually dropped after he apologized in a healing circle. With charges being laid in British Columbia and the Yukon, police investigations were triggered across Canada. In 1993 the RCMP created a Native Residential School Task Force. Survivors filed more than 3,000 complaints against 170 priests and nuns. But only 5 were ever charged. In many cases, the accused were dead.
When researcher Kathleen Kearns spoke to Father Paddy Collins in 1990, he denied any sexual abuse at the Shubenacadie school. Nothing that horrible could have happened there, he told her. A survivor told Kearns that Collins himself gave quarters to girls who lifted their skirts for him.
Dislocation
Leading addiction researchers have found that people who lose connections to family, clan, community, nation, and custom often create a “substitute lifestyle.” They fill the hole created by loss of connection—often called “dislocation”—with excessive work, drugs, food, sex, pornography, video games, television, crime, religion. All to forget the loss or replace what has been taken. Given this phenomenon, the fact that the Canadian government took 150,000 Aboriginal children away from their families, communities, nations, and cultures, and the self-destructive and illegal natures of many of the survivors’ resulting addictions, the incarceration rate of Aboriginal peoples is no surprise.
The hurt of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School resonates today not only with survivors but also their descendants, and other members of the community who suffered through losing the children. Every child who went to Shubenacadie represents a family torn apart. Some managed to reconnect, but many never did. After residential school, many survivors found themselves adrift, still unacceptable to the white majority but no longer able to speak their mother tongue or understand their own cultures.
The loss of language has been one of the most painful impacts of the school. “A culture without language is a culture without a soul,” says Mike Isaac, a student services consultant with the Mi’kmaq Liaison Office of Nova Scotia’s Department of Education. Bureaucrats, politicians, and women and men of the cloth systematically attacked the soul of Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik culture for decades while the Nova Scotia media cheered them on. In The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis note that many of the terms that once richly described the land of Mi’kma’ki have been forgotten.
Among the two thousand souls who went through Shubenacadie, dislocation has taken myriad shapes. Survivors have testified—in media coverage since the late 1970s, during a class-action suit against the federal government in the 1990s and 2000s, and later at the TRC in 2011—of the lingering hardships encountered since they were taken from their communities and homes. While each individual’s experience is unique, several of the impacts were common to many survivors.
Isolation
In her account of life at the school and its impact on survivors, Isabelle Knockwood writes that, for many years, those who had been at the school avoided each other. The subject of Shubenacadie became taboo, something people didn’t want to think or talk about. Better to suffer in silence than to pick at scabs. Dredging up old ghosts was so frightening that when Knockwood started writing her book in the early 1990s, she was threatened with lawsuits and violence.
Shubenacadie’s spectre was so powerful that even siblings who had been there together, who had bonded tight in surviving the experience, did not speak of it. Brothers and sisters who were residents at the school simultaneously but could not interact with each other sometimes heard about each other’s experiences for the first time at the TRC. When they had their own children, some survivors would not talk to them about Shubenacadie. Some didn’t want to be negative. Others simply weren’t able to speak of it. Fear was the teaching tool at Shubenacadie, and as it turned out, fear was the lesson learned. Children did not learn of love there. If they were touched it was to further instill fear. They hadn’t received love and they didn’t know how to give it either. Many survivors have spoken publicly of a fear of touch, and of being too close to others—common among people who have experienced physical and sexual abuse as children. A simple hug could instill panic: “I would freeze up,” one survivor said at the TRC.
Cultural Shame
Years of psychological abuse left survivors with invisible scars. The children at the school heard the same thing every day: “You will never amount to anything.” In many cases, the message hit its mark. Former residents had learned to be ashamed of themselves, to hang their heads. “I’ve failed in everything,” one survivor told the TRC. Others reported being
unable to hold a job or finish further attempts at education.
Children also learned that their language was simplistic and out of date, something to be punished for. Some who returned to Mi’kmaw communities refused to teach their children or grandchildren Mi’kmaw. The fear of punishment for speaking the language, once instilled, became permanent for some, as if the strap hung forever over their heads, ready to drop with the slightest misplacement of the tongue.
Survivors often speak of seeing, at Shubenacadie and in the years after leaving the school, cowboy and Indian movies, and cheering for the cowboys. It was what you were supposed to do. But worse, they had been taught to be ashamed of who they were. “Brainwashing,” is what one survivor called his experience at Shubenacadie. It was the worst thing about it for him.
Mental Health
Some survivors have testified that the school drove them to suffer severe mental anguish—including being hospitalized repeatedly over decades. Adding to the horror of that experience, one survivor observed, was the fact that the mental hospital looked identical to the residential school: gleaming and institutional, as if regularly scrubbed clean of damning evidence.
Hour after hour of lectures on Catholic morality were undone by sexual, physical, and psychological abuse by priests and nuns. Some survivors were left without a clear sense of right and wrong, and in turn hurt their own loved ones. They were consumed by unquenchable rage. Years of living in survival mode—trying to fly under the radars of school authorities, taking careful note of everything in order to anticipate and avoid danger, manipulating the right allies to avoid punishment—had taken away their ability to trust. They lived the same way outside the school, carefully and with skilful manipulation. “I learned crazy mental games,” one survivor said.
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