“The main goal of our program is to ensure that the Sixties Scoop and residential school situation doesn’t occur again,” said Thomas, referring to the era in which Indigenous children were removed from their families en masse and placed into foster homes that were divorced from their culture.
The reforms are aimed at reducing the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the child-welfare system, where 68 per cent of children in care are Indigenous even though they make up less than 10 per cent of the B.C. population. The key principle of the co-ordination agreements, Hajdu said, “is that the communities develop their own laws, their own code about how to protect families and ultimately keep children safe.”
“So if parents are going down the road of alcohol or drug addiction … and that poses a risk to the health of the children, we can call in and say, you need to work on yourselves and in the meantime, we will take your children into care for three months or two months,” said Thomas, whose mother, Ethel Thomas, a residential school survivor, is one of the community’s social workers.Article content
Adam Olsen, a B.C. Green MLA and a member of the Tsartlip First Nation, said as more Indigenous communities take control of child welfare, he expects to eventually see a much smaller Ministry of Children and Family Development.
This will be a disaster