First Peoples Child & Family Review
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Promising healing practices for interventions addressing intergenerational trauma among Aboriginal youth: A scoping review
No full textThere is growing recognition in Canada around the role of intergenerational trauma in shaping physical and mental health inequities among Aboriginal youth. We examined recommendations on best practices for addressing intergenerational trauma in interventions for Aboriginal youth. Academic-community partnerships were formed to guide this scoping literature review. Peer-reviewed academic literature and “grey” sources were searched. Of 3,135 citations uncovered from databases, 16 documents met inclusion criteria. The search gathered articles and reports published in English from 2001-2011, documenting interventions for Indigenous youth (ages 12-29 years) in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. The literature was sorted and mapped, and stakeholder input was sought through consultation with community organizations in the Calgary, Canada area. Recommendations in the literature include the need to: integrate Aboriginal worldviews into interventions; strengthen cultural identity as a healing tool and a tool against stigma; build autonomous and self-determining Aboriginal healing organizations; and, integrate interventions into mainstream health services, with education of mainstream professionals about intergenerational trauma and issues in Aboriginal health and well-being. We identified a paucity of reports on interventions and a need to improve evaluation techniques useful to all stakeholders (including organizations, funders, and program participants). Most interventions targeted individual-level factors (e.g., coping skills), rather than systemic factors (e.g., stressors in the social environment). By addressing upstream drivers of Aboriginal health, interventions that incorporate an understanding of intergenerational trauma are more likely to be effective in fostering resilience, in promoting healing, and in primary prevention. Minimal published research on evidence-based practices exists, though we noted some promising practices
Reflections on reconciliation
No full textFrom 2009-2015, it has been my greatest honour to serve as a Commissioner of the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The TRC’s huge job has had three key parts: to research, document and record the facts and impacts of over a hundred years of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children; to preserve all that information, and use it to educate the people of Canada about what we have learned; and to ‘inspire reconciliation’, so that the individuals affected, and our country as a whole, could recover from the past and live in respectful relationships with each other going forward
Pandemics and Urban Child Survival: Pulling Together in the Adoption Canoe
No full textThis article discusses an intergenerational narrative about how historical pandemics, starvation politics, and poverty contribute to implications for urban Indigenous custom adoption practice, policy, teaching and research. It uses the seven principles of Archibald’s (2008) storywork to demonstrate the importance of knowing our own family histories, and how those historical, cultural and current contexts can be a force to advocate, influence and teach for change.
Cultural Permanence for Indigenous Children and Youth: Reflections from a Delegated Aboriginal Agency in British Columbia
No full textThe article discusses cultural permanence for Indigenous children and youth from the perspective of the executive director of Northwest Inter-Nation Family and Community Services (NIFCS), a delegated Aboriginal child welfare agency that serves nine Indigenous communities from three First Nations on British Columbia’s Northwest Coast. Through increasing cultural knowledge, NIFCS aims to enhance its practice to meet the holistic needs of children and youth in care, in particular, to ensure that children and youth maintain connections with their families, extended families, and communities and are given opportunities to know about and learn their languages, spiritual teachings, and cultural traditions from their Elders, families, and communities. Ultimately, NIFCS’s goal is for the children and youth in its care to be strongly connected to their roots and experience a sense of belonging. The paper looks at connectedness and cultural diversity in the context of cultural planning for permanence and relates these concepts to practice at NIFCS. It outlines promising practices within NIFCS, including the agency’s collaboration with Nagantsi’istk, a group of grandmothers from Lax Kw’alaams who are leaders and strong advocates in supporting cultural connections for children from the member communities. Key words: connectedness, belonging, cultural diversity, cultural identity, cultural planning, cultural permanence, custom adoptions, customary car
Using a community of practice model to create change for Northern homeless women
No full textThis is a story about three virtual and face-to-face communities which met in the capitals of Canada’s three Northern territorial cities over a two-year period to discuss and act on culturally safe and gender-specific services for Northern women (and their children) experiencing homelessness, mental health and substance use concerns. It is a story of how researchers and community-based advocates can work across distance and culture, using co-learning in virtual communities as a core strategy to create relational system change. The three communities of practice were linked through a pan-territorial action research project entitled Repairing the Holes in the Net, in which all participants: learned together, mapped available services, discussed the findings from interviews with northern women about their trajectories of homelessness, analyzed relevant policy, planned local service enhancements, and generally took inspiration from each other
A Discussion Paper on Indigenous Custom Adoption Part 2: Honouring Our Caretaking Traditions
No full textThis paper forms Part 2 of a two-part discussion paper. Part 1 outlined a short history of adoption in Canada, examined the impact of forced, closed, and external adoptions on Indigenous adoptees and families, and traced the move toward more open statutory adoptions and greater cultural continuity in adoptions. Having zeroed in on the entangled histories of adoption and colonization in Part 1, here we explore traditional and contemporary practices of Indigenous custom adoption and caretaking. We first recount Western understandings and impositions, then feature Indigenous perspectives that centre spiritual and ceremonial protocols, values regarding child well-being and community connectedness, and the importance of kinship and customary forms of caretaking. We consider both the promises and complexities involved in designing and implementing custom adoptions, and the urgent need for adequate, equitable funding and supports to ensure their feasibility and sustainability. Finally, we highlight the resurgence of Indigenous authority over child welfare within a context of Indigenous self-determination and self-governance
The elusive promise of reconciliation in British Columbia child welfare: Aboriginal perspectives and wisdom from within the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development
No full textThis article considers the unique challenge for Aboriginal professionals working in a government child welfare system responsible for the oppression of Aboriginal children, families and communities. A non-Aboriginal organizational insider researcher uses an Indigenous/ethnographic approach to explore these issues with Aboriginal professionals within the British Columbia Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). This study involves a dual focus that examines the history, identity, values, motivations, and practice approaches of Aboriginal professionals as well as how organizational structural and environment variables support or impede their efforts toward critically needed improvements to child welfare services for Aboriginal children, youth, families and communities. Analysis of these two areas results in significant findings for the organization and its perceived inability to achieve progress with transforming service delivery for Aboriginal peoples. The findings contribute to better understanding of factors that impede Aboriginal professionals from achieving improved practice and outcomes. Organizational variables, such as low Aboriginal practice support, racism, cultural incompetence, hierarchical structure and decision making, risk-averse practice norms, poorly implemented or rhetorical change initiatives, and institutional physical environments impede the ability of Aboriginal professionals. However, significant mitigating factors were found to help, such as meaningful organizational support at the worksite level provided through dedicated culturally competent Aboriginal management and practice teams
Adoption is (not) a Dirty Word: Towards an Adoption-centric Theory of Citizenship
No full textThis paper argues that the resurgence of Indigenous peoples’ citizenship orders can be informed in part by tenets of Indigenous customary adoption. The paper considers registration as an Indian under Canada’s Indian Act as having conflated being “Indian” with a Eurocentric property-holder identity, which First Nations now internalize through band membership practices. As such, I argue that adoptees and customary adoption are seen as suspect because they challenge the blood and property-based conceptions of what it means to be “Indian.” Anishinaabeg customary adoption is taken up here in an analytical approach to re-thinking how citizenship could be discerned in anti-colonial ways; specifically, I consider “caring for others” and the concept of “controlling our associations” in developing an adoption-centric theory of Anishinaabeg citizenship
Community-based participatory research with Aboriginal children and their communities: Research principles, practice and the social determinants of health
No full textConventional health and social science research has contributed to advances in public well-being over the past century. Despite these advances, a significant gap exists in the health of Aboriginal children as compared to non-Aboriginal children in Canada. This has occurred, in part, as a result of the failure of conventional research to acknowledge the worldview of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, to fully take into account their experience of the social determinants of health (SDOH) and to address the intergenerational impact of colonization. In this article we review and discuss the social determinants of health (SDOH) with a specific focus on Aboriginal children and youth. Motivated by our experience in carrying out community based participatory research (CBPR) with children and families from First Nations and Métis communities in Alberta, Canada we review how use of CBPR) approach to research with Aboriginal children and communities can serve to enhance research results, resulting in greater relevance to community identified questions. We will address these issues in the context not only of good research practice but as an aspect of “wise practices” (Wesley-Esquimaux & Calliou, 2010) occurring within an “ethical space of engagement” (Ermine, 2007). We conclude that CBPR allows for meaningful and equitable research partnerships to occur in an ethical space without reinforcing colonial processes of knowledge construction and translation while marginalizing Indigenous knowledge