Fallen Feather Productions

Chief Wayne Christian and Marie Tonasket – Denommee, Director of Splatsin Child and Family Preservation Team including Jayne Taylor, Tresha Stevens and Vivian Bonneau

Lately in the province of BC their looking at doing an Aboriginal child welfare legislation, which I think is the direction that we want to go. 

It makes a huge difference when you try to identify needs with a family early on and build on that.  We need resources to be able to do that.

What happens in our funding formula right now is that we don’t get paid for any prevention dollars, we only get paid for every child we have in care.  So there is no prevention fund, zero.  A prevention fund is to help children so they don’t come into care.  So you may know there could be a problem so you go in and do the early work with the family.  Or if children are not having problems you work with them to get the relationship going so they can role model their good behaviors to their peers.  Prevention keeps children out of care.

When working with Aboriginal families or children in care there has to be involvement between the foster parents and the Aboriginal community, and the child’s Band. 

There’s a lot of history that an Aboriginal person can identify with in their background.  It starts with the first experience with a social worker.  Most typically, they (social worker) are either non-native, middle class, and they see being in poverty as being a bad thing.  There are different levels of poverty, that I don’t think they totally understand.  And how a person percieves being in poverty, because for them poverty may be a way of life, to them it’s not a hardship, but for say a white, middle class person they would see that as inadaquate.  Also the historical stuff, loosing their families, the lack of trust, Aboriginal people don’t always trust social workers.  Social workers took their children, their identities and entire Aboriginal communities would go silent when the government took the children to place in non-native foster homes.  That’s the difference that an Aboriginal person can bring to the work because that’s what clients can identify with because there is a stigma given the history of child welfare since the 60′s Scoop.