The principle may well have been enshrined in law since 2020 in Ottawa and since 2022 in Quebec, in Nunavik, the harshness of a real lack of resources can still have the last word in matters of child protection. The needs can become so dire that the need to preserve Inuit children’s connections to their family, community and culture becomes secondary. The shift is dangerous, because it awakens a specter that we thought had been freshly condemned and buried: that of forced acculturation.
The excellent series by our reporter Jessica Nadeau illustrates the difficult dilemma in which both the Nunavik Regional Health and Social Services Board, which oversees the two youth protection directorates (DPJ), are plunged, despite themselves. of northern Quebec, as families and their communities. We understand deep down in our guts the dilemma that is tearing them apart. The safety of a child is not a matter that can be diluted or postponed — everyone agrees on this point, in the North and in the South.
However, the means of ensuring the well-being of the children of the North must continue to be carefully weighed and discussed, even when the machine stalls. No tinkering, however well intentioned, should be permitted, even less so if it opens the door to “cultural uprooting” because the expected services “are not there”. It was stated as such, in black and white, in Jacques Viens’ 2019 report. The happy principle is no less true today.
That Judge Jacques Ladouceur questions in a judgment on the existence of a “prolific family network” of workers or ex-employees of the DPJ for the placement of Inuit children in the South is in this regard profoundly disturbing. Especially since other judgments subtly echo his own.
Relations between the DPJ and indigenous families have always been difficult. An Inuit mother whose two daughters were placed in the South spoke to the Duty, and it rightly reminds us how the image of a “child stealer” DPJ remains strong in the minds of the North. There are not a thousand ways to combat it: we must close all the loopholes likely to cause conflicts of interest and potential unnecessary uprooting. It’s easier said than done.
In its report published this month, the Commission on Human Rights and Youth Rights denounces the persistence of “perpetual breakdowns of services” and “social deprivation” with devastating effects on the youth of Nunavik.
Preventing any placement in the South is unthinkable in these conditions: there is a lack of too many host families, too many support resources, too much housing. But if we have to resign ourselves to continuing to place children, we will have to do so with much greater concern for cultural continuity, which tends to fade as the kilometers add up.
The story of this 16-year-old Inuit girl deprived for years of any contact with her family and her culture and today “in the process of very advanced assimilation”, in the very strong words of judge Peggy Warolin, is one obvious example. The teenager, who experienced 64 foster care placements and 14 emergency placements in seven years, paradoxically realized her uprooting through contact with Inuit women she met in a rehabilitation center. Since then, she has suffered cruelly.
The cultural disconnect is a nagging evil that should not be taken lightly. Especially with the memory of forced placements in boarding schools still so vivid. In a report that caused a stir in 2016, coroner Danielle Descent demonstrated that the majority of suicide victims in the communities of Uashat and Maliotenam had “been placed in a foster family, making the attachment significantly precarious and accelerating cultural loss.
No wonder that of all the issues that concern indigenous communities, it is that of the fate reserved for their young people which most strongly testifies to the pain of their cultural division of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Before the Viens commission, it was moreover the heartbreaking testimonies and the indignant declarations surrounding the youth protection services which were the most numerous to flow.
Five years later, Judge Viens’ ambitious, detailed roadmap has seen several significant advances. However, entire areas are fallow or budding. First and foremost, a good part of what relates to cultural security and continuity, the Achilles heels of our laws and our services for children, which nevertheless aim “to put an end to a situation of compromise”, and certainly “not to make it worse”, to use the words of Judge Warolin.
It is therefore on this front that we must act as a priority if we want to avoid waking up for good a specter that no one wants anymore.