Abstract
This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention.
In January 2011, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond – an Indigenous Cree lawyer and British Columbia’s Representative for Children and Youth – presented to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia (BC) a report entitled Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems: Strengthening Supports for Vulnerable Infants. The report reviewed the lives of 21 infants under the age of two who died between 1 June 2007 and 1 May 2009 while, in some capacity, living within the purview of the provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD). MCFD is the governmental body responsible for child protection, family development, adoption, foster care, early childhood development and child care, child and youth mental health and justice services, and children and youth living with special needs in British Columbia. Of the 21 infants who died, 19 had lived with families served primarily by MCFD and two of the infants lived with families served solely by an MCFD delegated Aboriginal Agency. 1 Five infants were being cared for in a foster home or a respite care placement, the ministry-approved option provided to parents who voluntarily agree to take a break from parenting for a short time. Three of the 21 infants were, by law, ‘in care;’ the children had been involuntarily apprehended from their families and placed under governmental guardianship. ‘All of the infants in this review were born into families facing tremendous challenges . . . ’ noted Turpel-Lafond, but ‘an alarming number of the infants – 15 of the 21 – were Aboriginal.’ 2
This is a paper about the tragedies detailed in Turpel-Lafond’s report. More specifically, it is a paper about child-welfare as experienced by Indigenous families and communities in BC. The paper is also a response to the ‘ontological turn’ in geography (and elsewhere), as it relates to Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples. By focusing on policies that touch down unevenly and to disastrous effect in the homes and families of Indigenous peoples, I am in part questioning the very kinds and scales of knowledges produced about ontologies and Indigenous peoples. Why does so much research about Indigeneity and ontology, including research produced by cultural geographers on topics that range from landscape painting to mapping and boundary-making, remain fundamentally tied to ecology, ecosystems, land, or macro-scale geographies and not attuned to Indigenous children’s bodies and homes? 3 What of intimate and domestic Indigenous ontologies, spaces where settler-colonialism remains present, acute, and embodied? What is critical cultural geography missing by amassing knowledges strangely silent about geographies of Indigenous families, geographies often headed by Indigenous women? As geographers grapple with slippages between culture and ontology, with postcoloniality or the lack thereof, with re/de-territorialization of Indigenous lands and resources, and with ways to articulate new, socially and politically-just ways of understanding spaces of Indigeneity, this paper proposes the importance of theorizing micro-scale domestic Indigenous ontologies.
I propose the deaths of 15 Indigenous infants, all of whom were known to the governmental agency tasked with family development and protecting children, must be included within discussions about Indigeneity and ontology and must be understood as constitutive of broader colonial systems, which I discuss in the first section of the paper. These systems are so fully naturalized as to be mostly invisible, especially to settler-colonists, 4 but they have systematically marginalized Indigenous peoples across a wide variety of sociocultural and physical geographies in British Columbia and beyond – and they are worthy of our attention. 5 I argue that a carefully produced, maintained, and historically contiguous set of logics premised on assumptions of neutrality, good intentions, and common sense vis-à-vis Indigenous children and families legitimizes child-welfare work done in BC today. More particularly, and as I argue in the second section of the paper, common sense is relied upon in child-welfare decisions about Aboriginal families. This common sense rests on assumptions about what constitutes good, moral, safe, and nurturing domestic spaces and on ignorance about the unique ontologies of Indigenous families and communities. If such common sense ignorance is not expressly interrogated as ontological, and at odds with different ontologies present in Indigenous families and communities, I propose colonial logics will remain fundamentally unchecked. I conclude by suggesting that destabilizing the child-welfare systems that currently so adversely impact Aboriginal families requires, first, critically situating child welfare within other systems that maintain colonial power and, second, rethinking it as always grounded, spatial, and material. Child welfare is inextricably attached to particular bodies, homes, and communities; these cannot be generically conceptualized but, instead, must be realized as always constructed within specific geographies and histories of power.
As written about elsewhere in reference to ways that colonial powers are sustained, 6 Gramsci’s examination of common sense is useful for understanding colonial state hegemony. Common sense has a powerful ability to transform and adapt to ‘scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation’ and to then make rigid ‘popular knowledge in a given time and place.’ 7 Indeed, as anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler points out, those at the helm of colonial projects have always ‘understood, if unevenly, that their political rationalities were dependent on crafting sensory attunements and affective affiliations that made up common sense.’ 8 Common sense in systems of governance – in the case of this paper, the governance of child welfare in BC – is also, as Derrida points out, often maintained and aligned with languages about goodness, morality, and thoughtful considerateness. 9 Destabilizing these languages, and the ideas of common sense they convey, is an important step toward more socially-just systems of governance: ‘Language . . . the words themselves, are a first mediating institution. There is always a strategical or political calculation in the generous gesture of one who offers . . . amnesty, and it is necessary always to interrogate this calculation in our analyses.’ 10 Close critical readings of the ostensibly neutral and common-sensically well-intended child-welfare languages and policies provide insight into how they function to structure and subordinate the domestic geographies of Indigenous families. The voices and perspectives of peoples self-identifying as Indigenous in northern British Columbia, who are living and embodying the outcomes of these common-sensically good child-welfare policies and practices, provide further insights into the ways child-welfare practices refuse different ontologies of home and perpetuate settler-colonial power. Thus, while this paper is based primarily in analysis of government policy, which is presented in the first section of the paper, interviews carried out with Indigenous service providers and with families who have experienced child-welfare policies are presented in the second half of the paper in order to extend understandings of ways that different ontologies of families and domestic places remain at odds with each other in a neocolonial present. Fundamentally, this paper aims to disrupt hegemonic, common sense, taken-for-granted ways by which Indigenous peoples are conceptualized and consequently governed by child-welfare systems that I argue always perpetuate non-Indigenous states of power.
I take as my starting point that child welfare and child protection are ontological – and should be of concern to those thinking through questions about Indigeneity and ontology. Despite existing at one register in the semiotic, discursive, and epistemic realms of policy, law, public rhetoric, and theory, they are importantly and simultaneously lived and embodied, ultimately unfolding upon and with material consequence to particular kinds of bodies, families, homes, and communities. What precisely is meant by something being ontological (as opposed to epistemological, semiotic, or theoretical) can be difficult to define. In this paper, and in conversation with discussions about ontology that are unfolding across the discipline of geography and other social sciences, I use the concept to denote groundedness. In line with an ontological turn that aims to politicize concepts, to enliven social and cultural geography, and to fully understand sociocultural relations and happenings as they occur in and of the world – social and cultural phenomena must be understood in and through what happens to people in place. 11 There is merited skepticism about pure hard and fast dichotomies between ontology and epistemology and growing agreement that ample work now demonstrates the impossibility of separating semiotics, knowledge, social constructions, practices, the real, and grounded materialities. 12 I argue herein, however, that child welfare provides an under-scrutinized and productive frame through which to illustrate, with specific reference to colonialism’s ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples, the grounded – or ontological – nature and impact of especially neocolonial government policy and the inextricability of epistemic systems from ontological colonial violences. I argue further that transforming child welfare, so that it no longer impacts Indigenous peoples so deleteriously, can only occur by expressly and purposefully theorizing it ontologically, at multiple scales, and importantly in the register of children’s bodies and Indigenous homes. I suggest too that the ontologies of government child welfare are different from, and clashing with, many Indigenous families’ ontologies of home. By focusing on child-welfare policies and practices as they impact Indigenous peoples, and by drawing upon the voices of Indigenous peoples working the front lines of Indigenous peoples’ home and family geographies, I locate my arguments somewhat outside work by other geographers (including cultural geographers) and social scientists examining Indigeneity and ontology (broadly). Much of that work tends to focus not on domestic or micro-scale places but instead on territory, land, and the natural environment and associated macro-scale questions of sovereignty, development, economics, or resources. 13 These focuses are not out of synch with traditional divisions between the epistemological ‘world as known, as thought’ versus the ontological ‘world as is, as being’ that have driven human geography’s broader, although not fixed, positioning of ontological investigations within, principally, nature/culture divides or relationships between human society and nature, place, and space. 14 Indeed, even within the context of this special issue of cultural geographies, this paper stands out as a paper not at all linked to land, natural resources, of environment. The presence of this paper in the special edition, and in cultural geographies more specifically, is an effort of thinking about Indigeneity and ontology differently, of grounding inquiries about Indigeneity differently.
Human geographers’ conceptualizations of ontologies are shifting, notably resulting in growing critique of hard and fast binaries between subject/object and knowing/being, with an attendant interest about concepts of ‘becoming.’ 15 In inquiries about Indigeneity and Indigenous geographies, though, the literature remains dominated by considerations about Indigenous cultures and identities flowing from ecological environments or slippages between human and non-human objects/environments within Indigenous ways of knowing and being. 16 I suspect these conceptualizations should and could be usefully critiqued for continuing resilient histories of framing Indigenous peoples and Indigeneity as inextricably linked to land, physical territory, the environment or, more problematically, a wilderness counterpart. 17 In this paper, though, I am principally concerned with expanding what has to date simply been a lack of geographic inquiry about the ontologies of, and attendant anti-colonial and political possibilities in, micro-scale, diminutive, vernacular, and domestic places lived by Indigenous children and their families – many of which are led by Indigenous women. Considering child welfare, then, dialogues productively with other especially feminist and anti-colonial geographic work that links colonial pasts and contemporary domestic politics and that recognizes ontologies as relational, as co-constitutively produced by people and spatialities, and as always informed by (especially unequal) relationships of power across multiple scales. 18 By tracing historic common sense attitudes about Indigenous people, by deconstructing child welfare to show it is not as neutral, given, or indeed common-sensically good and well-intentioned either as it might first appear or as government officials suggest it to be, and by then drawing on the voices of people working on the frontlines of Indigenous communities to demonstrate the need to ground (or ontologize) child welfare, I take up what Ann Laura Stoler observes more generally about colonial government policies: ‘epistemic considerations are neither transcendent nor abstract. They are of the colonial world and squarely in it.’ 19
Children at risk need protecting: it has always made good common sense
Child welfare as a state endeavor ultimately involves invasive and disruptive government-sanctioned interventions into the domestic spaces of families. 20 Child apprehensions, one outcome of conclusions that a child is at risk, involve social workers, and sometimes police officers or security guards or hospital and school officials, removing children from their families, often without parental or child consent. First-person testimonials by parents about their experiences of having their children removed rely on words like ‘stealing,’ ‘baby snatching,’ ‘kidnapping,’ and ‘life altering.’ 21 The work surrounding an apprehension consists of time-consuming and arduous processes involving social workers, courts, lawyers, family mediation programs, parental supervision by state authorities, all of which can be devastating to a family. As one mother explains, ‘[s]ince the day of my daughter’s birth, I have been fighting to keep the MCFD from removing her: doing as required by the MCFD [means] proving the accusations against me wrong [and] putting my own life (education) on hold. It sure isn’t easy.’ 22 Like other state actions that suspend considerations granted to the majority of a population or to a majority of individuals (e.g. imprisoning a person), intervening into families for child-welfare purposes requires systems of logic, policy, and then law that provide clarity and justification about why implementing the invasive, disruptive and sometimes even violent practices is, fundamentally, justifiable or better than not implementing them. 23 Child-welfare policies, and the social workers who implement or enact them, balance the conflicting pressures of, on the one hand, society’s wish to protect children from abuse and, on the other hand, broad social agreement that the family unit is a bastion of liberty which should be intervened into only with utmost caution. 24
Given that British Columbia joined the confederation of Canada in 1871, legalized state intervention into families has a relatively long history in the province. In March 1901, the first child welfare act was passed in the BC Legislative Assembly, solidifying in law the benevolent efforts of the Council of Women of Vancouver to ensure that children were not left in circumstances and places where they faced abuse, neglect, or abandonment. 25 Formalized governing of child welfare was – and is – premised on the idea that the spaces of some families are so antithetical to children’s well-being that it is incumbent upon the state to remove them and (re)place them into safer, healthier, spaces. Logics about child welfare have always relied on assumptions that there are objective quantifiable means of assessing the virtuousness of some families’ domestic spaces versus the corruptness or unwholesomeness of others. Historic assessments were often based on the hygiene of a home, morality of the parents, future potential afforded to the children by living in the home, and behaviors of parents and relatives towards each other and the children. 26 In British Columbia today, policies about child welfare are still infused with languages about goodness, safety, and the best interests of children.
The impulse to assist and better the lives of those positioned at the margins of society, and in Canada this has often included Indigenous peoples, is remarkably immune to critique at the time of its unfolding. 27 With ostensibly all good intentions, non-Indigenous government, non-governmental, and ecumenical agencies have a long history of constructing themselves as protecting and benevolent forces aiming to ‘improve’ and ‘help’ Indigenous peoples ‘for their own good.’ 28 Much of this work was underwritten by logics of common sense: ‘The epistemic tasks that colonial institutions faced . . . . [depended on] . . . a shared common sense about what was likely, allowing prediction and directing the political projects it served.’ 29 Common sense was (and is) a crucial colonial strategy with remarkable resiliency, offering colonizers a means to distance themselves from more obviously coercive or violent ideas, actions, and policies. Protecting, helping, and keeping Indigenous children and families safe, is a project with a long history in Canada and British Columbia. 30 As early as 1845, the government of the then-not-yet Canada voiced interest in the welfare of those considered most at risk for deleterious and a-moral behaviors, Aboriginal peoples: ‘[We are] interested in the welfare of this race . . . [of] mass[ing] valuable information upon their present state, and suggestions for improving it . . . to form a judgment upon any scheme proposed for their future management.’ 31 It was common sense of the day that underpinned the policies and laws of what is now referred to by some as Canada’s ‘national crime.’ 32 Residential schooling, although it shifted depending on the times and places in which it was delivered, was an effort, as outlined in federal government policy documents and program documents, to ‘produce Indians . . . adjusted to modern life [and] capable of meeting the exacting demands of modern society with all its complexities.’ 33 From its onset, residential schooling was framed as a means of ‘saving’ Indigenous children, through education – which had high moral standing in Canada throughout the 19th and 20th centuries – from the inherent lack of education, civility, safety, and progress understood to mark the spaces of Indigenous families and communities. Residential schooling was presented as a benevolent common-sensically good endeavor concerned with child welfare and protection. 34
Common-sense benevolence, then, is not a response to a politically neutral assessment of Indigenous peoples ‘needs.’ Rather, it is a longstanding contributor to a cycle of identifying deficiencies that can then be ‘fixed,’ making control more palatable to those involved. Historically, there has been a constant (re)production of Indigeneity – and places it is associated with – as abnormal or as normally aberrant. 35 Spaces and bodies of Indigenous peoples have always in colonial policy and law been rarified and codified as unique and as requiring the well-intentioned interventions of non-Indigenous powers. For Indigenous peoples, this cycle involves an endless deferral – often by governments – of the time when they can be deemed ‘ready’ to ‘manage’ themselves. 36 In the opening decades of the 21st century, it is child-welfare policies, replete with much benevolent language, that are increasingly managing the lives of many Indigenous peoples and families.
Today’s Child Welfare Act, and those who enforce it, has undergone various iterations since the early decades of the 20th century. Early child-protection workers were mostly charity workers or members of religious benevolent societies. Child-welfare policies and practices saw their most significant transformations between 1930 and 1960. During that time, social work became an institutionally recognized university degree in the province, the Depression left increasing numbers of families economically marginalized, and Indian residential schools, which through the 1950s were the principle places and means for the state to ‘care’ for Aboriginal children, 37 began to shut down. 38 The 1960s through the 1980s saw what has become known as ‘the sixties scoop:’ 39 in 1955, as Indian residential schools began to close in the province, 29 Aboriginal children entered the child-welfare system; by 1964 the number had risen to 1446. 40 Numbers of Aboriginal children entering the provincial child-welfare system have grown steadily (and increased as a percentage of the total population) since the 1960s. 41 In 2008, over 9200 children were in ‘care’ in British Columbia – many more were being monitored by the child-welfare system. 42 Provincial and national Aboriginal organizations, including the Assembly of First Nations and the Native Women’s Association of Canada, have called the percentages of Aboriginal children now in care ‘epidemic,’ calculating the numbers of children in state care as a function of child-welfare intervention as greater than those who went through the residential schooling system. 43
Child welfare in BC is governed within the legal framework of the Child, Family, and Community Service Act (CFCS Act), originally passed in the Legislative Assembly of BC in 1996 and amended through to include 2011. During those 15 years, the CFCS Act, the Ministers appointed to oversee the act and lead MCFD, and that MCFD personnel tasked with implementing the policies associated with the act have, according to more than one commission tasked with evaluating the ministry and the success or failures of its mandates, changed so many times that the lack of consistency itself is compromising the state’s ability to deal safely with child welfare. 44 Between 2004 and 2011, with a growing number of children dying either while in the care of MCFD or after having not received governmental care despite calls for such care and in the midst of growing and sustained criticism, the provincial government took significant efforts to explain child-welfare and protection services to British Columbians writ large. The results are a plethora of reports, websites, and ‘family-friendly’ materials designed to explain MCFD logics and practices. Close and critical reading of the materials provides insight into the production of a particular kind of ontology, a cohesive messaging about what constitutes good common-sense ways of assessing concerns about a child’s welfare and if a child requires the care of the state.
According to these publications, the basic premise of MCFD’s work is to provide ‘programs and services to ensure that healthy children and responsible families are living in safe, caring and inclusive communities.’ 45 In February 2011, when Mary Polack was the MCFD Minister, she observed that ‘[o]ur government is committed to ensuring that all children and youth in British Columbia have the strongest start possible. Safety is always of the utmost importance and is always our number one priority . . . Keeping children and youth safe is the responsibility of all British Columbians.’ 46 After ministerial changeover later in 2011, the fifth since 2006, the new Minister of MCFD Mary McNeil observed that ‘[t]his is an exciting time of change for British Columbia . . . [with] a new agenda that is putting B.C. families first . . . [u]nder the “families first” vision . . . [an] action plan [that] puts a strong focus on early intervention and a needs-based approach to supporting and protecting vulnerable children and youth – through a strong, integrated system.’ 47 Posters for child-abuse-prevention hotlines read ‘It’s Everyone’s Responsibility to Keep Kids Safe. You Can Help.’ The Child Family Community Service Act requires by law that ‘anyone who has reason to believe that a child may be abused, neglected, or is for any other reason in need of protection, must report it to the Director [of MCFD] or a delegated social worker.’ 48 People who suspect a child is being abused or neglected are encouraged to call a provincial hotline to report their suspicions. Responding to Child Welfare Concerns: Your Role in Knowing When and What to Report, 49 is a booklet that abounds in schools, doctor’s offices, and social-service agencies. It outlines indicators that a child may be being physically, sexually and/or emotionally abused. According to the booklet, indicators to arouse suspicions of child maltreatment are disturbing, clear, and obvious. They range from lesions, visible bruising, and hand or object marks on any/all parts of a child’s body through to severe antisocial behaviors and suicidal ideations. The factors that would elicit suspicion of child abuse seem reasonably common-sensical: an injury on a child ‘in the shape of a stove burner or a belt buckle’ 50 is cause for concern, worthy of reporting to officials and professionals trained to reach well-reasoned decisions about such situations. The booklet also clarifies that ‘you do not need proof. Just report what you know . . . If you do not want to give your name or phone number, that is okay.’ 51 The indicators leave little doubt that it makes good and common sense to report any inclination that a child may be being abused. It is difficult to negate these publications’ messaging. Who would want or advocate for unhealthy children living in unsafe, uncaring and non-inclusive spaces? Who would argue against children having a strong and safe start to life? These publications, then, produce a set of frameworks about child welfare that easily form an ontological reference point from which common-sense decisions can be made.
Concepts like ‘healthy children’ and ‘responsible families,’ however, are not neutral or generalizable referents for common-sense decisions. Nor are they always easily assessable, definable, quantifiable, or immune to the sociogeographic and historical contexts in which they are circulated. A significant portion of wording in the documents deals with the very slippery concept of neglect, which is also mandatory to report, but about which much less clarity can be offered to a reader: ‘Neglect happens when a parent or guardian ignores or overlooks a child’s basic needs – to the point where the child is, or could be, harmed. Neglect includes failing to provide a child with food, shelter, basic health care, supervision, nurturing or protection from risks.’ 52 Indicators of neglect include ‘[c]lothing that does not protect the child from the weather . . . [and/or] poor personal hygiene.’ 53 The language about neglect is much more ambiguous than the language about abuse. Indeed, much of the language is ungrounded, resting on wording about ‘believing’ a child might be suffering from neglect, or about everyone needing to have the ‘best interests’ of a child at heart when evaluating a situation. Read in tandem with indicators about physical and sexual abuse, and offering no languages about how to critically think about broad social inequities (poverty and racialization for instance) that are not unto themselves reasons to remove children from their family geographies, the government materials simultaneously conflate neglect with other abuses and produce a message that ascertaining when and if a family requires state intervention is a clear and common-sensical process. When taken on the whole, informational materials disseminated by MCFD provide a unified and accessible suggestion that child welfare and child protection are good practices that address (if not solve) serious and harmful situations. The publications make clear that everyone in a population is vested in child safety and the maintenance of healthy and responsible families. People can report suspicions in anonymous ways and partaking in the surveillance of children’s well-being (or lack thereof) seems to mean partaking in a morally helpful, not to mention, legally mandated practice.
Grounding child-welfare policies and rhetoric: the realities of Aboriginal families
The reasons Aboriginal families are being reported, investigated, and intervened into are not, on the main, based on the physical or sexual violence and abuse about which there is such clear language in publications promoting child welfare. Instead, as reports by multiple First Nations community-based organizations emphasize, even though Aboriginal children are less likely than non-Aboriginal children to face physical or emotional abuse, they are more likely to be investigated for reasons of neglect. In four cycles (1998, 2001, 2003 and 2008) of the Canadian Incidence Study on Reported Child Abuse and Neglect commissioned by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), 54 neglect is the leading reason Aboriginal children are brought to the attention of child-welfare and protection services. 55 Reports of neglect comprised 40 percent of investigations into child maltreatment in 1998 in Canada, 57 percent of which were unfounded. 56 These numbers were virtually unchanged in 2001 and shifted only slightly in 2003. 57 According to the 2008 Incidence Study, of the over 235,000 child maltreatment investigations that occurred in Canada, 30 percent of all the investigations were based on unfounded concerns. This does not undermine the severity and seriousness of the 70 percent of substantiated cases. But, when the substantiated cases are broken down, at 34 percent respectively ‘neglect’ and ‘exposure to intimate partner violence’ (a new category in 2008) comprised an equal majority (at 68%) of the incidences of child maltreatment. 58 These numbers highlight three important issues. First, full clarity about what constitutes child maltreatment does not exist in those who report it. Second, suspicion of child neglect remains a primary reason for people to report suspicions of child maltreatment. And, third, neglect is a leading reason for finding that a child is in need of welfare-intervention services. There are material, grounded, implications of this lack of clarity about what constitutes child maltreatment and about assumptions of neglect being a leading reason for social workers to concur that family is in need of state services.
There is, it might be concluded, an ontological clash laying out in the homes and families of Indigenous peoples. As of 2008, Aboriginal children made up 51 percent of children in care in BC; the province’s 2008/2009 Auditor General Report noted that ‘[s]tudies indicate that in British Columbia, an Aboriginal child is about 6 times more likely to be taken into care than a non-Aboriginal child. Of all BC children who are in care, 51% are Aboriginal — yet Aboriginal people represent only about 8% of BC’s population.’ 59 The 2010 MCFD service plan reported 53 percent of 8677 children in the ministry’s care were Aboriginal 60 and the 2008 Canadian Incident Studies Report on child protection notes a rate of 49.69/1000 of Aboriginal families reported for investigation compared to only 11.85/1000 reports on non-Aboriginal families. 61 Within a rhetoric-infused context about domestic and family spaces needing to be safe and healthy for children, a context constructed by non-concretized and ungrounded languages and policies about scenarios in which children need protection from harm (including neglect), it is Aboriginal families who are being intervened into at greater rates than any other. Indigenous peoples working on or living at the front lines of child welfare consistently reassert that state intervention into their families is simply a continuation of ongoing efforts to secure settler-colonial power. This requires greater critical attention, including understanding the actual and grounded workings of child apprehensions and removals.
Once any child-welfare concern is reported, assessing the concern and deciding on next steps is immediate: ‘if there are concerns about a child’s safety, a child-welfare worker has a legal duty to respond under the Child Family and Community Service Act. The child-welfare worker has a number of options after making an assessment: ‘take no further action, refer the family to support services, . . . evaluate the family’s strengths and needs and . . . develop a plan to provide support services, [or] conduct a child protection investigation.’
62
Even if no further action is deemed necessary, a case-file is opened about the reported family and the particulars of the complaint are documented and recorded. This ‘record’ then informs any subsequent reports about the family. Should it be concluded that action of any kind is indeed required, the actions are taken by social workers guided by the Child and Family Development Service Standards (CFDSS) manual, referred to colloquially as ‘the practice standards’ manual.
63
The manual’s purpose is to:
promote consistent high-quality service for vulnerable children, youth and families while enabling flexibility in the way services are provided to meet the unique needs, capacities and resources of communities . . . The standards are not based on a particular service delivery model. Rather, they are designed to be flexible enough to work within a variety of service delivery approaches.
64
The manual continues:
With the exception of the administrative procedures, there is minimal use of procedural language in the standards. The language focuses on the intended outcomes of the service, rather than process or the steps to reach the outcomes . . . The approach taken in the standards affords greater flexibility in practice and allows the standards to fit a variety of service delivery models currently existing in communities . . .
65
Service standards governing assessment of whether or not a child is at risk in BC, and thus guiding state interventions into families, emphasize a lack of procedural (e.g. applied and grounded) language, a ‘broadness,’ and a ‘descriptiveness.’ The standards contain nothing about applied steps and practices or concrete means that might allow a social worker to ascertain if and how neglect exists in a family in a specific place. In other words, child-welfare guidelines about how to assess if a child or family requires state intervention, especially based on concerns or reports about neglect, are entirely devoid of grounded examples while simultaneously producing ontologies by which (particularly) Indigenous families are dealt with. In a remarkably circular logic relying on its own government-produced materials, the governmental CFDSS manual refers those who face uncertainties in the field (e.g. a home or domestic space) to The Handbook for Action on Child Abuse and Neglect: For Service Providers. 66 Beyond very obvious indicators such as bodily harm, starvation, and sexual exploitation of children, the handbook (like other materials) provides little clarity on the nebulous situations bound to present when assessing the need for child protection. The handbook states ‘[c]hildren do not always tell us about their abuse or neglect, and sometimes the indicators are not obvious,’ but specific or location-precise processes and means to assess if a child is in need of protection based on neglect are entirely absent. 67 Despite all BC Government materials undergoing wholesale revisions in the last decade, so that wording conveys governmental concern with the ‘best interests’ of children, families, and communities, child-welfare policies never acknowledge or even attend to either the possibilities of different Indigenous ontologies or the colonial politics and histories that underpin the very categories and assumptions embedded in the policies.
The CFCS act, the CFDSS manual and other MCFD publications about child protection and welfare, are additionally paradoxical. On the one hand, they are full of wording about Aboriginal peoples and, insofar as the publications make regular mention of ‘Aboriginal culture,’ full of references to Indigenous identity, heritage, community, Indigeneity. 68 Nowhere in the CFDSS manual or associated handbooks, however, is there any mention, any concrete, grounded, descriptions of spaces or places (the rooms and houses or even communities) in which reportable activities will have unfolded and where assessments will occur. That there may be different Indigenous ontologies of family and home that require attention by a child-welfare worker is rendered impossible. Given so many child-welfare interactions involve non-Indigenous social workers evaluating Aboriginal families and homes, often based on concerns of neglect, it is notable that no discussions are offered about ways to understand or evaluate family and domestic geographies outside non-Indigenous frames of reference or expertise. Distinctive or specific geographies of Indigenous families, whose lives and realties are inextricably intertwined with experiences of colonialism and who are consequently racialized in unique ways, receive no attention in child-welfare materials. Indeed, no discussions exist about how those working working within Indigenous communities, which often have disproportionate levels of poverty and sociocultural trauma, might thoughtfully evaluate Indigenous families and homes on their own merits or in terms not requiring state intervention. Policies and reference materials never make explicit that histories of colonization, often leading to economic and health marginalization in and of Indigenous communities, do not unto themselves clearly map out as neglect, abuse, or maltreatment within Indigenous domestic and family spaces.
That embodied, grounded, or place/site specific languages to guide assessments and/or subsequent actions and interventions are nowhere to be found is strangely at odds with child-welfare policies explicit emphasis on ‘community,’ and especially Aboriginal community. Notably, the CFDSS manual has independent and stand-alone standards and languages that apply only to Aboriginal families and communities. While perhaps common sensically well-intentioned, the wording results in an obvious emphasis on Indigenous peoples, a heightened focus on Aboriginal families, and a rarefication of their realities as distinctly different from non-Indigenous peoples. What constitutes these differences is never concretized, however. Nowhere is difference tempered with grounded discussion about ways to undertake child-welfare work with Indigenous families that account for a colonial context or that detail unique ontologies of Indigenous families and communities. Still, one of the seven ‘key themes’ of the CFDSS manual is ‘keeping Aboriginal children connected with their families and communities, and strengthening collaborative working relationships with Aboriginal communities.’ 69 Another one of the seven ‘guiding principles’ of the law upon which all child-welfare and protection practices are based in BC (the CFCS Act) is that ‘the cultural identity of aboriginal children should be preserved.’ 70 One of the five ‘service delivery principles’ of the law is that ‘aboriginal people should be involved in the planning and delivery of services to aboriginal families and their children.’ 71 Of the two subsections in the act devoted to the ‘best interests of the child,’ one section is simply that ‘[i]f the child is an aboriginal child, the importance of preserving the child’s cultural identity must be considered in determining the child’s best interests.’ 72 No other population is as singled out, as clearly rarefied and highlighted with reference to child welfare, as Indigenous peoples. Any yet there are no details or languages about the deleterious outcomes of colonial dispossession of Indigenous communities, about which much evidence abounds. 73 No linkages are drawn between historical and contemporary colonial interventions into families and territories and the corresponding sociocultural breakdowns that are, globally, understood as linked. 74 Nor are there any languages about how government officials tasked with evaluating the domestic spaces of an Indigenous family might disentangle markers of being colonized from indicators of neglectful or harmful parenting. Indigenous ontologies are, fundamentally, left fully unattended to.
In terms of grounding the principles about the best interests of Aboriginal families, of translating policy language into clear guidelines that would shape the practices of social work in homes and in communities, things falter even further. The CFCS act and CFDSS manuals instruct social workers that, 1) when screening reports and establishing approaches to service delivery, the ‘intent’ is to acknowledge that ‘a careful assessment involves the family and community, taking into account their strengths, needs, culture, and beliefs’ and 2) all MCFD policies ‘are based on an assessment of the context and needs of the child and family.’ 75 This language is never concretized. Social workers, child-welfare workers, or even concerned citizens who fear child maltreatment or neglect may be unfolding, are never given ways to consider colonialism’s ongoing dispossession of Indigenous communities – which results in poverty and a host of other marginalized realities. Nor are they provided with tools to account for the strengths, needs, culture resiliencies, and unique spaces of Indigenous families and communities. Indeed, the MCFD consultant responsible for training child-protection and child-welfare social workers in the largest health region of BC (the Northern Health Authority) observed there is ‘no ticky-box tool’ or any concrete or definitive set of criteria used by social workers to assess if a child requires protection. Instead, a social worker ‘makes their assessments based on their experience and training.’ 76 In other words, common sense plays an important role in decisions about child welfare in Indigenous families.
Reliance upon common sense figures elsewhere. Social workers are encouraged to consider the ‘need for stability’ and ‘continuity of life-long relationships’ in a child’s life. These concepts are vague and open-ended enough that little choice would be left other than to bring into play best, common-sensical interpretation and judgment. Both the CFSC Act and the Service Standards manual make mention of assessments and decisions being ‘community specific’ which, according to the MCFD trainer in northern BC, means that social workers are encouraged to ‘remember where they are’ when forming judgments: it is important, for instance, that a social worker ‘not have the same’ or universal expectations for ‘housing and general living standards’ in different communities because a rural or remote town might be ‘really different’ than an affluent ‘urban place.’ 77 Details or concrete descriptions that could inform community or place-specific assessments, however, are never offered. Nor is there ever a contextualizing of Indigenous communities and domestic geographies as always emplaced within colonial systems.
First Nations service providers working on child welfare and, specifically apprehension of Aboriginal children in the Northern Health Authority, link the lack of grounded, concrete languages or directions in child-welfare policy with sustained misunderstandings between ministry officials and Aboriginal families: ‘We [a First Nations advocacy organization] have a lot of frustration . . . when our kids are apprehended. A lot of times the social workers don’t even know that [First Nations’ expertise] are in existence and that we’re able to provide some supports for our children. So how do we . . . make ourselves more valuable within the system? How do we get our voices heard as advocates in a better way?’
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Misunderstandings, say First Nations service providers working with families who have encountered the child-welfare system, too often stem from Eurocentric, colonial (often racist) assumptions about Indigenous peoples and places: ‘There needs to be a cultural awareness that [ensures] cultural safety, cultural appropriateness. They [non-Aboriginal social workers] come from Eurocentric mindsets. Those Eurocentrics need to know more about Aboriginal peoples’ ways of knowing and being.’
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In essence, there is a clash of ontologies unfolding in British Columbia – a clash of ways to understand Indigenous ontologies of families and domestic spaces that is never recognized by non-Indigenous child-welfare policies. Specifically, say service-providers, policies and their resultant practices must be ‘much clearer’ and ‘more directive’ about ways for social workers to differently assess the different nature of Indigenous domestic and community ontologies, about the requirement to work directly with Indigenous groups and community services, about the ways that colonization has produced particular kinds of domestic spaces that do not simply translate in child neglect, about ways to overcome or at least account for biases behind common-sense assumptions about the spaces of Indigenous families, about why apprehending children is linked to much broader and more grounded community issues and, consequently, about how to stem the numbers of Indigenous children being apprehended. As one Aboriginal family advocate notes:
As a Wet’suwet’en woman, as a mother looking back at historical practices, I know that the Indian Act has affected every facet of my life. And you know that paternalistic, patriarchal, colonialist structures have disrupted the fabric of our lives. We live in communities as Mothers, but they’re not our community . . . because you’re placed in your husband’s community . . . I live on my husband’s home reserve which, you know, precolonization, I never would have. [A mother would have been] surrounded by [her] mothers and your sisters and aunties and your cousins. So now you live in this community where you have no power. I think that is the fundamental break that is happening to disempower Aboriginal mothers. Add residential schools in there and you’ve just got that whole thing going . . . I see multigenerational traumas [and] . . . poverty. That is huge, it’s true, and I don’t think you can separate those, unfortunately.’
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From the perspective of Indigenous peoples and communities, the effects of well-intentioned reporting of Aboriginal families as sites of child-welfare concerns are unwelcome, far from helpful, and have broad implications that span multiple scales. Summarizing what many Indigenous organizations assert, one First Nations organization observes, ‘By removing a family member from the original home community, child welfare . . . can impact on the strength of that [entire] First Nations community as it loses another community member.’ 81 Indeed, for many Indigenous peoples there is an undeniable and tangible link between child-protection interventions and an overall compromised standard of life, a cycle that perpetuates assumptions about Indigenous-family geographies as exactly the ones in constant need of government intervention. According to national Aboriginal organizations, the more a family is disrupted by government interventions, the more fragile a family becomes and the more vulnerable its family space becomes to subsequent investigations and incursions. 82 The greater the number of fragile families, the less likely Aboriginal communities within which those families exist will be able to overcome what remains into the 21st century some of the lowest standards of health and well-being in the country. 83 These unique Indigenous domestic ontologies, however, are never accounted for in current child-welfare policies and practices.
Child-protection and child-welfare practices in BC are operating within a paradox. On the one hand, child-protection laws state both that the CFCS act ‘must be interpreted and administered so that the safety and well-being of children are the paramount considerations, that children are entitled to be protected from abuse, neglect and harm or threat of harm’ and that ‘a family is the preferred environment for the care and upbringing of children and the responsibility for the protection of children rests primarily with the parents.’ 84 Also, according to the CFCS act, every effort must be made to ensure that ‘kinship ties and a child’s attachment to the extended family . . . be preserved if possible and . . . the cultural identity of aboriginal children should be preserved.’ 85 On the other hand, two things are still happening in British Columbia – with little sign of abating. First, Aboriginal families are, for reasons of suspected child neglect, being intervened into by MCFD at disproportionally higher rates than any other families in the province. 86 Secondly, disproportionally high rates of Aboriginal children, once under the purview of MCFD because of concerns about neglectful domestic spaces, are meeting with tragedy, including death. 87 Practices, polices, and laws written by governments focused on bright futures and full of language about the safety, health, and well-being of Aboriginal children and families, then, are resulting in just the opposite.
Bringing it home: some conclusions about ontologizing child welfare
Where people are located, especially and including intimate places of family and home and broader communities of kin and acquaintances, actively shapes social understandings and positioning of them. Accordingly, judgments and decisions about Aboriginal families’ maltreatment or neglect of children, which always occur in and rest upon expectations about what constitutes good or appropriate domestic and community ontologies, are always grounded, despite most often not being expressly articulated as such. In the case of assessments about a child’s welfare in an Aboriginal family or community, domestic and cultural spaces are judged, often tacitly and with well-intended common-sense perspectives, by professionals armed with little more than nebulously worded ungrounded policies that are never concretized, or – ultimately – ontologized in ways that might account for Indigenous peoples as uniquely racialized because of colonial dispossession. In northern interior BC, for instance, First Nations peoples directly correlate the Indian reserves where they live, spaces they were forcibly relocated to because of settler-colonial policies that did not establish treaties, with being discriminated against: as one First Nations woman noted, ‘I’d like people to know that just because we’re Indians, we’re not a lower life form. Which is really what you get . . . It’s a fact of life, we all know it.’ 88
In practical terms, child-welfare languages, policies, and practices never make explicit how to address Indigenous peoples’ ‘third world conditions of health,’ or ‘embodiment of inequality.’
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Nor is any guidance offered either about how
Removal of Indigenous children from homes, families, and communities, has occurred for a long time. Rarely have the logics that underpinned these removals not turned on benevolence and a ‘common sense’ of the day. It once made good, moral, sense (at least to those with the power to enforce it) to save souls, to civilize ‘savages’ who lived as families in places perceived as filthy and sinful, and to impart markers of modernity like literacy and education upon people for whom assimilation was understood as inevitable. It is difficult to argue against the imperative of keeping children – and all people, for that matter – safe and free from abuse. And it is true that children are particularly vulnerable members of any society. Despite the vast, government produced, rhetoric about making BC safe for all children and families, about a happy, exciting, and healthy future for all British Columbians, Aboriginal families are still facing disruptive, government-driven, intervention at unparalleled rates. In addition to the disproportionally high rates of apprehensions and interventions, and as Turpel-Lafond details, Indigenous children are also dying at unprecedented rates once under the purview of the MCFD, often in homes being monitored by the state. Three contributing factors may be behind this. First, because of deeply ingrained historic ideas about Indigenous people being aberrant and requiring intervention, Indigenous children are seen – and thus reported – as requiring more care, more often, than non-Indigenous children. More Indigenous families are consequently being investigated and, whatever the outcome of the investigations, are (re)constructed through expectations about the elevated nature of Indigenous families’ needing care by the state. Secondly, with an ascendance of rhetoric about what constitute good and morally sound families, more attention may be focused on homes that seem not to adhere to common-sense ideas about what constitutes safe, happy, strong, and healthy domestic places. Once such homes and families are called to the state’s attention, common sense constructed around the same rhetoric is relied upon to ascertain a child’s state of well-being or lack thereof. Thirdly, Indigenous children and families are, by default and by the logics and rhetoric that collude to reproduced them as such, perceived as always abnormal and unsafe. They are and thus always requiring some type of intervention, which may lead to racialized expectations about their unsafe situations being a ‘normal’ state. This would translate into genuinely unsafe circumstances simply being ignored, viewed as ‘par for the course’ and a normal part of an already marginalized and othered geography. Nowhere is attention paid to ways of assessing Indigenous-family ontologies based on their own merits and terrains.
The Aboriginal families who attracted the gaze and attention of MCFD between 1 June 2007 and 1 May 2009 were absolutely multiply marginalized. 91 They faced unique ontological circumstances. This opened them up to scrutiny through a variety of normative sociogeographic lenses that can find families or communities wanting and unfit. Multiple marginalizations can also produce assumptions about potential markers of risk simply being expected in the rarefied and already ‘not normal’ geographies of the margins. If both the general public, who is called upon to report suspicions about child maltreatment, and professionals, who are called upon to judge if child maltreatment is occurring, scrutinize realities of these families in part through common-sense orientations about good and moral domestic spaces, about which people are being actively schooled through multitude publications circulated by the MCFD, it makes sense that interventions might appear appropriate in the case of impoverished, marginalized, or racialized Indigenous families or, paradoxically and conversely, that there is no need to intervene. What appear to be good, common-sense driven state policies about child welfare, then, demand interrogation. Addressing and deconstructing child-protection practices, logics, laws, and policies that are being called forth, enacted, and enforced by people relying on a common sense (that is steeped in discursive terrains that have always (re)produced Aboriginal peoples as uniquely and aberrantly racialized and requiring salvation, mostly from themselves by a well-intentioned state) must occur by understanding child welfare as emplaced, embodied, material, and ontological. Child-protection imperatives always exist within a lived world. For Indigenous children and families, that lived world includes a host of disparities flowing from a suite of prior colonial interventions and assumptions, producing ontologies that might clash with those of settler-colonial governments. To recognize and privilege an ontological orientation to child welfare requires troubling the ascendance of languages that produce common-sense rhetoric about good and moral domestic spaces, insisting instead that policies circulating in rhetorical spaces take up, name, and provide insight into racialized and marginalized colonial geographies lived by many Indigenous families. At present, without frameworks that account for different kinds of ontologies, Indigenous domestic spaces may far too easily map into assumptions about child neglect. The ascendance of common-sense languages about what children ‘need’ must constantly be tempered with concurrent discussions about addressing and critically understanding Indigenous peoples as living in geographies marred by historic and contemporary colonialism.
Common sense is, and has always been, active in the service of colonial power. Troubling and destabilizing what is taken up as common sense in child-welfare services, which occurs through scrutinizing the logics and materialities upon which such common sense rests, requires carefully and purposefully deconstructing languages and rhetoric about child and family well-being, particularly in the interpretation and consequent implementation of policies and laws governing child protection. This means recognizing and accounting for ontological differences amongst families and domestic geographies. Undoing contemporary colonial power, manifest in the ongoing disruption of Indigenous families and communities, requires destabilizing common-sense ideas about what constitutes good child-welfare practices and in whose best interests those practices are being undertaken. Thus, while on the surface it makes good common sense that all children and youth in British Columbia have access to the ‘strongest start possible,’ and this provides for an ‘exciting time’ that supports and protects vulnerable children and youth in British Columbia, such discursive frameworks result in certain domestic spaces becoming vulnerable to public scrutiny and state intervention, rendering them further susceptible to violent interruptions of child-welfare services. Despite dwelling and circulating in the epistemic/semiotic realm, child-welfare policies and practices are always and also material, grounded, and embodied, which means they are always in a tensioned relationship with differing ontologies. Child welfare must be evaluated not as abstract, but as material, lived, and in-place incursions that, ultimately, impact families, communities, and lives in the real world.
Ontological inquires about ongoing colonial power and Indigenous geographies require a (re)focusing on the micro-scale, on the everyday and domestic spaces lived by Indigenous families. If child-welfare policies and practices are seen as powerfully grounded examples of colonial incursions into Indigenous spaces, destabilizing them can be understood as holding remarkable potential for destabilizing neo settler-colonial power. This requires understanding – and making ontological – the fickle-nature of concepts like caring, nurturing, safe homes and families or, conversely, ideas about some families innately not being as safe or as caring as others and thus ‘normal’ in that state. It requires holding these realizations in constant reference to understandings about the outcomes of colonization – as opposed to producing more and more opaque rhetoric about common-sense ways to conceptualize and evaluate intimate and diminutive spaces lived by children and families. Ontologizing child welfare demands concretely accounting for colonization and articulating clear ways to disentangle its impacts from normative assumptions about child neglect. Policies and laws need to be explicit about the materiality of child-welfare assessments and interventions – and they must then be understood as always (re)producing particular kinds of ontologies that by design will then exist in reference to other, different, ontological realties. Expectations about normalized domestic and family ontologies are always spatially and temporally informed. These expectations, particularly when they unfold in differently ontologized places of Indigenous families, might not in the end make much ‘common’ sense at all.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the thoughtful feedback of three anonymous reviewers. The efforts of Emilie Cameron and Caroline Desbiens are similarly much appreciated.
Funding
Research for this paper, and related projects focused on colonial projects in British Columbia, is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), number 410-2010-1413.