Yellowhead Tribal Council: Agreement transfers control of Indian children

Page

A group of Indian bands have taken a major step in preventing the loss of their children to the dominant society and assuming control over their children's welfare.

The Yellowhead Tribal Council (YTC) has just signed an agreement with Indian Affairs Minister Bill McKnight and Alberta Social Services Minister Connie Osterman that will place the control of child welfare programs in the hands of five Alberta Indian bands: Enoch, Alexis, Alexander, Sunchild and O'Chiese.

Through the agreement, funds will be directly received by the YTC from Ottawa. The money will be used to purchase child welfare services from the province until the bands' own staff and programs are fully operational. In the past, bands have obtained such services from the province, which then billed the federal government. With this new system in place, the bands will pay the province for services rendered with the money that they get directly from Ottawa.

A special advisor on Native issues with Alberta Social Services sees the signing as "a real tremendous story, an historical event" and accomplishment. Baldwin Reichwein says "from our perspective, this signing is quite consistent with the intent and spirit of the Child Welfare Act of Alberta."

In effect, the agreement delegates third party authority to the YTC. Reichwein praises the action because "the YTC member bands have been historically reluctant to accept provincial authority or any other trilateral structure which includes the provinces."

Lee Ann Tyrrell is the director of Native child welfare for the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA). She explains that they have 29 people enrolled in a social services program at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton. That program will "train and prepare their people to take over all the responsibilities that go with the authority" of the child welfare services. Tyrrell's role is to oversee those services.

YTC Executive Director Richard Arcand told Windspeaker that the initial idea for the program came up at a regular council meeting when they had a workshop with the Lesser Slave Lake Regional Council. The basic thrust at that time, he said, was to be "more involved" in child welfare.

In a recent statement to the Edmonton Journal, Arcand claims that 75 per cent of Indian child welfare cases are off reserve, with the bulk of them being in urban centres. "We started finding we lost a number of kids in the (dominant society's) system, completely lost them . . . this was most apparent and we found it appalling," he said.

Under the recently signed agreement, the YTSA child welfare program is based on an important underlying assumption, says Tyrrell: " . .. that there's a better way in the Native community of caring for children than has historically occurred in the provincial child welfare system." This sentiment is echoed by the social services minister, who says that "what we've been doing with the best of intentions has not been working well and I think that this looks like the appropriate solution."

Many Native leaders and social workers have been expressing that very same point for a good number of years, but to no avail. The solution, to have Natives care for their own, is also what Native leaders are professing as one of their examples of self-government which they are seeking to have entrenched in the Constitution. Control over programs that affect their people is what this agreement is all about. It is also what self-government is all about, claims the leadership.

Osterman says she was "surprised at the number of Native children and juveniles who were in our care or institutionalized; I was just appalled at that," she exclaimed.

Arcand bemoans the fact that band members are lost to the outside community. Grandparents especially he says, are the ones who most often inquire about these children. They wonder where they are, what they are doing and how they are doing.

Now that the controls will be in the hands of Indian people, those kids of situations may be resolved. Osterman expresses her empathy, saying "I want to see the kids stay where they belong-with their families, with their Elders, and this is going to make that possible."

Realistically, the program will not be able to address itself to all the children who have been "farmed out." According to Tyrrell, it is an onerous task to try to recover children who have been adopted by outsiders because they are not under provincial jurisdiction.

Osterman says her department is "going to be pressing the federal government to continue to receive the bands that would like to participate in this kind of arrangement." She contends that the most important aspect of the agreement is the consideration for children and that they'll be with their own people.

"If we had been able to supply some extra support at home, maybe we could have been keeping the kids there, and that applies to all aspects of (people in) our society," she adds.

Some bands have already established special committees to deal with child welfare, explains Tyrrell. For example, she says, the Alexis and Alexander reserves have volunteers on their committees who are approved by their councils. "They both have Elders on their committee, and the other three reserves are in the process of trying to get committees established."

The actual transfer of control is to occur next month, Ron Dawson, the regional director of social development for Indian Affairs, is "very pleased" with the agreement. He commented on the funding process:

Traditionally, any services to Indians by the province have been billed from the province to the federal government. Now, says Dawson, the province will provide the services and the YTSA will pay the province with the funds they (the YTSA) receives from the federal coffers.

When questioned by Windspeaker as to whether the agreement will ease the process of delivering child welfare services, Dawson says, "I have no doubt about that . . . because it's community diven, it give the community the say and the control over what's happening with their children."