| In recent years there have been at least three cases before the courts related to the adoption of native or part-native children by white parents. The position of native institutions has been to oppose such adoptions, but despite their good intentions, these cases prove that is not always in the best interests of the children involved.
The most recent court case to get public attention was in Saskatchewan. On December 10, 2004, Justice Jacelyn Ann Ryan-Froslie threw out a provincial policy of not allowing native children to be adopted by non-natives without the approval of the children’s band. The case involved five brothers and sisters, including an eight-year-old who had stayed in 20 different foster homes in the last five years, and two other children who had lived in at least 13. The judge ruled that preventing the children from having a stable home life violated their Charter right to security of the person. Saskatchewan subsequently abandoned its policy.
In July, 2002, Justice Holly Beard, in Manitoba, stated that the refusal of Dakota Ojibway Child and Family Services to permit the adoption of a three-year-old girl who was taken from her alcoholic grandmother was not in the child’s best interests, and that the child was "being held hostage." The girl was born in Winnipeg, 350 kilometres from the reserve, and she had never been to it. Nevertheless, the judge reluctantly found that she did not have the jurisdiction to overturn the native agency’s ban on the child’s adoption. As we have seen, the court in Saskatchewan found a basis for making such a decision in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Hamilton, Ontario was the location of the third case. In 2001, the local Children’s Aid Society took two Hamilton-born sisters under the age of two into care. The Squamish mother was described as a drug user and pusher, and the father as a white man. The CAS put the girls into a pair of foster homes, but the older one had serious behavioural problems that proved too much for her first home and for the second as well, requiring a third placement. Finally, both the girls’ current homes moved for adoption, with support of the CAS.
Then, just before the adoption could be finalized in 2003, the Squamish Nation in British Columbia moved to oppose the adoption, and the CAS reversed itself, siding with the Squamish. The band proposed instead that the girls be placed in foster care with a single white woman living near their reserve. Following a lengthy court battle, during which Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, wrote to the judge to support the band’s position, the band gave up – the woman had moved away to live with a boyfriend. Meanwhile, the foster parents had been driven into near financial ruin by court costs.
Native leaders have expressed concern that, as in the 1960s, Indian children will be "scooped" and placed with white families, depriving them of their culture. However, infants have no culture: culture is acquired, not inherited. In any case, at least in the Manitoba and Hamilton cases, the children had never even been to the reserve – Hamilton is far from the Squamish reserve in British Columbia.
Native organizations have striven to prevent adoptions by non-natives, preferring to leave native children in unstable conditions. In the Hamilton case, the Squamish Nation, flush with a newly won land claims settlement, was prepared to spend whatever it took in a futile effort to deprive children of their loving homes – all to place them with a white woman. These native efforts, in reaction to past injustices, are certainly not in the best interests of the children, who like all children need a sense of security in their environment.
Nevertheless, there are ways in which the desire of First Nations people to keep native children can be promoted. The Squamish case is particularly instructive, as the band, with all its resources, was not able to offer a native placement. If native placements are not available, the native organizations and child welfare authorities should get together to find ways to develop them. Currently, foster parents are seen as volunteers, but perhaps if they were made employees there would be a greater chance of recruiting native foster parents. Such an approach might also make for less turnover in foster placements.
What, then, of adoption? Poverty is a major barrier to adoption by Aboriginal people. As those of us who have done it know all too well, raising children can be an expensive proposition. Maybe it is time to look at subsidizing adoptions by First Nations people. It makes more sense to push for reforms to make fostering and adopting by Aboriginals more feasible than it does to make kids suffer today because native communities lost children 40 years ago. |
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