An Endless Cycle of Despair

First published in January 2020 by retired Manitoba Provincial judge and prolific editorial writer Brian Giesbrecht, this carefully crafted and beautifully written essay is timeless in content.

This is partly because the issue at hand — compensation to indigenous children and families allegedly harmed by the alleged discriminatory under-funding of the First Nations Child and Family Services programme and the federal government's narrow definition of Jordan's Principle — is still before the courts and may not be settled for years to come.

The process began when the notoriously woke Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) began hearing class-action evidence in 2013. On January 26, 2016 it ruled in favour of the indigenous plaintiffs finding that indigenous children were being discriminated against.

Negotiation among the various parties — the federal government, the Assembly of First Nations, and lawyers for two related class-action lawsuits — resulted in a July 4, 2022 government announcement that a final agreement had been signed.

"Historic harms require historic reparations. While no amount of compensation can make up for the grief and trauma that the actions of the Government of Canada caused to First Nations children and families, this final settlement agreement is an important step forward to acknowledging the harm done and beginning the hard work of healing. I am hopeful that the court process for approving the agreement will be quick, and people and families can have the certainty and resolution they have asked for. Canada must never repeat these discriminatory actions. We must all work together to ensure that every First Nations child has equal opportunity to succeed, surrounded by family, culture, and community."

The Honourable Patty Hajdu
Minister of Indigenous Services

The next step was to bring the final settlement, amounting to a whopping $20 billion — $40,000 for each child involved and earmarked to thousands of children and their caregivers, the largest such cash settlement in Canadian history, along with another $20 billion to repair the allegedly broken aboriginal child welfare system — back to the CHRT to confirm that the settlement satisfied its compensation orders.

To the surprise and disappointment of all the parties involved, in late October 2022 the CHRT ruled that the settlement did not satisfy its compensation orders in a brief statement expressing concerns about the timeline for claimants to opt out of the compensation program combined with concern about whether all covered children would indeed receive the full $40,000 it said they are owed.

On November 23, the federal government announced it would be asking an outside judge to review some aspects of the $40-billion settlement agreement.

Lost in this brouhaha, are the more fundamental issues of why such a disproportionate number of children are seized from their parents or other guardians in the first place and why more and more money is always at the heart of all indigenous grievances.

 These are the issues that Brian Giesbrecht addresses head-on in this important essay.

My correspondence with Judge Giesbecht about the current state of the negotiations and the implications of his essay are as follows:

He generalized that we can expect the outcome of the current impasse as being just like the results of every other government-funded indigenous giveaway programme, namely that many tangential parties will be asking for a share in the proceeds or will initiate their own legal actions hoping for a similar outcome. For this to occur, current requirements will be stretched to meet the new demands. What about, for example, children who were only made temporary wards of the state for a short time? It is likely that they will eventually be included. What about supervision orders? This government will find a way to pay them and keep paying them. This is exactly what happened with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) recommendations. For example, even day students who never spent a single night at an Indian Residential school but complained they were also the victims of cultural genocide, have been promised tens of millions in compensation for simply saying so.

What this shows is that the TRC proceedings also gave birth to a permanent grievance and compensation industry as part of the larger Indian Industry. A 60-million-dollar building at the University of Manitoba filled with dozen of researchers will now be around for generations. We can expect exactly the same thing with the 40 billion giveaway. We will have a “Sixties Scoop” sub-industry, a “mistreated child welfare ward” sub-industry, and many more to come.

As for the child welfare issues described in his essay, he attributes them mainly to children emotionally and otherwise damaged by life in alcoholic or drug addled homes, a phenomenon vitally important to understanding many of the problems at the Indian Residential Schools (IRSs).

These problems were evident early in the colonial period, gradually accelerated, and then exploded after World War II, Giesbrecht claims, when increased physical access to towns and government liquor stores turned most Prairie and then northern reserves into “drinking party cultures.” In short, alcohol had been a serious problem long before the reserve system and the Indian Residential Schools were created in the last third of the 19th century.

As for the indigenous child welfare problem generally, it also began long ago, and it has only changed fundamentally in the proportion and number of children affected.

The federal government had no apprehension machinery or child welfare institutions for status Indians (which was their responsibility) in the first seven decades of the operation of the IRSs and chose the cheapest option, namely residential schools, instead of developing a standalone dedicated infrastructure or contracting out this responsibility to the provinces.

According to Giesbrecht, when the federal government finally transferred welfare management to the provinces in 1951 it did not sufficiently fund this transition or ensure that severely abused or neglected children were protected by placing them under proper care. The result was that only British Columbia apprehended children in any numbers. And It was not until well into the 1960s that the federal government made it financially attractive for the Prairie provinces to apprehend children in need of separation from their neglectful or abusive parents, resulting in what is now called the Sixties Scoop, a wrongly vilified effort to protect the well-being of innocent aboriginal youngsters.

Still, the problem was so severe that even while the “Scoop” was happening IRSs were still being used as child welfare dumping grounds.

What this means is the unfairly condemned Sixties Scoop apprehended children suffering from exactly the same pathologies as the child welfare children sent to residential schools: these were all severely damaged children. The residential schools didn’t damage them: irresponsible and neglectful alcoholic parents did that.

As Giesbrecht sees it, the federal government was not at fault for trying to educate indigenous children. But what was definitely problematic was using residential schools as child welfare facilities. The 1967 Caldwell Report is useful in this regard, he claims. Basically, the federal government was aware of the fact that it was wrong to pursue this path particularly because abused children from dysfunctional homes and communities were infecting normal children in the same way that tubercular children infect healthy children. Certainly in retrospect, if not at the time, student-on-student sexual abuse with older students exploiting younger ones — the most common form of IRS sexual abuse — would have been perfectly predictable to any child welfare expert.

Lacking a formal way to rescue native children from dysfunctional homes, federal Indian agents often used residential schools as a make-shift child welfare system.

No indigenous activist wants to explore the child welfare aspect of the problem, because it conflicts with their simplistic but politically convenient story -- largely accepted by a naive public and lazy mainstream media unwilling to search for the truth -- that priests, teachers, and other adults were the main sexual abusers at the IRSs. In fact, there is no evidence that there was a higher percentage of child-molesting priests, teachers, and workers, in residential schools than in any other boarding school situation let alone within the general population. As is well know today, public schools have their own non-clerical adult predators. But the percentage is low, and generally constant. 

The 7,000 or so “survivors” who testified before the TRC were children in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Most were from Prairie and northern reserves where the “drinking party culture“ — often composed of being drunk over an entire weekend — was in its heyday and they were either removed from their homes, or sent away voluntarily by their concerned mothers or other family.

Giesbrecht suspects that many or most were from dysfunctional homes. Though their exact numbers may never be known, there is more than enough evidence to support his suspicions.

My own take on this dysfunction is that it included rampant incestuous sexual abuse, a topic I will address in due course.

The government’s Caldwell Report is also highly instructive in revealing that in eight of the nine Saskatchewan IRS schools studied in the 1960s, as many as 80 percent of the students were there for child welfare reasons. The Caldwell Report is the most important piece of evidence on this subject but academics have basically ignored it while indigenous activists are willfully unaware of its existence.

Still, the mantra that “Residential schools caused indigenous dysfunction” is the TRC’s regnant assertion. But factual truth based on hard evidence is closer to the reverse, namely the introduction of indigenous dysfunction into an IRS was a recipe for exploitation of children from normal homes with loving and devoted parents. Partial proof of his claim is found in the fact that indigenous people who never attended an IRS and indigenous communities that had little or no experience with IRS show the same pathologies as individuals and communities that had a lot of experience with IRSs. The Maritimes had only one IRS (Shubnecadie) and yet indigenous communities there experienced the same problems as Prairie indigenous communities. Many huge areas of northern Canada sent almost no children to an IRS, and yet some of those Innu and Cree communities are the most dysfunctional indigenous communities in the country. 

All these considerations cast doubt on the attribution of all indigenous pathologies to residential schools. The evidence simply does not support this claim. Indigenous individuals and communities that had little or no residential school involvement suffer at least the same levels of family and personal dysfunction as individuals and communities that had extensive residential school experience.

These observations from Giesbrecht and yours truly are merely the tip of the iceberg in his outstanding essay posted on the other side of the paywall.

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