Everything is changing-the future needs re-arranging

Transcultural placements of Inuit children are more complex than what seems to meet the eye. Children are often placed in non-Inuit families for years and sometimes never return home.

Policies and practices reflect longstanding and deeply embedded mother-blaming culture and father invisibility ideologies that shape child protection systems. This misuse of power attests to our colonization past when it comes to this isolated population.

Disconnection from the community and birth families

Apart from the more obvious disconnection from the community and birth families, these children face additional challenges that they will carry throughout their adult lives.

When children are removed from their Northern communities and families in Nunavik, Quebec, Canada, they are denied the bonds of love between their friends, their families, their communities and themselves while making white parents into rescuers. This is not to say that the substitute parents have a lesser ability to love. Taking a child in is a beautiful act showing the capacity to give and nurture.

An attempt to assimilate the Inuit child into Canadian society

But I argue that, when a group in society maintains a position of dominance over another group, it necessarily reflects the framework of systemic institutionalized racism and discrimination. This misuse of power attests to our colonization past when it comes to this isolated population. Is this not an attempt to assimilate the Inuit child into Canadian society?

Is this rescued child to disappear into white society through love, lies, and ideology? This act of assimilation has no lasting impact on the lives of the people it is supposed to help. Just for a minute, contemplate if it was our child taken into another society. Having taken from him/her of a political, historical, spiritual, linguistic and cultural background, why should we be surprised when this child grows up into an angry adult and feeling dissociated and disconnected from both cultures.

When I spoke to Dolores, she declared: "It took me 65 years to put it all together and to let go of my broken roots". Displaced in an urban center at age 2, she struggled all these years to find a sense of cultural belongingness to her original community.

My project No Child Should Take the Long Way Home is looking for an alternative to the placements out of their territory.

Change is what Saturviit and Aura Freedom International, as well as myself, aim for. Central to this is the voices of the Indigenous women like Dolores.

Petition to empower the mothers and to reduce placements of the children

Like all that matters, we have to make the connections with what we can all do to help. We are carrying a petition to be given to PM Justin Trudeau. We hope to restore dignity but also their rights to families and communities.