Innu chief pitches housing fix to deal with foster care crisis
The chief of an Innu band council in Labrador says her reserve needs $1 million to start addressing the high number of children in foster care.
About a quarter of the children of Sheshatshiu were not living with their parents in January, according to a document obtained by CBC News.
"This needs to stop now. We need to do something about it today," said Anastasia Qupee, who said she was shocked to see that so many children from her central Labrador community had been taken into the child protection system.
Qupee said she was most upset about the nine children who now live outside her province altogether.
"These are our children," she said.
"They have our culture, they have our language, and we need to retain that, but you can't do that when the kids are away — far away from the community, even out of the province — because the parents can't make [a] connection with their kids."
An additional six children were placed in neighbouring communities in Labrador, with another child in care in a Newfoundland community.
A report in January showed other troubling figures, including that 37 children from Sheshatshiu had been placed in continuous custody.
As well, an additional 40 had been placed in the care of relatives.
Qupee said a $1 million proposal — which her council made to the federal government in 2006 — would expand the homes of 30 families in the community, who could then work as foster parents.
Qupee said federal officials rejected the proposal.
No quick fixes: psychologist
Wayne Hammond, a clinical psychologist who has worked with the Innu for 15 years, agrees with the principle of keeping Innu children closer to home.
However, Hammond said infrastructure alone is not the solution.
"Just because you have a new building doesn't mean that you have wrestled with all the social issues or the cultural adaptation issues that the community was wrestling with," he said.
Indeed, Hammond said there will be no quick fixes to the problems facing both Sheshatshiu and Natuashish, an Innu community on Labrador's northern coast.
"It has to be an approach where we're dealing with the immediate crisis, but in that intervention there needs to be this idea that it's a multi-generational approach," Hammond said.
"If we work with the children in this community, they're going to parent in 20 years, and hopefully what we do with them now builds a template where they parent in a different way, so that their children will parent in a different way."
Qupee, meanwhile, said 85 people in Sheshatshiu are now on a waiting list for housing.