Last spring, a Manitoulin United Church was able to hand over a $6,000 donation to an Island First Nation.
The funds had come from a church in Sudbury, which had closed and sold off its assets. Its church council had announced that sister churches in the area could apply for a portion of the funds realized from this sale but that the applications would have to benefit children in some way.
A parishioner at the Island church became aware of these funds and as she was at that time involved with establishing a nutrition program at one Island First Nation’s school program, suggested that the church could apply for funds to support the program.
The application was successful and the grant went to support the First Nation school’s nutrition program.
That was all well and good, but in the course of the donation being made, the person who had suggested the application in the first place happened to mention that, for First Nation schools, the per child funding is 50 percent ($5,000, compared to $10,000) of what schools like those in the Rainbow District School Board receive from the province. This person went on to say that she knew this first hand because, in a previous career, she had served as director of education in her home First Nation community.
These are the things we hear about, but it was significant to hear this directly from someone in the field who made the statement not in any form of complaint in the circumstance, but as merely stating a fact.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal last month released its binding decision that, following research, it had determined that First Nation children who live in First Nations communities and whose lives are touched by Children’s Aid Societies (CAS), are not funded for the same level of child welfare services as are given to children who do not live in a First Nation setting.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s decision is a legal one and requires the agency who pays for these children’s services, the Government of Canada, to remedy the situation.
The current government is not going to contest the decision, but it is interesting to note that its predecessor Conservative government went to great pains and expense to derail the Tribunal’s research and even tried to paint Cindy Blackstock, the former B.C. social worker who spent a decade urging this concern into prominence, as an undesirable citizen, monitoring, and sharing details on her personal life with government agencies.
The informed observation about the underfunding of First Nations schools by the Government of Canada (in comparison with how the provinces fund their public school education) and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s decision that this has been also the case for child welfare services, also funded by the same government, are very much part of a continuum that demonstrates First Nations children are not being offered the same opportunities to succeed as are those children who happen to live in a neighbouring municipality, go to school there and, should need arise, are served by a children’s welfare agency.
On Manitoulin Island, the quality of education and educational administration in First Nation schools directed by First Nations boards of education is in every respect comparable to that offered in Rainbow District School Board schools.
In the area of child welfare, last year the Manitoulin First Nations- operated organization Kina Gbezhgomi took over all aspects of child welfare services for area First Nation children from the Sudbury-Manitoulin Children’s Aid Society (CAS). A news feature published in this paper in the January 6 issue gave a detailed description of the services Kina Gbezhgomi is offering and these, parallel to the situation in local First Nations schools, ensure parity with the services provided by the CAS.
But then we are told by the people who work within these agencies, and, in the case of child welfare, where a national investigation has taken place, that the entire range of services to First Nation children has been traditionally shortchanged in comparison to those services provided to children who do not call a First Nation their home, and where the same or similar services are provincially funded.
The community schools in Manitoulin’s First Nations are performing well and graduating students who go on to post secondary education. The teaching staffs in each of these schools is marked by a dedicated cadre of instructors, both First Nations and non-First Nation people, who care about educational excellence and the best outcomes possible for their students.
Similarly, Kina Gbezhgomi, although relatively new to its full mandate, is staffed with experienced people who have and will continue to guide children and their families through rough patches and whose objective is to work to keep families intact.
But imagine how much more these Manitoulin Island educational and child welfare agencies could accomplish with “full funding”?
We have to think that, if the First Nation schools and child welfare agency on relatedly sophisticated Manitoulin Island operate as efficiently as they do in what we know is an underfunded mode, then our area must be the very high end of the national average of these things and that, in more remote areas, these children’s services are far more bleak.
We are not a third world nation. Our various levels of governments have a duty to provide similar levels of these basic services to everyone, in particular children, no matter where they live. Historically, the Great Proclamation of 1763 set the tone for all of the individual government-to-government treaties that were entered into between the British government, of which the Government of Canada has since 1867 been the successor, and First Nations groups and alliances all across our nation.
As a nation, we have been caught out by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s findings and we must make this right. We must make it right for First Nation schools as well.
During the federal election campaign period last fall, Liberal leader, and now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, declared that he would seek to implement all of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools.
Many of these recommendations can be recognized, honoured and grouped together for implementation by the Government of Canada setting out to bring the funding of current First Nations children’s services to parity with the rest of Canada and to do so within the next five years.
