PART 4
December 10, 2008 Ottawa Sun
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media
One of the darkest days in the life of Kenn Richard came when his pride and joy -- Native Child and Family Services of Toronto -- was linked back in August to the outrageously brutal death, and the alleged pre-mortem scalping, of 7-year-old Katelynn Sampson.
To his credit, Richard did not cut and run, and nor did he evade questions with smoke-and-mirror rhetoric.
Instead, he vowed to find the truth, publicly stating he would bear the burden of guilt if the multi-service agency of which he was a founder, and now its executive director, had played any role in enabling Katelynn Sampson to be placed with her legal guardian.
That legal caregiver, Donna Irving, 29, a status Native, now stands accused of first-degree murder, as does her common-law husband, 46-year-old Warren Johnson, both their charges recently upgraded from second-degree murder.
In the end, however, Native Child and Family Services had had no involvement in Katelynn Sampson's life and death, and the agency's guilt-by-association proved to be wholly unwarranted.
"It was just the worst experience," says Kenn Richard, who attended the little girl's funeral. "What a sad little event that was -- a real heartbreaker for everyone.
"But we have seen a lot of sad events here," he adds.
"Sadness is not uncommon."
What began back in 1988 as a children's aid society for Natives, with four staff and an annual budget of $400,000, has since grown to a staff of 170 with a budget of $20 million.
At the end of last month, the agency finally moved into its new home on College St. between Yonge and Bay, right next door to Toronto Police headquarters, with the four-storey building purchased for $4.5 million, and with over $8 million in borrowed renovation money to follow, with most of those renovations still under way.
"We are so excited to be here," says Richard. "Most aboriginal services are in a basement somewhere, or off the grid. This is definitely not a basement, although we started in a basement just down the street from here.
"This is something our community can be proud of."
Kenn Richard, along with the literature his agency puts out, does not candy-coat the challenges, nor are the issues facing urban Natives understated.
"Most of (our) clients are self-referred single parents with young children," one piece of literature reads. "Many are currently before the Child Welfare courts. Most are poor, isolated and suffer a lack of support in an environment deemed insensitive and inaccessible to Native people.
"Sexual and physical abuse, addiction problems, and family violence are common themes. By all measures of the human condition, Native people lead in the statistics of suicide, alcoholism and family abuse.
"They serve as indicators of the serious stress connected with being a Native person in today's world ... (and) the feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness," the fact sheet continues.
"Indigenous people, as compared to any other racial or cultural group in Canada, have the lowest life expectancies, highest infant mortality rates, substandard and overcrowded housing, lower education and employment levels, and the highest incarceration rates," it reads.
"It is estimated that a Native child in Toronto is five times more likely to be apprehended and placed in the care of children's aid than any other child -- with many of these children having graduated to living on the streets of Toronto."
It is not a pretty picture.
But the picture does not lie.
Kenn Richard, 59, is a Manitoba-born Red River Metis with a master's degree in social work who, back in the mid-Eighties, saw the need, along with other activists of the day, for a separate children's aid society in Toronto dedicated to the urban Native.
When provincial legislation finally opened the door for alternative children's aid agencies, Richard and his colleagues seized the day.
"The numbers were there," he says, admitting, however, there was governmental hesitancy when push came to shove, with many provincial bureaucrats worried that, once the "Natives" got their own children's aid, it would lead to "the Chinese, or the Jamaicans, or whoever" demanding equal billing, despite the fact there was already a Catholic children's aid, and a Jewish children's aid.
"There was some real nervousness," says Richard.
Those concerns, however, never materialized, although it took a succession of provincial governments of all political stripes -- Liberal, NDP and Tory -- before the deal was finally struck.
"We knew what our marching orders were to be," says Richard. "The resounding message was to not duplicate the existing children's aid societies.
"Our orders were to develop a children's aid service that would be preventative of circumstances leading to the apprehension (of children) or provide treatment for those people who are troubled with addictions, or post traumatic stress, and all sorts of other stuff, but recognizing that the protection of those children was paramount.
"If necessary, of course, those children will be apprehended," says Richard. "But that's not the end of the day when it comes to our agency.
"That's the beginning of the day of getting that family back together."
When Native Child and Family Services was finally struck, it already knew its mandate had to include services for Native youth on the street.
"Not long after we opened our doors in the basement, we suddenly had all these really rough-looking kids showing up looking for bus fares back home," says Richard. "So, I'd dole out some money and these same kids would show up a week later, again supposedly looking for bus money home.
"So, we were quick to realize that there was a huge population of youth on the street that we were not even aware of ... mostly boys.
"But there were girls on the street, too, unfortunately, but they were under the control of other dynamics -- like pimps -- but the boys were pretty evident.
"The aboriginal girls, though, are really hard to get to," says Richard. "Our youth work is dominated by boys, and that is just not right. wIt's something we have to work on.
"We are not tending to the girls very well.
"We know what happens to them -- if they survive that whole thing on the street" says Richard. "They get pregnant, they have kids, they're full of addictions, and we end up taking their kids into care.
"I know where those girls are. I drive by them every day," he says. "I'd rather get to them now than when they are in the hospital giving birth."
- - -
Just beyond a small bridge, inside the Tyendinaga First Nations reserve on the outskirts of Deseronto, is a roadside sign expressing the need for foster parents.
That need is understated -- not just in the Mohawk territory of Tyendinaga but across the province, including the largest non-official reserve in the country.
And that, of course, is Toronto.
According to the latest Aboriginal Peoples Survey put out by Statistics Canada, nearly one in five aboriginal people in Canada live in Ontario, making its aboriginal population -- 188,325 -- the largest among all the provinces and territories.
Public perception would think Manitoba or Saskatchewan, Alberta or British Columbia, but that perception would be wrong.
Ontario is it, even though those 188,325 aboriginals make up only 1.7% of the province's entire population.
In Ontario, according to the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies, one in 100 of the province's children are in the care of a children's aid society.
That's more than 27,000 children in all who have been legally seized from their birth parents because of abuse or neglect.
Fourteen percent of that number, however, are First Nations' children, or children of aboriginal ancestry -- again, even though aboriginal people represent only 1.7% of the province's total population.
That's 2,512 aboriginal children in care, according to the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies latest count.
It's overtly disproportionate, but the numbers don't lie.
Out of those 2,512 aboriginal children, only 73 -- or 3% -- are in the care of adoptive parents of First Nations or aboriginal ancestry.
That, too, is disproportionate, and plays into the grand conspiracy theory -- arguably more fact than fiction -- that the goal in the long run is to "take the Indian out of the child."
According to the provincial children's aid agency, there are 1,347 aboriginal children -- or 54% of that total taken from their original homes -- who are now in foster-care arrangements.
Of that number, only 6% -- or 160 children -- have been placed with family or relatives, as in kith-and-kin scenarios, and only 1% -- or 28 children -- have been placed in customary care through an agreement with the child's Native community or band.
The vast majority -- 904 --are in "other placements."
Of those "other placements," 409 aboriginal children are in private foster care with non-aboriginal guardians, while another 209 are living in group homes.
The rest are dispersed into what is described as "no cost care," "independent living arrangements," or simply "elsewhere."
Some 33 aboriginal children, in fact, are deemed to be "elsewhere."
That said, there are numerous mitigating factors that negate many First Nations homes from being able to adopt, or foster, their own community's children.
Poverty and overcrowding are but two reasons.
According to Mohawk activist Shawn Brant, it is not uncommon to find upwards of 10 people living in the same small house on the Tyendinaga First Nations reserve, four of them adults, and with no potable water upon which to draw.
It may be a snapshot, but it is also a reality. Some 100 Native communities in this province are under a boil-water advisory.
According to a 2004 report by the Canadian Policy Research Network, Canada's aboriginal population is growing almost three times as fast as that of the rest of the country.
As they increasingly move off the reserves, the poverty rate among urbanized aboriginals in Canada's 12 largest cities has burgeoned to two-to-four times the rate for non-aboriginal people -- with more than 50% of aboriginal children in those cities now living below the poverty line.
These are not the kind of houses that make homes -- foster homes or adopted homes.
Hence, the telling and startling numbers.
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ADOPTION CRISIS
In April 2007, the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights issued a report titled "Children: The Silenced Citizens" that concluded "there is an adoption crisis in Canada." It called on "governments across Canada to recognize and address the adoption crisis in this country, particularly in the case of aboriginal children."
Despite the fact that aboriginal families are more inclined than non-aboriginal to adopt, there continues to be a chronic shortage of aboriginal foster and adoptive parents.
Meanwhile, a May 2008 report by the Auditor General of Canada found the federal government is failing to provide First Nations Child and Family Services agencies with adequate funding to meet the number or the needs of children in care. That report stated that the funding formula has not been reviewed since 1988, and it has not been adjusted for inflation since 1995.
Earlier this year, the Canadian Human Rights Commission launched an inquiry into a complaint regarding First Nations children in state care.
In Ontario, there are currently approximately 9,200 children available for adoption. Of those, 1,191 (13%) are children with aboriginal ancestry.