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Pages 1 - 53, Chapters 1 - 6
Eighth-Grader Morgan and seventh-grader Eli are foster siblings living in Winnipeg. Their foster parents are Katie and James. Katie is a teacher and James is a doctor.
Katie and James are new to foster parenting. Morgan has long-time experience with the foster system. This is her eighth foster home. She joined Katie and James’ home two months ago. Eli just arrived the previous week, this being his first foster home.
Eli is a talented artist. His father gave him a drawing pad that he carries everywhere, filling it with pictures based on stories from his community. He draws villages and a world of animal beings that walk on two legs.
On the way to school, the wind catches Eli’s drawing pad and it is destroyed by a bus. Feeling bad for Eli’s misfortune, Morgan arranges to get him a new drawing pad from the school art room.
Meanwhile, Morgan falls afoul of her teacher Mrs. Edwards. Mrs. Edwards, who takes great pride in her one published book of poetry, is not happy with Morgan’s poetry assignment. She tells Morgan that her poem has the techniques right, but it comes from the head. Mrs. Edwards asks Morgan to write a new poem that comes from the heart, and hand it in the next day.
After school, Morgan introduces Eli to her secret place: a third-floor attic bedroom in Katie and James’ home. The attic room has a painted-over door. It presumably leads to another bedroom. Morgan has been told that the attic is off-limits. She speculates that this is probably because the area is under renovation, and littered with nails, tools, and various building supplies.
While the two are in the attic—Morgan is reading, Eli is drawing—a mysterious cool breeze blows across the room. The children return to the main floor, where Katie and James serve takeout from an Indigenous-owned restaurant. Following dinner, they give Morgan a pair of Manitobah Mukluk moccasins. The two hope that these gestures will help Morgan reconnect with her culture. However, it brings out Morgan’s anger, who feels that she has no connection with her culture.
Teacher Background Information: Foster Children and Child Welfare Laws
The Barren Grounds opens by introducing Morgan, an eighth-grader who has been in foster care since she was a young girl, alongside seventh-grader Eli who is in foster care for the first time.
Katie and James, the foster parents of Morgan and Eli, are doing their best to care for the two. This is particularly true in comparison to some of Morgan’s bad experiences in previous foster homes. Nevertheless, on page 6 Morgan makes an important comment that speaks to the experience that many Indigenous children have in foster care:
“But this isn’t my home,” Morgan said. “The last seven places weren’t my home either.”
An idea underpinning this comment is that Indigenous children in particular are most often not “at home” when they are in foster care. Being in foster care often results in children being removed from not just their families, but also their communities and their culture.
Colonial policies and programs in Canada have had and continue to have a devastating impact on Indigenous children and families. The most destructive of those policies and programs was the establishment of the Indian residential school system. At least 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed into a system in which
they experienced not only separation from family and community but also physical and emotional abuse. Students were denied access to their culture and prevented from speaking their language. The results were a catastrophic loss of culture, language, family and, in some cases, lives. The legacy of colonialism continues today with Indigenous children being nearly 20 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be removed from their family for child welfare reasons.
According to Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, the high rate of Indigenous children in foster care can be directly traced to colonialism and its related factors such as poverty, poor housing, multi-generational trauma, addiction, and domestic violence.
These harsh realities have been recognized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In their calls to action, the Commission called upon the federal government to Enact Indigenous child welfare legislation that would affirm the right of Indigenous governments to establish and maintain their own child-welfare agencies. The Commission also said that when children need to be put into care, having culturally-appropriate care should be a priority.
In light of this Call to Action, in 2020 the Canadian government passed the Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families. This Act, a piece of child welfare legislation, acknowledges the particular circumstances faced by Indigenous Peoples and the legacy of past government policies including residential schools.
It has principles and standards for child welfare that emphasize a child’s physical, emotional and psychological safety, security and well-being and the importance of culture, connection to language and territory, and relationship between a child and the Indigenous group, community or people to which they belong.
Importantly, this legislation recognizes Indigenous Peoples’ inherent right to govern child welfare as part of their inherent right to self-government. It provides a framework for Indigenous Governing Bodies to make laws and take jurisdiction over child and family services matters for their communities.
Since the Act came into place, nearly 90 Indigenous governing bodies have submitted notices to begin exercising their jurisdiction over child and family services. Many are now in control of their child welfare and family service systems.
In Saskatchewan in particular, more than a dozen Indigenous Governing Bodies are at different stages in this process of returning child welfare and family services to their own jurisdiction. The first to sign a coordination agreement was Cowessess First Nation. They enacted the Cowessess First Nation Miyo Pimatisowin Act on April 1, 2021.
This law now governs child and family services for Cowessess First Nation citizens and their children. Jessica Knutson, of the National Council of Youth in Care Advocates, believes that moving child welfare jurisdiction into the hands of individual Indigenous Nations will help heal generations-long trauma. However, this healing process will take many more generations, and this healing process needs to be nurtured with the needs of each nation in mind. As she says,
Children and women are the heart of community…. It’s so important and really significant that nations are able to use their own protocols to be able to care for their children, because Indigenous nations need to be making the decisions for their own children, and that looks different for each nation.
Recognizing historical harms and the need for culturally-appropriate care, alongside returning jurisdiction of child welfare to individual Indigenous Nations, are important steps forward in Reconciliation. These changes to the laws governing child and family welfare will hopefully result in improved well-being for everyone, particularly but not exclusively those directly involved in the child welfare system.
CLASS DISCUSSION
Reading Reflection
In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, laws have been changed to help ensure that foster care for Indigenous children is culturally-appropriate. This includes allowing
individual Indigenous Nations to create their own child welfare laws.
1. Why is it important that foster care is culturally appropriate?
2. Consider Morgan and Eli’s conversation on Page 12, when she tells Eli about her experiences in foster care:
“How’ve you been to so many homes?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Stuff happened.”
“What kind of stuff ?” he asked.
“I run away,” she said, “or they don’t like me. Or I run away because they don’t like me. I get older and, you know, they want a cute Native kid. And I can tell, so, I don’t know … I guess I act like a jerk. They’re saviors, you know. Like, all of them. Katie and James too. Theywant to save kids like us.”
“I like them,” he said.
Morgan took a deep breath, then half smiled. “Yeah,” she said under her breath. “I do too.”
What ways could culturally-appropriate foster care in her own community have helped Morgan avoid some of these problems?
Looking Forward
An APTN article on Indigenous people and child welfare discusses why being good to children will improve the lives of children today, and the lives of everyone in the future:
“The reason [children are a top priority for Indigenous Peoples ] is that children are the keepers of the possible. They’re the keepers of our tradition. They’re the keepers of our peoples,” said Cindy Blackstock, a noted activist for Indigenous children’s rights who is a member of the Gitksan First Nation and executive director of the First Nations Child and
Family Caring Society of Canada.
“If you don’t pay attention to the children, then really, you’re losing that. You’re losing your culture, you’re losing everything.”
Children grow up into parents and grandparents, she noted.
“There’s an understanding that you have to treat them well, because… everything that happens to them will ripple forward to generations that we’ll never know,” Blackstock said.
As The Barren Grounds unfolds, look for these things:
• Morgan’s memories of bad experiences related to her foster care.
• How Morgan’s well-being improves under the good care of Ochek.
• The efforts that Katie and James make to connect Morgan with her culture.
