Government social services are 'significant agent' of colonialism, N.L. inquiry hears

The Canadian Press

· Posted: Apr 08, 2025 9:54 AM EDT | Last Updated: 1 hr ago

A societal idiosyncratic with decades of experience working with the Innu successful Newfoundland and Labrador has told a public inquiry that authorities societal services that were expected to help have successful information undermined and harmed Indigenous families.

Lyla Andrew, who grew up successful Toronto and attended university there, was caller retired of postgraduate schoolhouse successful the precocious 1970s erstwhile she began moving successful the Innu assemblage of Sheshatshiu. She said she started her vocation with the commonly held — but incorrect — belief that she had thing to springiness the Innu that they did not have.

"The learning process was that my presumption was very wrong," Andrew said successful pre-recorded grounds played astatine an inquiry hearing successful Sheshatshiu.

"In fact, I don't deliberation what we were trying to stock with Innu had immoderate worth unless we could spot the worth of Innu knowledge and we were prepared to recognize that Innu had a precise affluent culture and history."

The enquiry into the attraction and experiences of Innu children successful attraction successful Newfoundland and Labrador began successful 2023, and it resumed Monday for a week of ceremonial hearings. The proceedings have examined the past of Innu successful the state and the systemic barriers they face.

Community members person spoken astir children being taken away by kid services officials to unrecorded successful attraction acold distant from their families and culture. Several Innu children person died successful the attraction of the Newfoundland and Labrador government.

Andrew, who works with a secretariat for Innu First Nations in Labrador, said the province's societal services programs were built on the Western European thought of a household consisting of a mother, father and children. By comparison, Innu communities are focused on the wider collective; often respective generations of families — or even groups of different relations — live unneurotic successful 1 house.

In that arrangement, for example, the state would reduce income enactment benefits for parents if determination were grandparents living with them, Andrew said. 

"The policies … were conscionable imposed connected the Innu," she said. "The helping systems don't absorption connected the well-being of the collective."

Grandparents felt an added request to support their grandchildren, Andrew testified, due to the fact that they knew young children were being taken from their families by kid services astatine the command of non-Innu.

"It's hard to ideate that 2 oregon 3 radical successful these systems — the caput doctor, oregon clergyman oregon schoolhouse main — could have truthful overmuch power," she said. "But they did."

Andrew wrote a study successful 1992 calling for Innu-led family and children's services. It described the government's social services programs arsenic a "significant agent" of the colonial relationship betwixt Innu and the provincial government, and called
for Innu-led kid and household services.

Its recommendations went mostly unheeded, she said.

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