Continuing to break up native families

Canada is repeating our old pattern of injustice against indigenous women, said Carol Finlay. In the last century, indigenous children were ripped from their tribes and warehoused in residential schools, causing damage that reverberated down the generations. “Violence, substance abuse, and crime” are now endemic in the children and grandchildren of the people placed in those institutions. And how have authorities responded to that crisis? By incarcerating native women, far from their communities and at shocking rates. Across Canada, more than two-thirds of female federal inmates are indigenous; in Edmonton, the rate is more than 90 percent. This is again devastating indigenous families, because when a woman goes to prison, “she is often the sole support to the family, and her children go into foster care.” The loss of her kids sends her into a spiral of hopelessness and depression. “Cut off from their families and culture, and locked up in a ‘white man’s justice system,’” these women become mentally and physically ill. When they get out of prison, they are broken, and they have no job training, so they can’t earn money to get their children back. If we don’t break this cycle, “we become complicit in the ongoing tragedy of the residential schools.”