Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Despite the 1985 recognition of "Customary Care" (CC) as an Aboriginal right, there are more Indigenous children in out-of-home care now than at the height of the residential school period (Trocmé, Knoke, & Blackstock 2004). Though forms of community-based childcare like CC are increasingly being promoted by social workers as a best practice (Carriere-Laboucane 1997), the continued overrepresentation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in Canada signals a need to integrate culturally grounded permanency planning into provincial child welfare service delivery programs (de Finney 2012). My doctoral research responds to this need through an ethnographic study of CC in Victoria and its surrounding First Nations. I aim to identify gaps in Western and Indigenous understandings of care that may be contributing to Indigenous child apprehension. I argue that though child apprehension is often framed as being in the "best interests" of Indigenous children, it fails to account for the cultural, spiritual, and psychosocial wellness of Indigenous communities as crucial considerations for healthy permanency planning (Carrière & de Finney 2015). My research will explore how the practice of child removal may actually impede upon the early childhood development of those placed in out-of-home care, with severe consequences for the long term health of Indigenous families and communities who are losing their children. My doctoral research will serve as a contribution to a growing field of knowledge emphasizing the importance of building more culturally nuanced understandings of health and wellness as it pertains to Indigenous children and families in settler states (Stevenson 2014; Simpson 2011). This knowledge can be used in the development and implementation of Indigenous child welfare policies, and service delivery models, that seek to improve the individual and community health of Indigenous peoples in Canada through more holistic and integrative permanency planning.