Tansi Nîtôtemtik,
“Rebuilding Indigenous nations requires us to rebuild our childrearing practices”
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Tanya Pace-Crosschild
This week, ReconciliAction YEG is wrapping up our five-week segment on Indigenous child and family welfare services in Canada. While a crucial part of our survey of the child welfare topic has required a critical view, it was important to our team that we end the segment highlighting stories of power and resistance of community-based groups as they work to promote Indigeneity and reunification of Indigenous families coming into contact with child welfare services. Today’s post highlights a southern Alberta initiative called the Opokaa’sin Family Preservation Program.
The Opokaa’sin Early Intervention Society opened in 1996 with the aim to nurture and support the strengths and resilience of Indigenous families, children, and youth.[1] Opokaa’sin works to promote family unity in situations where the child’s safety can be supported and to enhance and strengthen family functioning by connecting members with community resources and services.[2]
In 2002, Opokaa’sin started the Family Preservation program, which provides family support to parents seeking to recover their children as well as mentorship opportunities for Aboriginal children in foster care.[3] The Opokaa’sin family project is significant because it promotes traditional Blackfoot child-rearing and family structuring. As we have previously talked about on this blog, child welfare services in situations involving Indigenous families and children perpetuate systems of colonization in part because they impose Euro-Canadian nuclear family models on the children placed in care.[4] Indigenous children have historically been,and continue to be, placed in non-Indigenous foster homes based on an “erroneous set of colonial assumptions that fail to see Indigenous family and kinship models.”[5]
The Opokaa’sin project is dedicated to decolonizing approaches to early childhood and “strengthening cultural identity amongst Indigenous families and youth.”[6] We have previously discussed on this blog that the importance of decolonization in the context of child welfare means creating a space for cultural safety and regenerating connections to culture and language and community.[7] The Opokaa’sin program falls into this category as it is based on the idea that “Rebuilding Indigenous nations requires… rebuild[ing] childrearing practices.”[8] Prior to colonization, Blackfoot nations viewed children as sacred beings held in the highest regard because they were seen as “extremely close to the spirit world.”[9] Children’s position in society required the collective efforts of the community in child rearing and they were not the sole responsibility of the mother.[10] Opokaa’sin, which means ‘all our children’ in Blackfoot, works to restore this form of Blackfoot family structuring and child-rearing by incorporating traditional teachings, stories, languages, and traditions into their programs and services for families.[11] The programs promote Indigenising child-rearing by placing child-rearing and care for the world as a collective responsibility.[12] This value is promoted by incorporating extended family into the education of the children.[13]
The Opokaa’sin project continues to develop its resources and methods of service delivery as it re-discovers and articulates traditional values systems in consultation with the Blackfoot community and elders in its goal of ultimately restoring Blackfoot childrearing practices.[14] Restoration of these practices will prove in turn to have a significant effect on programming for parent education and support, family reunification processes and early childhood education in the future.[15]
If you would like to learn more about the Opokaa’sin Early Intervention Society, please visit their website here.[16]
Yours Truly,
Team ReconciliAction YEG
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[1] “About Us”, Opokaa’sin Early intervention Society (last visited 10 January 2020), online: <www.opokaasin.org/about-us>.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Programs & Services”, Opokaa’sin Early intervention Society (last visited 10 January 2020), online: <www.opokaasin.org/programs-services>.
[4] See “Indigenous Mothering and the Impacts of the Child Welfare System” (12 November 2019), online (blog): University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog <ualbertalaw.typepad.com/faculty/2019/11/indigenous-mothering-and-the-impacts-of-the-child-welfare-system.html>.
[5] Tanya Pace-Crosschild, “Decolonising Childrearing and Challenging the Patriarchal Nuclear Family through Indigenous Knowledges: An Opokaa’sin Project” in Rachel Rosen & Katherine Twamley (eds) Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? (London: UCL Press, 2018) 191 at 192.
[6] Ibid at 192-193.
[7] See “Decolonization” and Why it Matters in the Context of Child Welfare”, (27 November 2019), online (blog): University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog <ualbertalaw.typepad.com/faculty/2019/11/decolonization-and-why-it-matters-in-the-context-of-child-welfare.html>
[8] Supra note 6 at 193.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid at 196.
[13] Ibid at 193.
[14] Ibid at 196.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Opokaa’sin Early intervention Society (last visited 10 January 2020), online: <www.opokaasin.org>.
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