Warning: This story deals with disturbing subject matter that may upset and trigger some readers. Discretion is advised.
After a B.C. First Nation revealed that 215 suspected unmarked graves had been located on the grounds of the former residential school in Kamloops, the world paid closer attention to the cruel system of assimilation and abuse Indigenous Peoples have endured in Canada.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series examining the connection between residential schools in B.C., what is known as the ’60s Scoop and efforts to reform what’s been described as a ‘broken’ system of Indigenous child welfare.
Part one: ‘We’re invisible’: Amid residential school reckoning, ’60s Scoop survivors in B.C. want action
Fialka Jack-Flesh had not yet taken her first steps in the world before she entered the foster care system.
Her mother, a residential school survivor, was unable to take care of her, and she was taken into care at just eight months old.
“I was removed from my mom’s care originally because she grew up in residential school and she was deemed very unsafe at the age that she had me,” Jack-Flesh said. “She had me, I think, like seven years after she showed up for residential school. So not that long.”
It has been 10 years since Jack-Flesh aged out of government care.
Sometimes, it seems as if it was just yesterday.
Born in Nanaimo, B.C., Jack-Flesh spent most of her childhood in foster care, with a few years in Calgary with her dad and her stepmom in between.
She was first taken into care because her brother started abusing her, both physically and sexually, she said. Placed back with her mother when she was about 18 months old, Jack-Flesh said the abuse continued so she was removed again just before she turned three.
“I’m going to be very honest. You know, like, I’ve been out of care for almost a decade now and I’m just starting to, like, feel like an actual person that’s 10 years younger than me should be feeling as a 19-year-old. I’m just starting to feel mentally stable and OK with my life and doing things that I would like to.”
According to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, as of Dec. 31, 2021, there were a total of 5,021 children and youth in care in B.C.
More than two-thirds of those children are Indigenous.
“In general, we are seeing the lowest overall number of children and youth in care in 30 years and the lowest number of Indigenous children and youth in care in over 20 years,” the ministry said in a statement. “In addition, expanded government supports are helping to increase the rate of family preservation — for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous families.”
Jack-Flesh said she moved to five or six different foster homes before her father moved her to Calgary when she was eight. When she returned to B.C., she lived in another five before she aged out of care.
“Sometimes it was because they couldn’t handle me. Others, because it was temporary,” she said.
In one case, she ended up in a foster home halfway across Vancouver from her school because social workers couldn’t find a closer space. She had to wake up at 6 a.m. and take three buses just to get there.
“Being in foster care, not having any family, the only thing I had were my friends at the time,” she said. “So I was like, I’m not leaving my friends. I don’t make friends very easily. I wish I did.”
Jack-Flesh moved around to many homes during her teenage years and acknowledged it was sometimes difficult for her social workers and her foster parents to handle her.
“They had two social workers for me,” she said of a period when she was 17 years old. “That is how difficult I was.”
Jennifer Charlesworth, B.C.’s representative for children and youth, said the greatest challenge still facing Indigenous youth in care today is “a system that has not supported their belonging to culture, community in place and sustaining their relationships because of the continued impact of colonization.”
“So it’s very hard for young people to be healthy and well in the context of an interior environment that is not able to support them in their own thriving and growth.”
In 2001, while Jack-Flesh was still in government care, the B.C. government announced plans to create five regional child welfare authorities. As a result, First Nations, Métis and other Indigenous leaders produced the first Tsawwassen Accord, which recommended the development of regional Aboriginal authorities.
The next year, the government signed a memorandum of understanding with Indigenous leaders to create those Aboriginal child welfare authorities. Funding for the program was cut two years later.
In 2009, the First Nations Leadership Council and the B.C. government signed the Recognition and Reconciliation Protocol on First Nations Children, Youth and Families, which committed B.C. to support First Nations in resuming jurisdiction over their children and families.
When Jack-Flesh was almost 19 years old, the First Nations Child and Family Wellness Council was established with community-driven child and family initiatives at the forefront under the Indigenous Approaches program.
However, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who was B.C.’s representative for children and youth at the time, released a report in November 2013 slamming the government’s approach, saying the MCFD “spent $66 million over the past dozen years on Aboriginal service-delivery discussions and projects, with no evidence of a single Aboriginal child or family receiving better services as a result.”
Again, funding was cut for the program and the First Nations Child and Family Wellness Council.
It was not until 2020 that The Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families came into effect, which the Indigenous Child and Family Services Directors called “a real opportunity to reclaim the jurisdiction over their children and families, which is their inherent right.”
The organization said the act “provides an opening for Indigenous communities to take charge of their own child and family services—to occupy the space under their own laws while the province vacates the field. For Indigenous communities, this is just the beginning: the beginning of imagining, planning, (re)creating, and managing their own approaches, systems and practices.”
While these changes and policies were taking place as Jack-Flesh was still in care, she aged out long before the act came into effect.
Charlesworth told Global News there have been many changes made in the last 10 years when it comes to the foster care system, but there are three key areas of focus moving forward: supporting and being a strong ally to the Nations and Indigenous governing bodies who want to resume jurisdiction over their kids in care, ensuring children are able to still have connections to their community while in care, and dealing with the intergenerational trauma of residential schools and colonization so children do not end up in care in the first place.
For Jack-Flesh, aging out of government care, she said, was jarring and devastating.
“It’s kind of like being thrown off a f–king cliff. If I’m going to be very honest with you guys.”
Jack-Flesh said she was assigned a transition worker at age 16, although usually someone aging out of care is assigned a transition worker about six months before they turn 19. She said her social workers knew that she likely needed more help, as she does not handle change well.
“They ended up giving me a transition worker, kind of like a housing worker, when I was like 16 years old,” she said.
That transition worker helped Jack-Flesh with tasks like applying for welfare and for BC Housing, which has a wait-list of about two years, and learning to shop on a budget.
When she turned 19, Jack-Flesh was given a room in the St. Helen’s Hotel on Granville Street. The 93-unit single-room-occupancy building was built more than 100 years ago. Last year, the City of Vancouver hit it with 80 safety violations.
Jack-Flesh said it was not a safe place for her to live a decade ago either.
She had quit drinking and doing drugs a year before she aged out of care but when she was housed on the youth floor at St. Helen’s, she said it was impossible to stay sober. There was a bar downstairs and many of the other tenants used drugs and drank alcohol.
“My life went downhill when I got put into St. Helens. I’ll be very honest,” she said. “Because I went from being completely sober to, like, living with drug addicts in my building.
“How do you stay sober in an environment like that?”
Jack-Flesh had to buy and pay for everything except the roof over her head. After rent came out of her welfare cheque, she was left with about $225 a month.
“I went two weeks without eating,” she said.
A friend of hers ended up taking her to Directions Youth Services in downtown Vancouver, a resource she’d used when she was 16. She said it didn’t even cross her mind to go to them for help again, as she was just trying to stay alive.
The staff ended up feeding Jack-Flesh for weeks, and she loved working with and mentoring other youth that would come into the centre.
But she said once on her own, she struggled for many years, including dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and then a miscarriage.
“You feel like you’re drowning,” she said. “You feel like you’ve been thrown to a pack of wolves or hungry lions and you’re literally just dying, and you really don’t feel good.
“I went from being completely clean and sober for the year prior because I wanted to have a good mental space for when I aged out because I knew that it was going to be very difficult for me.
“But I went from being completely clean and sober to doing super hard drugs.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking in Kamloops, B.C., on May 23 as that community marked one year since the discovery of unmarked graves at the former residential school site, said “generations of Indigenous children are being taught that their language, their culture, their identity, had no value. Non-Indigenous kids in school systems across the country were being taught similar things about Indigenous cultures and communities. And that’s all of our shared responsibility to move through and beyond.”
He said the Canadian government has been working for a number of years, including passing Bill 92, in partnership with Indigenous leaders and Indigenous communities to transfer the responsibility of caring for kids at risk back to the communities.
“From a federal government perspective, and indeed from an Indigenous perspective, it is something that we absolutely need to do and we’re going to continue to do it because we see that even though residential schools are gone, Indigenous kids in care go through similar levels of trauma and vulnerability.”
Charlesworth said there are some First Nations in B.C. that are starting to develop and implement their own foster care systems, which helps recover their traditional laws and practices.
“It’s going to be a work in progress,” she said. “It will not be perfect. There will be problems, as there is right now with our child welfare system. So we have to be patient, supportive and provide the appropriate resources in a good way and get out of the way sometimes, but also be very strong allies and support children and youth.”
Charlesworth added that her office is working hard to make sure the Nations have the best information possible about where their children are located and what their children need.
“Sometimes it’s hard for them to even find out where their children are now because of the way in which the colonial system has worked,” she said. “So just finding their children and reconnecting them through that, the prevention efforts and whatnot will be positive. So I’m very hopeful. But I also know it’s not going to be easy.”
Jack-Flesh said she is still healing from her trauma and figuring out her life.
“It’s about stopping that cycle and starting a new one because that’s all residential school has done,” she said.
“That’s all technically what all of us have done for the last 500 years is just deal with this cycle of pain — everyone, honestly, you know, it doesn’t matter what culture you come from. We all have a cycle of pain and a cycle of trauma that our parents didn’t stop. So we now have to stop. And if you don’t, well, you’re just passing it on to your child.”
Jack-Flesh’s mother used to occasionally take her to Catholic services and classes when she was younger. She said she later realized it was because her mom attended those services when she was in residential school.
“Now, as an adult, I’m like, that was her trauma,” she said. “But it also passed on to me before she was even able to, like, take care of it.”
Jack-Flesh said, even now, Canada has never really felt like home.
“Maybe it’s because of the fact that I didn’t grow up with (my mother),” she said.
“Maybe because I didn’t grow up with a family and I was jumping from home to home to home to home. So I didn’t really know what home felt like.
“So for me, home is where my heart is, where I feel the most happiest.”
Indigenous Child & Youth Mental Health (CYMH) Services are available through the provincial government with free mental health and wellness services. Find an organization near you.
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