The Six Nations Child Welfare Designation, also known as Ogwadeni:deo, is well on its way to becoming a fully operating child welfare organization providing child protection services to all indigenous people in Brant County.
The Two Row Times sat down with Director Tricia Longboat to get an update for where the process is at now. “There are five stages of designation set out by the Ministry of Child and Youth Services. We’ve been in the second stage (capacity building) for two years now and we’re coming up to the last part of it when we resubmit our documents. Basically everything we need to do business we have submitted to the ministry. They reviewed it and we had our feedback session in September,” Longboat said.
Longboat says that the Ministry gave recommendations to the collective and that they will again re-submit documents with the suggested edits for consideration by the end of this month.
This means that indigenous people, including those who self-identify as Metis and Inuit, across all of Brant County are a few steps closer to receiving help from a child welfare agency that is culturally driven, focused on the whole well-being of the child, and under the control of indigenous people themselves.
For Six Nations it has been a lengthy process. The first requests for indigenous led child protection services on the territory were being heard in the 1990‘s. To date there are seven indigenous agencies within the province of Ontario that are designated specifically for First Nations children.
Longboat said, “We’ll have a community based agency that is going to be providing child welfare services for Brant County to Ongwehowe people. This is also going to be available for any self-identifying indigenous person and Metis as well. This is what we have asked the Ministry to grant us. Until our feedback session in September I think the ministry thought we only wanted to service Six Nations but we said ‘no, we want all of Brant County’.”
Longboat said that the long term goal is to eventually see Ogwadeni:deo branch offices offering child protection services to the indigenous people in the surrounding area including Hamilton, Haldimand and Niagara.
Ogawdeni:deo is breaking new ground in the child welfare designation process as they will be primarily about intervention and child protection. Longboat says this differs from the other seven indigenous designations who primarily focus on prevention and have incorporated child protection services into the plan as only a part of what they do.
“Ogwadeni:deo will first and foremost be involved in child protection while utilizing the other existing agencies on the territory that already are involved with servicing other aspects of childhood well-being. This will ensure that Ongwehowe children in crisis within Brant County are receiving the kind of care they deserve,” said Longboat.
Longboat said that during the community consultation process it was heard loud and clear that a child protection agency founded on traditional teaching that would work toward the wellbeing of the entire family was what the people wanted.
The process will differ from the CAS structure in that Ogwadeni:deo will pursue an assessment of the child’s family relationships including consulting with extended family where there is a concern for a child’s safety.
“In our process we are going to do an assessment instead of an investigation because that is what you are going to be doing; asking questions, getting to know the family very quickly in order to make a determination on whether there needs to be an intervention and what that intervention will look like.
“We want to incorporate the family as much as possible. We want the family to know that they are the experts of the file. We want to defer to them in terms of ‘hey, what direction do you want to go on this?’ because if you think about it, a lot of times its not a surprise if a call comes in on a family. A lot of the times a family member knows, their extended family knows and they will either have a sigh of relief and go ‘phew finally someone said something’ or if someone did something sometimes the family has already tried to intervene.
“When the referral comes in from the family member when the CAS becomes involved – they will do interviews. We would like to do a wider scale assessment where we interview the extended family to find out who is supporting the family right now.”
Longboat says the next phase of the Child Welfare Designation will hopefully be in effect this coming Spring 2015.
