Reflections on the launch of Calling All Kin, a new podcast on Indigenous child welfare in B.C., and what it means to – and how we might better – belong to each other
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s primary “call to action” is to reduce the number of Indigenous children in out-of-home care in this country. Yet, Indigenous children continue to be apprehended into the child welfare system at rates three times higher than at the peak of the Indian Residential School period (1831-1996). Though there is increasing research on the negative impacts of child removal on Indigenous children, families, and communities there is less research that records and analyzes existing community-based and institutional strategies that prevent, resist, or refuse child welfare interventions broadly and child removal specifically. … [Which leads to the question:] In the context of ongoing and disproportionate colonial child removal, how do Indigenous peoples make and maintain kin? (emphasis added)
So begins Erika Finestone’s 2022 Ph.D. thesis (Anthropology, University of Toronto), “Making Kin / Unmaking the Colony: Indigenous Refusal in the Era of Colonial Child Removal.”
I met Erika for the first time a couple of weeks ago, at the entranceway to the indoor gathering space at Heart Lake Farm, where she and her co-host – and my inspiring, multi-skilled friend – Hiinahcit Petrina Dezall, were launching their new podcast, Calling All Kin: https://callingallkin.ca/.
It was September 30th, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, established 13 years ago “to honour Residential School Survivors, their families, and those who never returned home.” The Day’s intent is to serve “as a powerful reminder of the lasting impacts of the Residential School system.” A day on which many of us don orange shirts, an emblem that “symbolizes the loss of culture, freedom, and self-esteem that many Indigenous children experienced.”1
“To honour” … “never returned” …”experienced” … past tense words and phrases.
And yet, Erika’s thesis opens with the fact this chapter is far from closed; it is not simply the impacts of the past that last – it is the actions, persistent, still, today.
“This day reminds us that ‘Every Child Matters.‘“2
Still, today.
And, as Hiinahcit underscored that day, that mattering must be expressed as more than words. “That’s nice,” she observed with flat affect, having just acknowledged the many various Truths that have been named in the past thirteen years, “but what are you going to do about it?”
A few of us were gifted the opportunity to be present for the launch of the podcast, with nearly 100 people joining online. The event flyer invited attendees to “join the conversation with First Nations leaders, Elders, advocates, lawyers, and scholars who are transforming child welfare by putting kin, community, and Indigenous sovereignty first.”
But it was the children, not listed, also present, that mattered most.
One of those young adults was the final speaker of our two hours together, before the ANSWER2 Drum Group sang our circle to a close. At 18-years-old he stood up, between the drum group behind him and a room of strangers in front. Gestured with unwavering words back toward his dark experiences as a child in care, beginning at 3. And then forward to a future of his belief in the people around him that day. Saying it was his 3-year-old self that in fact now stood tall – could stand, despite the darkness, because of kin – to address us. Most of us cried in response.
“Calling All Kin is a podcast about the changing landscape of Indigenous child welfare in British Columbia, and the people and approaches that help keep Indigenous families together in systems designed to pull them apart.”
“Be forewarned, this is not a podcast about Broken Children from Broken Homes. Calling All Kin centres concrete and actionable strategies that protect Indigenous children from harm within broken systems.”
This is the introduction to Calling All Kin’s first episode, “Hopping on the Caravan with Kukpi7 Wayne M, Christian,” which aired on Truth & Reconciliation Day.
For those listeners, like me, who haven’t yet learned or processed the history of Indigenous child welfare – a term Chief Christian problematizes – in B.C., these stories, told through his personal history, are illuminating, evocative, and lingering after the episode closes.
He tells the story of how, in 1980, at just 25-years-old, he led the historic Indian Child Caravan to Vancouver, a thousand-person march that successfully clawed back jurisdictional control over Indigenous children – previously held by the federal government. That march left an enduring legacy, founded on Christian’s lifelong commitment to those he set out to march for: children.
“I’m wondering,” Hiinahcit queries in the episode, “what would you say to those children, if you could put out a message to them with everything you’ve been through and where you’ve landed today, what would you like them to know?”
Christian reflects in response on the fact that today’s children likely don’t know that they’re bound up in this pivotal part of history. “They don’t know that because they were not taught it.” Of course that teaching needs to be part of the way forward, say Chief Christian, but that teaching can’t come simply from formal schooling.
“[T]hat’s what children need is an adult that will mentor and walk alongside them without, how do you put it, taking over their life … [I]f they can get connected to their family, in our societies, it’s the aunts and uncles and grandparents that would play that role. And that would help them. So we can get reconnected …That’ll start them on that journey.”
While acknowledging the experiential learning and community-based support that’s called for for care-deserving kids, Chief Christian also shared stories of the leadership roles children will play in the future, as was prophesied, on his telling:
[W]e’re walking in [a] time of prophecy. And what I mean by that is that things were prophesized that are happening right now. …
And one of the things that they prophesized, there would be a time when the children would lead. Things would be turned upside down, and the children would lead. And that’s what’s going on now.
[T]he 215 [children in unmarked graves, found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School] showed themselves, they’re leading us into that journey of healing. That’s what they’re doing. They’re showing us we need to heal.
Where are these children of prophesy pointing us? How do we heal?
Having listened now to the next two episodes in this series – with member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation and Co-Research Director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit, Tara Williamson; and Haida auntie-advocate and long-time former Executive Director of NIȽTU,O Child and Family Services Society, Katharina Stocker – Calling All Kin’s self-described “action-oriented podcast” fulfills the promise of offering actionable answers we, communities, and institutions might take up. I’ll leave you to listen for those on your own; though welcome a conversation together, when next we see each other, about what arises for you.
Perhaps the core answer to what we might do was already offered by Chief Wayne in the first episode … and foreshadowed in the launch day remarks at the farm from podcast advisory board member, launch day co-host, and University of Victoria Professor of Indigenous Studies, Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel:
“We belong to each other.”
Indigenous kids belong in their communities, with each other, with all those providing them with care also supported with the care and support they too need and deserve.
When Professor Corntassel shared his Cherokee Nation’s notion of digadatsele’i – “we belong to each other” – a gentle gasp and a few tears escaped the group gathered in-person. While none of us shared Jeff’s history or language, we all resonated, viscerally, with the notion of inter-dependence, of inter-belonging:
While state governments attempt to “claim” Indigenous peoples as citizens, workers, and/or rights-holders, Indigenous nations claim their own in a much different way: as relations with inherent responsibilities to our homelands, cultures, and communities. A Cherokee word that describes these lived relationships is digadatsele’i or “we belong to each other.” It is this sense of belonging that breaks through the colonial confines of the “nuclear family” and guides our relational responsibilities as clan mothers, chiefs, grandmothers, grandfathers, youth, children, parents etc. Mississauga Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson describes it as a ‘series of radiating responsibilities,” which require actions to reciprocate and renew these relationships.”3 (emphasis added)
Our gathered group all also resonated with the notion that our inter-belonging, the in-community care deserved most by the children that Hiinahcit and Erika are calling us to connect with, that Chief Christian is inviting us to follow, is a fragile thing. Just as is required of all relationships – but almost certainly even more so with those of this nature – the re-establishment of kin-based care will require that we take actions to renew it. And, yes, to have it reciprocated, for the benefit of all of us.
I’m deeply grateful to the Calling All Kin crew and their podcast guests for having the care, creativity and endurance to put together this series. And for the great kindness of inviting my partner and I to be present for its launch. I wholeheartedly encourage everyone reading this to head over to the team’s site and/or the podcast player of your choice to listen, learn – and then act – alongside them.
- https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/national-day-truth-reconciliation.html ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Corntassel, J., “We Belong to Each Other: Resurgent Indigenous Nations,” November 27, 2013: https://freeuniverseity.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/we-belong-to-each-other-resurgent-indigenous-nations-2/ ↩︎
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