It’s staggering to think aboriginal people are only 4.9% of Canada’s total population yet 48% of children in foster homes are aboriginal.
A lot of those kids would also be in foster home if they lived in the same conditions. But if the children are not removed from a toxic environment and something happens to them it is the government's fault. Part of the reason the kids are in toxic environments may be the result of Residential schools but and the parents of the children did not grow up learning how parrents are suppose to act. So now we have a multi-generational problem.
I remember working of Main Street on the midnight shift with what looked to be a pre-teenage girl leading tow other younger children, one in diapers, across the street which was four lanes in either direction. At four in the morning. What do you do as a government when you have issues like that? We hear, "White man does not understand our culture." We also have reserves where some people with the strength to say it, say that almost 100% of the population has been sexually or physically abused.
Manitoba had over 10,000 children in care. It is not like the government want to dish out the money looking after other people's kids. They tried to spin off the kids to native run organizations. They tried to find their own people to take the kids into care and could not find enough families to do it.
This 5% of the population but 25% of the problem (or what ever number) be it kids in care, adults being incarcerated, there is a reason for that. And not all of it is systemic racism. I live in a little enclave bookended by things that isolate us from others. And we repeatedly have youngsters going through yards, looking to get into cars. And there is more than 5% of them native, more like 75%. The cameras do not seem to bother them. We do have a few native families living here, they are great and we have no issues with them and are sure it is not their kids. They are hard working families just like the rest of us.
But the ones that are not, the ones that were not 'brought up right' end up with brushes with the law. Getting locked up? Heck, that means 'I get to hang out with a bunch of my friends' there and I have more cred on the street. My city has one of the greater concentrations of Natives. And we have some real shithole reserves where they grew up and then come down to the city. Some come down to escape them, with no support network they end up on the mean side of the street. Some of the guys go back to the reserves to recruit girls which they get hooked on the party life and then, well you got to bring in so much for me bitch.
Heck, when I was much younger my ex-girlfriend got involved with one guy, fell in love. He said, "I love you but I can't be with you unless you are working to make our lives better." She had a decent job before that, then she was out pulling in $1,000 a night on the streets. They moved Windsor with $90,000 (in the 80's) and she was not allowed to go anywhere without one of his family watching her. She phoned her mother here to send money (the family spent the money she made peddling her ass), her mother called me and asked me to get her back home. I wired her money, she got here, told me the story. Starting to get her set up here, she phones the boyfriend, "Oh I still love him.", she borrows money off my brother to go back to the boyfriend, never heard from her since. She was only half native though.
So I am going to get in shit, not being sensitive enough for them. A half native guy I worked closely with, he said for $1.000 his cousin will beat the shit out of someone for you. He had to go to another cousin's funeral, seem to remember a stolen car wrapped around a pole for that one. His auntie saw a picture of the two of us. Then she started to embarrass him, her telling him I was cute and what she would like to do with me.
So yeah, the numbers are staggering, 5% population, 50% the number in foster homes. There is reasons for it. So what is the solution?
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