In Canada, the government has just announced that it will soon compensate thousands of indigenous people who have been torn from their families and communities since 2006. Due to a lack of local child protection services, these children have been sent to youth centers or Canadian families that had nothing to do with their culture. After fifteen years of legal battle, the Canadian government now agrees to compensate them financially, while setting up new services close to Native communities.
With our correspondent in Quebec, Pascale guéricolas
As early as 2006, families whose children had to live in an environment totally different from their Aboriginal culture, filed a complaint against the Canadian government. Lawyer Armand Mackenzie, himself an Innu, one of the First Nations communities, supported them in this fight: “ Unfortunately, what still happens is that the children are taken far from their village, far from their culture, far from their language, and then we never see them again, these children, except that after adulthood. They come back to adulthood, they search for their identity, they want to know their family, their relatives, their cousins and all that. “
► To read also: Indigenous Peoples: Canadians in Search of their Buried History
End discrimination
Several court decisions have ruled in favor of the natives in contesting the placement of children outside their home environment. The Canadian government has finally agreed to release sums of up to thirty billion euros to compensate families and promote local services.
” Concretely, this investment will make it possible to put an end to discrimination, to ensure not to reproduce the intervention model that tore children from their families, explains Marc Miller, Minister of Native Relations. All of this comes at a financial cost. But we also need to think about the cost of inaction. “
Negotiations are to continue until December 31 between the government and several indigenous bodies.