Indigenous elder gives moving speech on intergenerational trauma at Newmarket forum

Children's Aid hosts workshop as it moves to redesign organization after damning report

Yorkregion.com
April 4, 2023
Lisa Queen

Growing up on a reserve, where adults protected children from the years of colonization Indigenous communities have endured for generations, Hilton King’s first years were filled with joy.

But then, he and other children were taken from their community as part of Canada’s deplorable policies aimed at wiping out Indigenous culture.

“They wanted us to be like them. They wanted us to lose our way,” King said. The elder gave a moving keynote address on intergenerational trauma and colonization at a forum in Newmarket March 29.

Indigenous Peoples of Canada had welcomed Europeans, offering kinship, teachings about medicines and more.

“When the settlers came, when the missionaries came, they didn’t look at this, they didn’t think about how did you live here, how did you get along? We had a governing system, we had a child welfare system ... We had a kinship. We had everything we needed to survive here,” he said.

“All of a sudden, boom, it was gone, just like that. Residential schools came in, the Sixties Scoop (when thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in the child welfare system). It was a scoop. When we were taken from our home, my sisters and I, I was the only boy, that’s how it was. They scooped you, they put you in a car and they took you away and you didn’t know where you were going. I remember looking back and seeing my mom standing in the doorway.”

During the next five years, King and his sisters were in five foster homes, and at times suffered abuse.

He went on to struggle with and later overcome addiction. King is now a knowledge keeper with Dnaagdawenmag Binnoojiiyag Child and Family Services.

The Teaming Up for Children and Families in York region forum, at the Newmarket Community Centre, was hosted by York Region Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in collaboration with Dnaagdawenmag Binnoojiiyag, and Jewish Family and Child Service.

It came as the CAS is working to redesign the organization following a damning 2020 report commissioned by the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services.

The forum, which included more than 130 participants from community organizations and agencies in York region, was the first in a series of community outreach and partnership workshops, executive director Ginelle Skerritt said.

“We’re moving to where we see child well-being as a responsibility that is the entire community’s responsibility, everyone in the community, and really, that’s the spirit. When you look at Indigenous culture, when you look at what it says in the United Nations declaration on the rights of the child, it is about children’s well-being being a responsibility of all the adults and all the people who wrap themselves around children in the community,” she told yorkregion.com.

“I think CAS has suffered a bit from being very, very focused on one area, when children face extreme crisis and harm, and we want to expand that and be part of a community that creates a safe place where children can thrive.”

The pandemic has highlighted the need to focus on children’s well-being, Skerritt said.