Valuing the lived experience
Cindy Blackstock, of the Gitskan First Nations people of Canada, would like the ‘lived experience’ of her people to be given more weight as a source of research evidence.
Chief executive of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada (FNCFCSC), Cindy was in New Zealand as a keynote speaker at the Social Policy, Research and Evaluation conference. She described the multiple negative effects of colonisation on First Nations families, including the forced assimilation of children into mainstream society by removing them from their families and placing them in residential schools. Since then, community-based First Nations child and family service agencies have been developed to stem the disproportionate number of children being placed in non-aboriginal foster homes. However, despite the agencies’ success, Cindy says they are limited by systemic under-funding, the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge in social work, and having to work within Euro-western legislation.
Cindy told the Bulletin her organisation’s role was to provide resources indigenous communities could draw from to implement their own best solutions. It publishes a research journal, First Peoples Child and Family Review, which provides a forum for sharing knowledge that respects indigenous culture and indigenous knowledge, and an annotated database of articles. In terms of research and evaluation, Cindy says communities are best placed to do their own research. “That’s where the most important questions are and they are in best position to answer them,” Cindy says.
She would like more weight given to people’s lived experience. “Research is often based on getting new answers and new knowledge. But our ancestors raised children, and what shapes our children is not new. What we find in research is what aboriginal people have been saying. It provides evidence in a form the government is willing to hear. But I would like the government to listen to information provided on the basis of lived experiences – to value that experience not just when it is validated by quantitative research.”
FNCFCSC does take part in national research projects such as a 1998 study of the incidence of child abuse and neglect Canada, in which FNCFCSC was involved in the secondary analysis of data on aboriginal children. The study found that neglect was the main reason for placing aboriginal children into care. Cindy said neglect implied parents were unwilling or unable to meet the needs of the child, and assumes parents have influence over the risk factors. “So we controlled for certain variables – poverty, inadequate housing, and substance misuse. We found that if you controlled for those three factors, there was no over-representation of aboriginal children in the child welfare system. That is, if those did not exist at disproportionate rates, there would be no over-representation of aboriginal children in child welfare care – it would be at the same level as other children.” She said poverty and poor housing were systemic factors over which families had little influence. And while substance misuse involved personal choice, there was also a systemic issue of limited access to services for First Nations people compared with other Canadians. “There is a disconnection between the services we provide and the actual drivers of child poverty. Far too often we focus on the relationship between child and family, without dealing with the societal factors that put them at risk. As social work professionals, we must be deal with the structural issues that impact on child wellbeing as much as we support families to deal with their personal relationships.”
