This story was produced as part of Spotlight: Child Welfare, a collaborative journalism project that aims to improve reporting on the child ‘welfare’ system
‘Indigenous people across the country and across the world have always talked about how they know the best for their children, and they do,’ says Jessica Knutson, a social worker who was involved in the child protection system as a teenager.
Indigenous Peoples are reclaiming their right to take care of their children after at least 500 years of colonization. The transition to taking back jurisdiction — the power to make legal decisions — over their children is a move full of hope, but also fraught with concerns about inadequate funding and offloading responsibility from federal and provincial governments to Indigenous nations…