A toddler martyred to native identity
Author: Jonathan Kay, National Post
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Gage was born in July, 2005, and was abandoned by his mother before his first birthday. A foster family was found--by all accounts, a safe home run by competent parents. But child services workers instead turned the boy over to his paternal grandmother, a former criminal and suspected alcoholic.

According to documents recently obtained by the Winnipeg Free Press, child service workers visiting the grandmother's home determined that she'd left the asthmatic child with "an older gentleman and someone sleeping on the floor." During another child services visit three months later, the lice-ridden child was found amidst the "aftermath of a drinking party," featuring "people sleeping in the living room and other areas in the home." The actual care of the boy apparently had been outsourced to a 15-year-old uncle.

Gage then was given over to his great-aunt, a former car thief who'd been imprisoned for assault. A month later, the day after his second birthday, he died-- allegedly after falling down the stairs. (Child services workers subsequently rescued Gage's sister from the same home, covered in bruises.)

Why had Gage been removed from his foster family, and placed with such dubious relatives in the first place? Readers who know anything about the intersection of identity politics and child services policy probably already suspect the answer.

Aboriginals represent 14% of Manitoba's population, but account for about 70% of the province's child welfare caseload. (On some reserves, more than 40% of children are in foster care.) In 2003, the province devolved child welfare services to aboriginal agencies -- the idea being that First Nations case workers better understand the unique needs of aboriginal children, and can be counted on to protect native culture by prioritizing family reunification.

Ultimately, those politically correct intentions paved the way to Gage's grave.

Gage's mother was a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation, an Anishinaabe First Nation located east of Lake Winnipeg. Sagkeeng Child and Family Services -- the native-run child services unit charged with Gage's case -- apparently didn't want the child raised outside the boy's clan. "The family is very important in native culture," a well-informed source told me. "Reunification can become an obsession." (The foster family was Metis. "As far as the Sagkeeng are concerned, they might as well be white," my source told me.)

I have not had the opportunity to review the primary documents reported on by the Free Press. But the available evidence suggests Gage was put into a dangerous environment -- despite appalling evidence of alcohol abuse and squalor -- simply because it was deemed (as the jargon goes) "culturally appropriate." Effectively, Gage Guimond was martyred for the cause of native identity.

This isn't an isolated case. Last year, Mia Rabson and Lindor Reynolds of the Free Press spent three months investigating Manitoba's devolved child-welfare system. In many cases, they found poorly trained caseworkers shuttling a skyrocketing number of children from broken home to broken home. Guimond's death is just the latest tragedy. In 2006, police found the remains of five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair, a former foster child who'd gone "missing" after being returned to the custody of her birth mother on Manitoba's Fisher River First Nation reserve. In 2005, a 14-year-old native prostitute hanged herself after being moved over 60 times among foster homes, and sent 17 times to her addict parents.

Last week, in response to the Gage Guimond scandal, Manitoba's NDP government introduced legislation that would ensure a child's "safety" -- not just his "best interests," as the law currently holds -- is explicitly entrenched as the goal of child-placement decisions. I hope the bill passes. But I also hope the issue spurs a wider dialogue about native policy. In his senseless suffering and death, Gage personifies Kacheshewan, Peguis, Natuashish, Yellow Quill and a hundred other dangerous and dysfunctional native communities whose populations are languishing under similar pretexts. White society tolerates their misery -- subsidizes it, even, by pouring billions into their reserves --because the alternative, assimilation, is deemed too offensive a concept to contemplate.

But would it have been so bad if Gage Guimond had been "assimilated"? Is a healthy, happy future something to be disdained simply because it's provided to a child by a family with the wrong-coloured skin?

Assimilation can be a wrenching, painful process. But at least life goes on. Perhaps that is the modest goal we should be working toward -- protecting life itself-- rather than grander sociological projects. However precious culture may be to natives, it cannot possibly be as precious as a two-year-old's beating heart.

jkay@nationalpost.com

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