Going Forth With Healing and Prayers

"Of the 31 child-death and 25 critical-injury files closed in 2012, we can confirm that 56 percent and 84 percent respectively involved an aboriginal child or youth.
"We suspect that the percentage of deaths involving aboriginal young people may be significantly higher."
Saskatchewan Advocate for Children and Youth

From statistics available through provincial archives and the child-welfare systems, aboriginal children remain disproportionately represented in the child-welfare system. They are taken from their dysfunctional families because of neglect, because of abuse, because of unsupportable conditions in which no child should ever be immersed whose effect is to turn out twisted minds and socially-inversed adolescents who turn to drugs, alcohol and crime. (Accounting for the over-representation of aboriginal adults in Canadian prisons.)

They are, after all, patterned on the lifestyles of those closest to them; their parents, their extended family members, neighbours -- struggling with addictions and with the effects of violence directed toward one another. Aboriginals insist that their children must be placed for foster care within their own communities, so that their children will not lose their ancestral inheritance of custom, lifestyle, language, memory. In the process, many lose their lives.

There is huge sensitivity from those in authority to this issue, and pressures are brought by those involved in social welfare to honour the wishes of First Nations people. So aboriginal children are given to aboriginal communities to foster when their extended families appear incapable of raising the children as children should be raised with tender respect for their formative years, giving them emotional and practical support and encouragement to learn and succeed.

When there are victims and those who victimize them and they are both aboriginal, sympathy must be extended equally to both parties. The victim is a transitory victim of a corrupted soul enacting vengeance on one of their own; the victimizer cannot be held to blame, because his heritage, traditions, culture have been held in insufficient esteem by the invading Europeans who conquered the rightful inhabitants of the country.

Six-year-old Lee Allan Bonneau who lived and died last month on the Kahkewistahaw First Nation Reserve in Saskatchewan was in the care of a foster mother. He was "receiving services from Yorkton Tribal Child and Family Services, along with his family", evidently. The family receiving counselling that might conceivably aid them to grasp the concept that their severe familial and social dysfunctionality represented a sad abnormality in human relations.

And the child given to the care of an experienced aboriginal woman to help raise in normally functional surroundings. The night of August 21 while the little boy was playing alone just outside the band community centre, his foster mother was inside that same community centre, busy, playing bingo. It was established that he was last seen playing with some dogs at around 8:30 p.m. An hour and a half later his whereabouts were unknown.

He was discovered around 10:20 p.m. beaten and battered in a wooded area close by the reserve's community centre. His killer is under twelve years of age, and as such, under-age to be held criminally responsible under Canadian law. He cannot be criminally charged. According to RCMP Staff Sgt. Larry Brost, there is "no other person responsible" for the death of little Lee "than this child", who under the law cannot be publicly named.

And because the murderer of the six-year-old is under the age of twelve "that child is deemed to be in need of protection". The provincial government and the Yorkton agency will be co-engaged to jointly make decisions revolving around the young killer's welfare "to ensure he receives the treatment he requires", and in the process that "the community is safe". No blame, evidently, is to be attributed anywhere special.

"I thought about leaving this reserve because of the parties, the drug dealers, the drunk drivers", wrote Bobbi Alexson, a young man from the reserve. Bobbi Alexson happened to be among those who set out to look for little Lee the night he went missing. He has started a petition for peacekeepers to be present on Kahkewistahaw. He has posted messages on his Facebook page decribing the "terrible home" the reserve represents for children.

He hesitates to leave himself, though he wants to, because of his reluctance to leave his grandmother and children "in an environment that has lost (its) ways. I don't feel safe on my reserve, my home, and I know damn well you don't, either", he wrote on Facebook.

"This tragedy", feel provincial authorities, that has latterly befallen the reserve makes it imperative that a healing process go forward, prayers for example, lots of prayers.