A Change of Residence: Government Schools and Foster Homes as Sites of Forced Aboriginal Assimilation – A paper Designed to Provoke Thought and Systemic Change

Abstract

Richard Cardinal is a Metis boy from Fort Chipewyan. He now resides in the spirit world, along with many other Aboriginal children, after hanging himself from a birch tree in Alberta in the backyard of his sixteenth foster home. Richard is not forgotten, but reminds advocates for Metis children, Aboriginal children, all children, that we are in the midst of an ongoing crisis when it comes to caring for “removed” children. Not unlike many children in the care of the state today, Richard had been removed from his parents, removed from his home community, and finally separated from his siblings without his consent. He was placed in twenty eight different living situations: these included sixteen foster homes, twelve group homes and locked facilities, as well as time spent on the street while trying to escape from abusive foster parents. He died at age seventeen. It was a Metis organization that brought Richard’s plight into the public eye. The abuse, degradation, and inhumanity endured by this Metis child was exposed. However, in spite of his suffering, he was ostracized in the system for being difficult, while he became more and more suicidal.