By Juliet O’Neill
What set Cindy Blackstock off on a lifelong quest for equality for First Nations children was a boy with cerebral palsy whose damaged wheelchair was held together with duct tape.
Because he was a First Nations child, he was only entitled to a wheelchair through a government program every five years, so he’d have to wait another three years for a chair that wasn’t broken.
There were no such restrictions for low-income white kids, literally across the street in the North Vancouver neighbourhood where Blackstock was working in childcare in the Squamish Nation community after graduating from the University of British Columbia.
“It was a shock to see the injustice of giving these children less just because of who they were, “ she said in an interview. “The government was truly treating them as if they weren’t worth the money, and I just thought I have to do something about this.”
Since then, Blackstock has been a leader in efforts to get the federal government to provide the same services to First Nations children as other children. She was at the negotiating table that led to the announcement in December of $40 billion to compensate children and to make improvements in child and family welfare services on reserves and in the Yukon.
The $40 billion announcement came after many years of government resistance in the courts to complying with Canadian Human Rights Tribunal orders to end racial discrimination against First Nations children.
The litigation dates to a landmark ruling in 2016 by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that the Canadian government was racially discriminating against tens of thousands of First Nations children, many of whom were removed from their homes and put in the foster care system.
For now, the $40 billion is “words on paper,” Blackstock said, but she believes many Canadians will be watching closely, like her, to ensure the funds go to individuals and services, such as trauma and addiction help, as promised.
Canadians have been awakened, she said, by the campaign for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the discovery of unmarked graves of residential school children.
For so long, she said, public awareness did not rise to the necessary level of alarm to prompt government action. “That’s one of the dangers of discrimination – when it becomes so normalized that people hardly notice it anymore.”
A resident of Lowertown for 17 years, Blackstock is the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, a professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work, a recipient of honorary university degrees and a member of the Order of Canada.
Lowertown is where she was living when the government put her under surveillance to find grounds to have the human rights case first launched in 2007 thrown out. There were incidents that made her suspect she was the target of government attention “but I didn’t want to give it any energy” and detract from her cause.
It came to a head when she was invited by Ontario First Nations chiefs to a meeting with officials from what was then called Indian Affairs. She was barred from entering the meeting. “They hired a security guard to stay with me in a waiting room.”
In 2011 she got government documents showing that for several years dozens of public servants had been spying on her Facebook page, reporting on her, where she went, and what she said.
“I live such a boring life as all my neighbours here in Lowertown know, they didn’t find anything,” she said. “They didn’t find one spicy thing after following me around for four years.”
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal awarded her $20,000 compensation which she gave to a children’s charity. “It wasn’t about the money for me. It was about people having a right to peacefully use the courts to hold the government accountable and that’s what we were doing.”
Blackstock recalled the eve of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology on behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools system in June 2008. It was a sunny day. She was on her computer with the doors open. She found out that Dr. Peter Bryce was buried in Beechwood Cemetery.
Dr. Bryce, the chief medical health officer in 1904 Indian Affairs, was a whistle-blower on horrible conditions causing high death rates at residential schools. He was ignored in his time.
“I went to the ByWard Market and got the most beautifully coloured bouquet of flowers I could,” she recalled. “I went there to thank him, and I told him about the human rights case.” She later collaborated with the cemetery and his family to have a plaque installed in his honour.
Blackstock saw “racism all around me” while growing up in the 60s and 70s. “I didn’t have words for it back then, but people expected very little of me,” she said. “I was expected to grow up to be a drunk Indian or being on welfare . That never squared with the way that I saw myself or my family.”
She said her hope for an end to discrimination against First Nations children has “sometimes dimmed but never died” throughout years of government resistance.
“I just always thought this is such a big injustice that when Canadians come to understand it, they are going to stand up and press the government for change,” she said. “ I’ve always believed that in the deepest of my soul, even during the times when nobody seemed to care.”