SS IS MÉTIS. WHY WASN'T THAT RESPECTED?

You know the girl's story don't you? News networks across the country carried it for several months as the foster parents fought the MCFD in court for good reason. The case is saturated with cultural issues because S.S. is Métis. So is her foster mother Métis.

The term "Métis" derives originally from the French adjective metis that referred to something that was half of one thing and half of another, and then subsequently, referred to someone whose father and mother were of different races, or mixed-race. The Métis are a specific indigenous people group initially developed as the mixed-race descendants of unions between First Nations people and early European settlers.  Over time in Canada, many mixed-race people married within their own group, maintaining contact with their indigenous culture. A distinct and unique culture was developed. Métis are recognized by the Federal government as a segment of the aboriginal community of Canada.

As far as the birth parents and the foster parents were concerned, according to Métis customs, L.M and her husband RB had adopted S.S. That arrangement occurred soon after the child's birth. S.S. has lived with her mom and dad (foster parents) since she was three days old. This is her family. As I described yesterday, she was adopted by virtue of an Aboriginal Custom Adoption, a provision made possible by B.C. legislation. MCFD knows that.

This Métis heritage is a significant factor in this case.

That underscores the offense that the Métis and specifically the foster parents of S.S. feel, that no consultation occurred that demonstrated respect for either Métis culture and practice or wishes or for the Children and Family for that matter. Despite the objections of the BC Métis Federation that continues to protest the relocation of the Métis foster child to a non-Métis family in Ontario, the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) removed her from the Métis foster parents, who have cared for this little girl for the past 3 years, and who had applied for formal adoption of the child already legally adopted by Aboriginal Custom adoption.

BY ALL MEANS look up the little girl's Facebook page ‘Bring Home Baby S’, and the two websites that tell her story, bringsshome.ca or bringsshome.com.  

SHE IS GONE

SHE IS GONE

I have written about her earlier. The story has been in the news for months. It was not difficult for me to decide which course of action was most appropriate to the child. The bottom line is, she is gone.

She is no longer in B.C. She may soon be out of the news entirely. At three years of age, she is having to learn to live with the shock, the anguish of loss, the fear, the mistrust, the daily changes. She is gone, gone from foster parents who loved her so much that they applied to adopt her, and MCFD flew her to Ontario to be adopted into a Caucasian family in which the girl's two siblings live. She did not know them and had never seen them. 

Little attempt has been made here to understand a culture, the Métis culture, because that is the girl's birth heritage. Does it matter? Of course it does. It does in every other avenue of Canadian life and law and societal correctness. Yet in her case, with her life, that culture has been minimized and we have another instance of bureaucratic initiative misjudging what is truly in the best benefit of the child. Isn't our history full enough with the bad burden of young lives plucked from families and shipped off to a residential schools or to out of province non-aboriginal families and even over the border into the United States? Did we have to repeat this again with this little girl? No we did not.

I will talk about her a lot over the next weeks but first I want you to see her, well, you can't really, because there is a ban on such publication, but what is permitted, I can offer here. Furthermore, I am providing links to new websites that tell her story very well from the viewpoint of the loving foster family who miss her.

In subsequent pieces you will be shocked again, perhaps outraged by what our government has done.