Social Services and the placement of Indigenous kids

Interview with Norm Hiebert

Transcript

The interview and this transcript have been edited for length and clarity.

Erica Fehr: Hi, and thank you for joining me today. Today we’re going to be hearing from somebody who has spent his career inside an organization that has come under fire repeatedly for the past several decades, particularly in regard to the sixties scoop. But what is social work about, really, and what can we learn about the sixties scoop from inside? I am Erica Fehr, and today I’m talking to Norm Hiebert. Norm has worked with Child and Family Services in Manitoba, both in the southeast region and in Winnipeg, for several years and then as a school social worker again in both of those areas. He attends the Fort Garry EMC in Winnipeg with his wife.

Hi Norm, and thank you for being willing to talk to us. You told me earlier that you worked with child protection as part of Child and Family Services. Can you give us just a bit more about that?

Norm Hiebert: My career started in 1987. And I was working for Child and Family Services of East area at the time—well, Eastern Manitoba. I was based in Steinbach, which is my hometown. And I worked there for four years, and I was a child protection worker. And the basic work of child protection is you have a caseload of children in care that you care for. You're interacting with police and mental health and psychiatry and foster parents, and it goes on and on. And doctors, and you also do investigations of abuse and neglect. And I was involved with that, and I did that for four years there.

EF: Okay, thank you, that helps—it gives us a bit of a picture. I mentioned earlier that CFS has come under fire. I don’t think I’m overstating that, but I would like to hear your perspective from being on the other side of that, and maybe walk us through the actual process of what you do as a child protection worker.

NH: Well, you know what Child and Family Services does. They just go and they just take kids away. Well, if that's your only picture, your only vision of, or only experience, then I guess that's true. But I know that that's not what the role of Child and Family Services is. That their role is to investigate when it is believed abuse or neglect has occurred. And the Act, Child and Family Services Act has a double-edged sword to it. And every worker that does this work is charged with that, and that is keep children safe and look after their best interests. And do everything you can to keep families together. Those two are diametrically opposed to each other sometimes.

What, so Johnny's getting beat up by his dad on a daily basis. Are we okay with Johnny getting beat up and hurt? Is it in his best interests to stay with Dad to keep that family together? Or can we intervene in some way? To say to Dad "look, that behaviour is unacceptable. And because we want to keep your family together, we're going to intervene in this way.” Or part of that intervention might have to be this has to stop. That it's not allowed, and for that we have to remove this child. But then, it doesn't end there, it shouldn't end there.

And you have to account for what you've done. You have to be able to say to the court, “This is what we discovered. This is what we found. This is what we have done. This is what we're planning to do.” And then, the judge can agree, disagree, ask for more work to be done. And yeah, I mean, it's a nerve-racking proposition. Court is not fun. It's stressful, it's serious, and it should be serious. And you are scrutinized and criticized, and it just… so again, the criticism is always there.

If you don't like criticism, you're in the wrong business. That was a constant. It was everything from, we were criticized for why didn't we get involved with a certain family? Why, didn't we get involved? Why did we? Why did we stick our nose here? Or why did we do this?   

So, let's say again, using the example of Johnny's getting beat by his dad. A lot of our calls… I mean, again, we don't go—agency workers do not have time to go driving down the streets looking to see if you know, if harm is being done. We generally have to hear about it. And in fact, it's the law, and that's every citizen of this province. You know, if you believe that someone is being harmed in some way, it is the law to notify the appropriate authorities, either child welfare or police. It is the law. So we get calls from individual citizens. We would get calls from mental health people. We would get calls from women's shelters. We get calls from schools, saying this is what we've learned, or Johnny doesn't want to go home now. Okay, then you have to make some decisions based upon the information you gather. Are we going to let this wait for a little bit, or is it serious enough that we have to intervene like right now? And so yeah, you have to make that determination. And again, it's based on information you receive. And let's say. Oh, we might have to check out Johnny and see, does he have physical marks on him from the beating. Will he talk to us? So that might involve an interview. And then we might also want to go. “You know what? I think we're going to have to have him seen by a doctor to corroborate the bruising,” and that type of thing. And then there's probably also going to be some contact with the caregiver as soon as possible to be able to say, “You know what? We have Johnny with us right now and we are going to place him in a foster home. And we want to meet with you as soon as possible.” And I mean, yeah, it's—we do not get Christmas cards. It's upsetting—it's upsetting for them. It's hard for the worker as well. But it's a job that needs to be done.

EF: I don’t envy you your job—it sounds very difficult, it sounds very stressful. And now I’m going to add a stressful question, my tough one: what about the sixties scoop? What about the Indigenous kids who were taken from their families and placed in white homes through CFS?

NH: The 60s Scoop, which, again it was before my time, but certainly the aftermath. And I met people that you know their parents had been some of the 60s Scoop people, and now they were living from like the residue from that and the disruption and the pain. Very, very difficult. But trying to answer the criticism, I mean certainly when I looked at my colleagues and myself, you know we have to say, I mean, it's one thing to say, “well, you know I wasn't around during the 60s Scoop thing—I didn't do any of that,” but we live with the history, so we still have—we're still doing the work. We're still working with families that came from that era. That—adoption breakdowns—kids that were adopted out and into the US and families that were broken up and separated and some that have only gotten together only recently, and it's a sad—it’s a very, very sad history of how we have dealt with those type of concerns.

The work that I was involved with and with my colleagues we tried, I think very hard to look at it on a case-by-case basis. What I found interesting was yeah, there are some that said, “yeah we did what we had to do,” and there was others that said “we did what we had to do, but we don't know if it was the right thing to do.” But it was—that was direction that they had received, and that was, you know, this child is in need of protection based upon the legislation at the time.

Child and Family, or Children's Aid in the 60s, they were told this is what you need to do. And I can't say that it was based. Oh just because of oh what's in the best interest of the child? Unless you're assuming the best interest of the child is to be white. Therefore, remove them in the hopes that, yeah, we're going to try and get them to assimilate and be white. That's a part of our history that we can't, we can’t change, we can't eliminate. We have to live with it. We have to say we have to try and do better.

And you know the whole idea of well, we were placing Indigenous kids into white homes. That's absolutely true. The majority of our placements were white homes. At the time that I was working for CFS, the Southeast was—it was kind of considered a gold mine of foster homes because there were so many individual families that were willing to foster. So, when I looked at it of “well, where are we going to place?” And I think that was the case of every worker. They didn't look at “oh, can we find an Indigenous home to place these children?” The question was “can we find a home to put these children into or a child?” That issue, I think, is still the same. It hasn't changed.

But there's history, and there's memory, and there's—trust has been broken, and there's fear. And you put all that together, and it becomes difficult. It doesn't bother me when someone said would say to me “well, I don't trust you.” I usually took the position—initially, that's "oh, come on, come on” [but] I realized “no, no, I haven't lived their experience,” so I started saying, “Absolutely right, do not trust me. But hopefully we can get to a point of being able to work together.” Because that's what I really want. It's the same thing I told this one parent, an Indigenous man, three kids. This is the one that he sent his mother to argue with me. And I took him for an appointment or something, and we were talking, and Child and Family had been involved with his family, and he said he hated them. Then I go, “This is the thing” I said. (He didn't know that I used to work for Child and Family) I said “Here's the thing” I said. “I don't think Child and Family wants your kids.” I said “Here's the other thing—I really want you to have your kids and if there's anything that I can do to support you, let's talk. But you also have got to know that if you are harming your kids and trying to sneak around, I said…I will call them myself.” And he said, “You would do that?” I said “Yes” and he says “Why?” I said “Because I care about your kids.”