“We stole her back too” - Acts of resistance and restoration when traditional governance and authority of child and family matters is reclaimed by the grandmothers of a First Nation community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings concerning child welfare highlighted impacts resulting in Indigenous people’s dispossession, trauma, separation, and relational upheavals through forced removals and lasting harm to children, families and communities. Canadian Provincial government legislation over child welfare authority dominates and these outcomes continue today through child apprehensions. In 2020 the Canadian Federal Government enacted Bill C-92 respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families; a legal framework intended to reduce the gross over-representation of Indigenous children in care. It affirms the inherent jurisdictional authority of Indigenous communities over their child and family matters. In 2024 following some Provincial Governments’ legal challenges, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously confirmed C-92 is constitutional in its entirety. This article chronicles the efforts of a team of Indigenous Dene, provincially-delegated workers with extensive experience working within provincial child and family legislative frameworks. Within 15-months 47 children taken by Alberta Children’s Services from their rural community were returned and re-connected to their families, kin and culture. Culturally-based practices such as inclusion of ceremonial practices, using circle processes to conduct meetings and problem solve and respecting the traditional authority of matriarchs within the Indigenous Dene kinship system were key strategies in resisting and challenging the status quo of provincial child welfare authorities. These actions can encourage other communities to transform current child welfare approaches by restoring and reclaiming their own laws and traditional practices which offer alternative, humane and culturally-connected ways to protect children, support healing and rebuild communities. • Canada has a long history of the forced removal of Indigenous children. • The C-92 law affirms Indigenous community authority over child/family matters. • One Indigenous agency sought redress of CWS child removal. • The community had around 1/3 rd of their children in state care returned. • These actions resulted in resistance from the provincial child welfare agency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".