New charter helps vulnerable adults

The Ktunaxa Nation Council has formed an historic alliance with the provincial Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation in British Columbia. The two bodies have come together to better assess and develop programs for vulnerable Aboriginal adults in the First Nation.

While the Ktunaxa Nation already runs programs for its vulnerable people—as well as other Aboriginal individuals in their area—the goal of this partnership is to use what’s currently available to find gaps, then remedy them.

“We do offer programs, but we’re entering into a relationship with MARR to extend programs,” said Shannon Gerling-Hebert, quality assurance administrator and service integration for the Ktunaxa Nation Council.

“To my understanding, funding is not secured, but we signed a charter to work together… It was a joint effort between the Ktunaxa social services sector and MARR,” she said.

Gerling-Hebert, who wrote the proposal for the charter, said the Ktunaxa Nation Council has been working on securing the relationship with MARR for the past six months. And while the charter has only recently been granted, the realization of the need to take a closer look at programming has been a long time in the making.

One issue Gerling-Hebert sees in particular is of young people who have spent years involved with child welfare, who then reach adulthood and “have no place to go.”

“Our proposal was to develop this relationship because we have so many young people aging out of the foster care system without any resources or plans for their future,” she said.

Programming gaps exist—province-wide—in relation to issues specifically affecting Aboriginal people, and Melanie Gould, regional governance coordinator for the Ktunaxa Nation Council, links many of these issues to social problems like cultural genocide, racism, and the Indian residential school system; all issues experienced collectively by the Aboriginal population.

“Aboriginal people need to be tied to their culture… that piece is missing. And if you look at residential school history, it’s horrific. They were stripped of so much, and there’s so much racism… It’s not as simple as “let’s find housing,” she said.

Furthermore, issues that have arisen out of problems with racism, and residential schools, have spawned secondary issues—like fetal alcohol syndrome, for example, which now affects a portion of the Aboriginal population.

Despite how common FASD is, many social services, including the public education system, fall short of being able to properly address these cases, said Gould.

“If you look back at residential schools, alcoholism rates skyrocketed when kids were taken from their parents. With everything from sex abuse to being hit if you spoke your language… Alcohol rates became very high and kids were born with FASD,” she said, adding that these children may then have children, but not have the capacity to be parents, causing inter-generational social issues.

In terms of the research to be done on social programs, Gould and the Ktunaxa Nation Council will be using a series of “well-being indicators,” such as ancestry, use of traditions, culture, health, and educational data. The model is less focused on hard data, like morbidity rates, and instead was developed after posing the question to Ktunaxa Nation members, “What does a Healthy Ktunaxa citizen look like?” and incorporating their answers into a holistic idea of health, said Gould.

The next step for the Ktunaxa Nation is to take over 20 individual cases of persons in need within the next year, from Community Living BC—an organization already working with the government to care for citizens with disabilities—and deliver services to those people while tracking the outcomes.

“It’s just a first step for us in looking at what it would look like to better serve Aboriginal people. We’re using CLBC because we’re already working with them. But our ultimate goal is to ensure that Aboriginal adults who are vulnerable are served in the best possible way... In ways that are meaningful to them, and culturally relevant,” she said.