Editorial: Touchstones of Hope: Still the best guide for Indigenous child welfare

In 2000, the authors of this editorial, along with a group of child welfare experts and allies, initiated a series of meetings and one conference as part of a project sponsored by the Centre of Excellence for Child Welfare, based at the University of Toronto in Canada. As a group, we represented the principal national child welfare organizations in the United States and Canada: NICWA (National Indian Child Welfare Association), CWLA (Child Welfare League of America), FNCFCS (First Nations Child and Family Caring Society), and CECW (Centre of Excellence in Child Welfare). The purpose of our gatherings was to conceptualize and develop a new perspective on child welfare that would be more appropriate for Indigenous children, their families, and their communities. The Touchstones of Hope was a document we produced in 2006 to share our new perspective. In the sections that follow, we revisit the origins and development of our thinking. Ten years after the publication of the Touchstones document, we look at how far we have come, at what we have accomplished, and at the difficulties we have encountered. We also look to the future, and to how Touchstones might continue to influence what we think and what we do. Using the analogy of a journey down a river, we look at the waters behind us, beside us, and in front of us. When a system fundamentally fails over many years to meet the needs of Indigenous children, you don’t try to make it culturally appropriate – you build a new system. The imposition of the mainstream child welfare system on Indigenous families in Canada and the United States has resulted in the mass removals of Indigenous children from their communities, while failing to improve the safety and well-being of the children or their families. A small group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies banded together in the year 2000 to develop a strategy to create a new child welfare framework for Indigenous children, because we were tired of the tragic stories from children who were removed from families only to be placed in a system that too often failed to give them the childhood they deserved. This small group, many of whom are authors of this editorial, quickly realized that this new child welfare framework needed to be a process that Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples could engaged in together based on reconciliation principles that were drawn from the collective wisdom of traditional knowledge keepers, community members, young people, experts, policy makers, and service providers. These principles also needed to be capable of adapting to various contexts and cultures. The group decided to bring together key knowledge holders to ask them what a new child welfare system would look like. The group was challenged by an enriching but complicated task of deciphering how to draw out the collective wisdom to develop the reconciliation principles and process once we had brought them all together. In our initial small group planning meetings, we realized that we really did not understand reconciliation well enough, and if we were going to host a gathering with reconciliation as the theme, then we would have to undergo the process ourselves. This involved courageously talking about colonization, working through our differences in worldview and more than one bout of tears. Processing these struggles provided us with clarity of thought and closeness of relationship that none of us have ever experienced in an event process before. Our own experience of reconciliation helped us realize that truth telling, an essential feature for reconciliation, is not just about putting facts on paper, it is hearing multiple interpretations of the truth, …