Government social services are 'significant agent' of colonialism, N.L. inquiry hears

A social worker with decades of experience working with the Innu in Newfoundland and Labrador has told a public inquiry that government social services that were supposed to help have in fact undermined and harmed Indigenous families.

Lyla Andrew, who grew up in Toronto and attended university there, was fresh out of graduate school in the late 1970s when she began working in the Innu community of Sheshatshiu. She said she started her career with the commonly held — but incorrect — belief that she had something to give the Innu that they did not have.

"The learning process was that my assumption was very wrong," Andrew said in pre-recorded testimony played at an inquiry hearing in Sheshatshiu.

"In fact, I don't think what we were trying to share with Innu had any value unless we could see the value of Innu knowledge and we were prepared to understand that Innu had a very rich culture and history."

The inquiry into the treatment and experiences of Innu children in care in Newfoundland and Labrador began in 2023, and it resumed Monday for a week of formal hearings. The proceedings have examined the history of Innu in the province and the systemic barriers they face.

Community members have spoken about children being taken away by child services officials to live in care far away from their families and culture. Several Innu children have died in the care of the Newfoundland and Labrador government.

Andrew, who works with a secretariat for Innu First Nations in Labrador, said the province's social services programs were built on the Western European idea of a family consisting of a mother, father and children. By comparison, Innu communities are focused on the wider collective; often several generations of families — or even groups of other relations — live together in one house.

In that arrangement, for example, the province would reduce income support benefits for parents if there were grandparents living with them, Andrew said. 

"The policies … were just imposed on the Innu," she said. "The helping systems don't focus on the well-being of the collective."

Grandparents felt an added need to protect their grandchildren, Andrew testified, because they knew young children were being taken from their families by child services at the command of non-Innu.

"It's hard to imagine that two or three people in these systems — the head doctor, or priest or school principal — could have so much power," she said. "But they did."

Andrew wrote a report in 1992 calling for Innu-led family and children's services. It described the government's social services programs as a "significant agent" of the colonial relationship between Innu and the provincial government, and called for Innu-led child and family services.

Its recommendations went largely unheeded, she said.