System Failing Parents and Children of the System.<br><br> By Sherri-Lynne McQueen<br><br>

System Failing Parents and Children of the System.

By Sherri-Lynne McQueen

Residential Schools, Child Welfare Act and Child and Family Services!

This all started when the government wanted to assimilate First Nations People by forcing our ancestors to be educated in Christian based institutions where they endured physical and emotional abuse, were raped as young innocent children, and in some schools they were aware of children disappearing, being murdered. In order to survive, children and adolescents were forced to suppress their natural emotional responses to personal assaults and/or witnessing others being tortured and sometimes killed

Our great-grandparents, grandparents and parents became institutionalized as children as they grew up with abuse, detached from their families, feeling and witnessing anger, hatred, racism, no sense of belonging, a lack of self identity. They lost their culture, language and traditional beliefs. When those who married and had their own children or became aunts and uncles or neighbours – all the abuse they endured and the anger and self loathing that they were taught was passed down to their children, or the children around them.

How could they love somebody when they didn’t even know what love was? They were never shown this. The confinement and torture in the residential schools continued to the 60”s Scoop when federal government Indian Agents went into homes and took children from their parents without reason. These children were placed in primarily white foster homes, which again led to more physical and sexual abuse, severe physical punishment, anger, rejection, isolated and humiliated in the dominant society. These children grew up never knowing where they came from, never meeting brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents. Some were placed on farms to work for immigrant and elderly/disabled white couples or those with pedophilie intent; some were sent to the United States, some being placed with single white males; some were even taken to Holland and had been traumatized into not remembering the homes from which they were abducted.

Many became part of the juvenile system, and the prisoner culture in provincial and federal penal institutions. Some had families of their own and their children suffered all the abuses that their parents were burdened with by the Child Welfare Act of __________

They developed complicated coping mechanisms to hide their inability to become part of communities, find a place in society where they could belong … many kept on the move, sometimes being forced away to another town, to another city, to another province. Our mothers, fathers, grandparents were in denial. They used drugs and alcohol to bury the past, to keep memories and feelings from coming to the surface.

We, the children born to them, didn’t know how to parent our children because we never received these skills when we were put in government funded foster homes. In turn, when we tried to be mothers and fathers, we coped the best we knew how. We passed the sense of being lost, and disowned down to our children and they in turn are now doing the same. Many of us have become grandmothers in our early thirties …

This has been going on for 4-5 generations -- children stolen by the federal government who used the apartheid of the reserve system and the organized pedophilia of the Catholic and Anglican church-schools to erase our ancestral heritage and collective knowledge, to sever the mothers from their children, to destroy the parental and clan bonds that allowed us to live, survive and prosper on this continent for thousands of years. Our great-great grandparents, our great-grandparents, our grand-parents, our parents, and now us, and our children, and our grandchildren.

We are the children of the land- and spirit-consuming machine that was created by the ‘marriage’ of the single white males issued by decree from Europe and Great Britain by the Catholic, Anglican and United churches to ensnare the youngest and smallest in the traps of the residential schools . We were taken from our families, from the homes we knew, and from our culture. This is taking place still … to this day … but the Web that was Woven has become larger, and the prey are easier to kill. We are seeing our children and our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren -- on the streets and in housing projects, urban reserves, selling their bodies and their spirits as sex slaves – some even younger than 12 years. We see the horrific exploitation of our young by organized crime who use ‘warriors’ and ‘posses’ to kill their own, to make those who have survived the generations before them disposable commodities. Native gangs are the end product of the first residential school, over a century ago …. created from the outside, by those who were ‘inside’ and can only find meaning and recognition by harvesting children and adolescents for sexual attacks and controlling them with drugs and torture, because that is what they were taught in foster homes, in group homes, on the street, in shelters, in hotel rooms, and party houses that were supposed to be ‘homes’ -- where they themselves might have been conceived.

Violence and silence is killing the generations to come. Obviously the government has failed us over and over, with each act and decree that gives them dominion over the newborn, over the young of our Nations. When the AJI came into being in 1990, what happened to it? Did it fall on deaf ears? Or was the government saying, with a whisper only they could hear, that “No, we are still orchestrating genocide on these people. We want them to become white or die, so they can be placed in the earth, not standing upright and proud on it, pointing to what we know is rightfully theirs.”

Today thousands and thousands of our children continue to be spirited away into other people’s homes; some have been murdered, some have committed suicide or cut wordless life stories into their arms, puncturing their veins with pauses and question marks. Thousands have been and are being raped, have been and are being abused, have been stripped of their identity and their ancestry, have been permanently adopted out, and we are suffering with a hollow-chest pain that echoes from coast to coast and down through the decades like a drum, because of we are of the land.

When will this stop? When are we to become whole again? When can mothers begin to gather their children back to them? It is time to tell the government what they have done to us, to make our stories known, and it is time for the government to be held accountable for all the crimes that were committed against us while we were under the ‘artificial’ parental care of the great white fathers.

We need change today. My two children, who are the only ones that WCFS haven’t adopted out, are in the care of Metis Child and Family Services. Here we have the agencies that were mandated for cultural reasons. Well, I can tell you my children aren’t living in culturally appropriate homes today. One of my children is living with I believe an East Indian family, and the other is living with a German family, which isn’t that bad because my biological Mother is of German mixed blood, and my Father (who went to the ancestors too early) brought me to being with his Cree spirit.

I still don’t have visits with my children. I have completed all the programs, jumped through all the hoops, acknowledged and dealt with every barrier placed between myself and my children by MCFS. Here goes the next generation growing up in European and now Indo-Canadian homes and adopted out to those with no Cree, or Ojibwe, or Metis blood, no daily reminder of ancestral memory, no sense of belonging, and possibly being abused and raped. I am not there to watch over them … I cannot see, or hear, or touch them … I cannot watch over them, protect them, guide them to this new future I am labouring to create.

When is it going to stop? I say today that we have to stand up to the government and say “no more will you do this to us again”. We need to take our claims as far as the Grandmothers and the Grandfathers tell us to go … and in which directions we must travel.

All of us that were affected by the foster care system, either directly as foster children or by having our own taken from us or witnessing the trafficking and slow deaths of our children and grandchildren in the streets and alleys across Canada … it is time to stand strong, proud and lift our voices, and be heard, and say “no more will you do this to us. No more.”

I want to see A Youth in Care Network, and a safe place for them to go when they don’t want to stay in care anymore, or when they turn 16 or 18 and are kicked out to fend for themselves, if they haven’t already run away. I also want to see the formation of an independent investigation and complaints program where the children, birth parents and child advocates can go when there are things that need to be addressed. I want to see this run by the Community, Immigration Officials, and Survivors of the System, and First Nation and Metis Leaders who are dedicated to their people.

I want this Network to have:

Ø A Healing Program specifically designed for children taken from their birth mothers and given to paid ‘others’ to raise

Ø A safe place when they want to escape sex slavery

Ø An advocacy program for children in care

Ø An Advocacy program for women and men who lost their children to Agencies,

Ø A Family Preservation Program

Ø A Healing Program for those of us who were abused in the foster care system to the point where we don’t trust society and we cannot confide in their workers or their representatives with our issues, because we cannot trust them to help us

Ø A Reunification Program

Ø A Scholarship program without an age barrier

Ø An Investigation Program because a lot of our children were adopted illegally,

Ø Independent Parent Child/Assessors and Psychological Assessors.

We (the mothers and fathers raised in foster care, losing our own children and now grandchildren to foster care) need our own counselors, social workers, justice advocates and assessors. This needs to be implemented immediately in order for this crisis within our agencies to stop. The government has tried and failed, and so have our First Nations and Metis Agencies. They do not want to work with us in a close and healthy partnership. They do not want us to reunify with our children.

This needs to be done now… because the struggle that we as a generation face ahead of us after many years of being away in homes is trying to build a bond with our own children when they are adults while we try and find our own families of origin, or those who have managed to survive. How can we bond with them when we don’t even know them? It is time for us to start healing, and reuniting with our families, and it is time to hold the government accountable for the crimes that have been committed against us as foster children and descendants of the Residential Schools. Our parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents – those who have somehow survived the genocide -- are still waiting for compensation, which is beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond human understanding.

We will start a class action lawsuit against the government and its agencies and contractors and sub-contractors for the crimes that have been committed against us as children and adolescents in foster care. We as citizens are held accountable for the crimes that we commit. Foster parents who brutalized or raped or exploited any one of us, have committed criminal acts as paid agents of the Canadian government. They are no less culpable than any priest, nun, minister, teacher, kitchen worker, handyman, doctor, etc. who injured, raped, starved or terrorized our great-great grandparents, our great-grandparents, our grandparents, or our mothers or fathers, aunts, uncles in the isolated torture chambers that were called ‘residential schools’. A bedroom or a basement in a foster home on a respectable city street can be as impenetrable as a church school that could only be reached by air or water …

1st Annual Walk

Sherri-Lynne McQueen was raped and beaten as a Crown Ward in Thunder Bay and Gull Bay. She begins her walk on behalf of survivors in Winnipeg, with stops in Kenora, Dryden. She will arrive at the CAS office at 110 Jade Court (off Balmoral Ave. Thunder Bay) at 11 am on

Friday May 19 2006

Sherri will walk from CAS to the offices of Joe Comuzzi MP & Michael Gravelle MPP on Van Norman & St. Paul Street where she will be calling on the Federal & Provincial Governments to answer survivors’ questions.

Why is this Walk necessary?

To raise awareness that Physical, Sexual, Emotional & Spiritual Abuse happen when children & adolescents are under the care of CHILD & FAMILY SERVICES and in their Foster Homes. “We are the generations who are suffering the legacy of colonization: residential schools, over-representation in youth & adult correctional facilities, exploited in sex trafficking, afflicted with addictions, Hep C & HIV.

When residential schools were closed down, foster care became the place to hide stolen children … thousands & thousands of First Nations & Metis girls & boys have been raped, maltreated, had their ancestral history & spirit beaten out of them under the contracted ‘care of the Crown’.”

It is time to speak out and have our voices heard

LET'S BREAK THIS CYCLE OF VIOLENCE & SILENCE

For more information please call Sherri-Lynne McQueen Winnipeg 204 589 5211 Lynne Moss-Sharman HBSW Thunder Bay 807 622 5407

Survivors walk for justice

Chronicle Journal, Thunder Bay By JIM KELLY May 20, 2006

The first annual walk for justice for survivors of child rape and abuse in foster care is more about awareness than revenge, says Debi O’Kane. O’Kane, 48, of Couchiching First Nation near Fort Frances, said she was placed in foster care locally by the Children’s Aid Society and claims she was raped before she was eight years old by friends (?) of her foster father. She also claims her sister Laurie, who was in the same foster home, was raped by her foster father and his son. Laurie later became a heroin addict and committed suicide in 1992. O’Kane and others participated in the 90 minute walk Friday from the CAS office on Jade Court to the offices of MP Joe Comuzzi (L-Thunder Bay-Superior North) and MPP Michael Gravelle (L-Thunder Bay-Superior North) at Van Norman and St. Paul streets

They were seeking answers to some sensitive questions, said O’Kane. “This isn’t about revenge,” she said. “It’s about bringing other victims forward so they can start the healing process. “It’s not the shame that keeps people from stepping forward, it’s facing the nightmares. Doctors and psychiatrists are not here at night when you want to jump off a balcony or swallow a bottle of pills.”

O’Kane said she wants to bring abuse into the open so others don’t suffer the same fate as she, her sister and others. She also would like to see a home built in Thunder Bay so victims of abuse will have a safe place where they can come to heal. She said the trauma of what happened to her 40 years ago haunts her to this day as she suffers from anxiety attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder and night terrors. O’Kane has two other sisters and two brothers, of which a sister and a brother were also in foster care but were placed in good homes.

CAS executive director Rob Richardson said the allegations by the abuse victims are “unfortunate obscene occurrences and what happened to them is terrible. What they want is resolution,” he said. “We can apologize, but that’s not resolution.” Richardson said the CAS is not trying to hide anything or avoid taking responsibility. He said many documents from the 1960s were shredded or destroyed within months of being written. “There’s not a lot of stuff in there.” But that’s not a matter “the CAS hiding anything,” he said. “Certain confidentiality provisions appear like you’re trying to hide something,” he said. “We can’t just open the file and say ‘read away.’”

Glenda Melvin, O’Kane’s mother, predicted Friday’s event would not be the last. “People are in the shadows,” she said. “They might be more willing to come out if they see this (walk for justice). You might have a bigger crowd next year,” she said, pointing to the handful of participants who gathered at the CAS office.

Letter from Diane Ogima Moir

Diane Ogima Moir Born March 25, 1955 Ojibwe Fort William First Nation

Sisters Judy, Gloria (deceased) Brothers Alec, Brian, Danny, Rodney, Frankie; Glen and Norman (deceased) I was born into a family of ten children – to an Ojibwe father and a Metis mother of Blackfoot Cree/French/Irish heritage (from Medicine Hat, Alberta). Both my parents were alcoholics. From age one to four, I was placed in CAS foster homes because of assaults against myself, sisters and brothers. I can remember having to darn socks on a lightbulb in one foster home … my sister Gloria and I had to darn socks until our fingers blistered. At age four I was permanently placed with a foster family where I remained until I was eleven years old … my four older sisters and brothers were unfortunately returned to my parents because my father raped my sisters and brutally beat my brothers

When I was eleven, my foster family took respite or went on vacation … and for some reason I was sent out to the bush to my father’s house. On the second day there, my sisters were out blueberry picking, my brothers were working in the bush and my father raped me. I can remember running down the railway tracks … the OPP bringing me to Port Arthur General Hospital … where I was not given any medical attention. I was quickly taken across the road to the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital.

Dr. Coates had me stripped naked, strapped on a gurney, and taken for two days to a solitary room on top of the front of the LPH. I had nothing to eat. Then I was given the first of many electroshocks … so many that I forgot who I was, forgot my ABC’s, everything I had learned. I believe the electroshock was done for the simple reason to make me forget I had been raped, forget who I was and what had happened to me.

I stayed there on the children’s ward for two years, was given birth control pills for some reason, and I was classified as mentally deficient, subnormal. In 2004 I got those hospital records and I read that “Diane should be institutionalized for the rest of her life.” I went on to become a mother, a grandmother, a wife, I worked for the city for ten years, I drive my own car. Two of my daughters are attending university.

I attended classes on the children’s ward, and some of my schoolwork started to come back to me (before being raped my father and put in the LPH, I had been attending Grade 7 at Holy Cross School). I wrote to CAS and told them I was going to kill myself if they didn’t get me out of the LPH. I was placed in a foster home when I was 13 … the LPH schoolteacher and her husband, who was a teacher in the community, became my foster parents (___ and Gord Chartress). In that home he also became my rapist on two or three occasions when his wife was away from Thunder Bay.

I told my CAS worker what had happened and the husband and wife teachers, my so-called foster parents, told CAS not to believe me because I was mentally disturbed, a psychiatric patient. I heard later that she divorced him.

CAS placed me in another foster home where they took in kids from the LPH (Helen Hamilton and Ross Hamilton). In this home I was raped by the foster father. I told my CAS social worker (Boyd Drake) and he didn’t believe me. I had no choice but to run away from CAS, and I lived on the streets in Thunder Bay from age 14 to 17. I took shelter once with an uncle while my aunt was in the hospital having a baby. He raped me. I took shelter another time with another relative and his wife, but she went to the hospital to have a baby and he raped me while she was on the maternity ward.

When I was sixteen, I lived with one boyfriend who locked me up in a room for an entire week while he went away to work in the bush. He left me no food, put a jar on the floor for me to pee in. He didn’t want me to run away.

Two of my sisters had children by my father when they were pre-teens. I found out last year that the boy I thought was my longlost nephew is my brother, a child born of incest (Richard Braden Ogima, adopted by white rural family outside of Hamilton, Ontario). My sister Gloria lived at Shelter House for many years, and she died in a fire across the street from the shelter on Simpson Street. I was told that she slept with dolls and baby bottles propped around her cot at the shelter, dressed in many costumes, rode her bicycle around the south end of the city. Everybody knew her to be kind, generous and funny. But she was vulnerable and would be beaten and raped out on the street because she was like a child herself. Predators would find her around Simpson St. and she would stumble back to her bed in the shelter, bruised, raped, and she would take refuge with her ‘babies’, talk to them.

She had been so damaged and injured by my father -- he held both of my sisters hostage as his sex slaves out in the bush with no intervention from CAS, or police, or any hospital officials when they gave birth to their father’s children. Our first family reunion was at Gloria’s memorial service near Shelter House. The residents dressed up in black pants, clean white shirts, carefully served food to us at the Shelter after the service. Sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles … many of us had been scattered into different foster homes, we had never gathered as an extended Ojibwe family before that day.

I had a breakdown because I couldn’t hold everything in any longer. My marriage had ended, my sister had died a horrible death, I had managed to keep going long enough for my children to become young adults … and then I couldn’t keep my memories, my grief, my anger away any longer. I got my records from the LPH and from CAS and started the process of applying for victim compensation from the province of Ontario. I had to read for the first time what had been done to me, had to deal with the feelings and the pain that I couldn’t keep down any longer. Making appointments, going for counselling, filling out papers … getting sadder and more angry at the same time. I wanted justice, I wanted answers. I wanted to know why no one noticed what was happening to me and protected me from what was done to me in the LPH, in foster homes, at my father’s, when I was a child on the streets ___________________________

Thunder Bay News Source 5/19/2006

Survivors came together Friday to protest what they say is the ongoing abuse of children in the foster care system. They staged the first annual Walk for Survivors and Abuse in Foster Care starting at the Thunder Bay Children's Aid Society office and ending at the offices of MPP Michael Gravelle and MP Joe Comuzzi. Coordinators say they hope to raise awareness about what actually happens in foster care. Victims of child rape and abuse gathered at the Children's Aid Society to tell their story. Survivors say there are many cases where children have been raped and abused in foster care.

Coordinators talked to the executive director of the Children's Aid Society, and the group then walked to Michael Gravelle's office to ask questions of the government. Survivor Debi Okane says she's not doing this because she's angry or for revenge. Survivors released balloons into the air, symbolizing releasing their pain and emotions.

The executive director of the Children's Aid Society, Rob Richardson, says things have changed over the years since the tragic events that happened to these victims. Richardson says he is unsure of what kind of resolution the survivors are looking for. MPP Michael Gravelle says he feels it's his responsibility to tell their story. In a symbolic gesture, a survivor gave Gravelle her shoe so he could take a 'walk in her shoes.'

Debi O’Kane.

Chronicle Journal, Thunder Bay By JIM KELLY May 20, 2006

The first annual walk for justice for survivors of child rape and abuse in foster care is more about awareness than revenge, says Debi O’Kane. O’Kane, 48, of Couchiching First Nation near Fort Frances, said she was placed in foster care locally by the Children’s Aid Society and claims she was raped before she was eight years old by friends (?) of her foster father. She also claims her sister Laurie, who was in the same foster home, was raped by her foster father and his son. Laurie later became a heroin addict and committed suicide in 1992. O’Kane and others participated in the 90 minute walk Friday from the CAS office on Jade Court to the offices of MP Joe Comuzzi (L-Thunder Bay-Superior North) and MPP Michael Gravelle (L-Thunder Bay-Superior North) at Van Norman and St. Paul streets.

Deborah O’Kane 416 240 8189 Glenda Melvin 807 623 0227 Mother of Laurie O’Kane (deceased) br>
Survivors are asking Michael Gravelle MPP Thunder Bay-Superior North to meet with them to discuss the establishment of a commission of inquiry regarding the disproportionate numbers of child and adolescent clients who have been subjected to child rape, including child prostitution, and other sexual assault and forced labour while under the care of CAS District of Thunder Bay … at certain times in the District, an organized pedophile ring was actively and dominantly involved in the foster care system at every level, procuring and silencing children in collusion with the psychiatric and juvenile systems.

Sherri’s Rally Speech

Welcome to the 1st Annual Walk for Survivors of Child Rape and Abuse in Foster care. I want to thank you for coming out, joining us and supporting us as we travel this journey to the Government and to the COURTS. This walk was a long time coming. This walk was a personal dream of mine and it became a reality. I will no longer keep silent about this issue and how it is affecting generations and generations. I was inflicted by abuse from the government many times over and it will stop now. A lot of you reading this have stories like mine and I encourage you to speak out and have your voices heard. It only takes one person to speak out and many will follow. Have courage and strength and the rest will follow. I believe the TRUTH will set you free. You don’t have to be a President, Actor, Social Worker or even a University graduate to be heard. Just be yourself. You are your own advocate. I spoke out because it was time in my own life, and this is part of the healing phase. I will have a life long journey but I am ready to get my strength back that was taken from me. I will never get my childhood that was robbed from me, or my innocence that was taken or my children that were apprehended and adopted but they can’t have me any longer. Our perpetrators day is coming!! It is time to hold the government ACCOUNTABLE and The Child and Family Services for the mistakes that they did to us. It is time for both governments Federal and Provincial to stand up and accept wrongdoing in our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. It is time for the MURDERERS that Child and Family Services hires as FOSTER PARENTS to be accountable for the children that they are killing. It is time for people who use my sisters and brothers as SEX SLAVES held accountable for what they are doing. It is time for MEN who use WOMEN as punching bags held accountable for what they are doing. It is time for Men who get young beautiful women addicted to CRACK and CRYSTAL METH and then send them on the street to work to pay off their debt, held accountable for their crimes. The key issue is CRIME that has been done that needs to be held accounted for. Yes this day is NOW. Not tomorrow because it will get worse than it is right now if we don’t speak up. All society is affected so don’t sit in your house and say well this doesn’t affect me because it does. You are the tax-paying CITIZEN. Your taxes are going to these crimes that are being committed by way of “indirect or direct”. Stand up, speak loud and clear because TODAY will be the start of something new. Our Child and Family Services system has failed on many occasions and it is time that the Government tries something new. Heal our people! Put into affect under the Child Welfare Act a FAMILY PRESERVATION PROGRAM. Have a” Kids of the System Program” that we of the system can become whole again. We lost our Self Identity when you took us away from our families. What are we suppose to do without a FAMILY? Where is our “Sense of Belonging” when we traveled down so many roads that failed us? Those of you who are doing the “Reviews” here us loud and clear we need change TODAY. The Prime Minister was elected because of Family Values. Lets start seeing this implemented. Stop using our Children as COMMODITIES. They are not yours to sell off. They belong with their Natural Parents. Heal our generation that you (the government) inflicted upon us. You set us up for a failure to raise our children, you knew one day that we would not be able to parent them because we were psychologically impaired by your Foster Homes. You were our GUARDIANS. Is this the way you treat your children? EDUCATE

Sherri-Lynne McQueen is presently attending University. She continues fighting for change in our child care system, for our children and the children of generations to come. Sherri-Lynne McQueen has not been allowed to see her children for two years.

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