Former Innu Chief Simeon Tshakapesh (left) cries in pain in 2017 while pleading for Innu children back with then-Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett (right). Photo: Germaine Benuen / Facebook.
Warning: This story discusses the death of a youth in government care, the physical and sexual abuse of children, and residential school experiences.
Two chairs stand in the middle of a chevron-style seating arrangement at the Sheshatshiu Ussiniun Youth Centre. One chair supports a picture of a smiling teenage boy holding his guitar. The other chair, blanketed with a white sheet, holds a 3-D glass print of the same smiling child. An angel stands on one side of the chair, a candle on the other.
The display is a memorial to 16-year-old Thunderheart Tshakapesh, who died by suicide in 2017 shortly after returning home to Natuashish from Regina, where he was admitted to a youth facility to treat his addiction.
In July 2017, Thunderheart’s father Simeon Tshakapesh — at the time deputy grand chief of the Innu Nation — and other Innu leaders crashed then federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett’s Canada Day barbecue in Toronto.
Tshakapesh pleaded with Bennett in front of onlookers, with other Innu leaders at his side.
“Stop stealing our children! Stop it!” he shouted. “Something gotta end. We can’t keep burying our own.
“My son Thunderheart had a dream, and that dream was killed by the system! Thunderheart!” the Innu leader cried. “I want my son back! You don’t know how much pain I’m going to carry the rest of my life.”
Bennett promised action, and Thunderheart’s death became the catalyst for the inquiry.
But it took several years before the government of Newfoundland and Labrador and Innu leadership agreed to the inquiry’s terms of reference. Finally, in 2022, the Inquiry Regarding the Treatment, Experiences, and Outcomes of Innu in the Child Protection System began.
It has a mandate to look into the systemic issues within the provincial child welfare system, conduct investigations into the death of six Innu youth and young adults, and make recommendations to the government.
Through the inquiry, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey said in April 2022, “we will acquire a better understanding of the treatment, experiences and care that Innu children have received in the current system, and more importantly, how we improve for the future.”
Inter-generational trauma
For decades, Innu have told provincial and federal governments the province’s child protection system has contributed to poor health outcomes for Innu, including addiction and suicide. Some have likened the epidemic to the residential school period.
A previous inquiry resulted in the 1992 report Gathering Voices: Finding strength to help our children. Produced by the Innu Nation and the Mushuau Innu band council, the report condemned the province’s policy of removing Innu children from their families instead of supporting families.
“Innu families used to stay together. We don’t like to see our children taken away,” the report reads. “If the parents are drinking, the answer is not to take their children away. We think Social Services should try to work with the families, not just take the children away.”
More than three decades have passed since then.
According to provincial records, in March 2024 there were 303 child welfare cases in Sheshatshiu and 184 in Natuashish — the two Innu communities in Labrador. In 2021, Sheshatshiu had a population of 1,225, while Natuashish had 856 residents.
In November 2024 the inquiry’s first phase concluded with a final week of public and private community hearings in Sheshatshiu. That’s when Thunderheart’s memorial was displayed.
The inquiry’s commissioners heard how the residential school system and then the child welfare system similarly contributed to intergenerational trauma, forcibly breaking up Innu families, leaving them without support, and leading to addiction and other mental health issues.
An Innu mother whose daughter was taken by the Department of Children, Seniors and Social Development (CSSD) told the inquiry how forced assimilation by federal and provincial governments led to intergenerational trauma in her family. The Independent is not publishing the mother’s name to protect the identity of her daughter, who is still in provincial custody.
The mother told the inquiry how government policies have torn parents and their children apart in her family for three generations. Her mother is a residential school survivor and endured abuse and trauma that left her angry and lacking self-worth, the woman said.
“I do love my mother, but in the beginning I didn’t. I hated her. I hated her thinking that she was the issue; she hurt us, she hurt me. Then I became a mother that was similar to her, and I hurt my own children,” she recounted.
She described being taken into provincial care at age four, after her mother’s partner sexually assaulted her. She lived with her aunt for several years before CSSD told her she had to return home, which devastated her.
“I don’t think that was fair for me when I didn’t want to be there, but I was forced to go back to a family that I didn’t want to be in. I was forced back to staying with the abusers,” she said.
While living with her mother and her mother’s partner, she experienced the same anger, trauma and suicidal thoughts that plagued her mother. “I grew up with no self-worth, no self-esteem, not knowing why we were the way we were. Nobody educated me about intergenerational trauma.”
She told the inquiry she went through treatment to address her addiction, and that she has been clean for several months. She wants to end the cycle of pain that she, her mother and her grandmother all endured so that her daughter doesn’t face the same outcomes.
Despite her efforts though, her daughter remains in the province’s custody. “I lived in chaos for a very, very long time. I’m a recovering drug addict, alcoholic,” she told the inquiry. “I suffer from complex trauma. But that doesn’t stop me in wanting to be a mom to my children.
“When is my child coming home? When is it going to stop? When? When are you going to stop taking our children and start building programs for the people here in the community?”
Florence Milley, who was put in a foster home at age four with her brother, told the inquiry she felt the system that was supposed to save her, destroyed her. She said social services separated the siblings by placing her sister in a different house than her and her brother.
She said the foster family she was placed with physically and sexually abused her and other kids in their care. “We were treated like animals. We were tortured,” she said, adding her sister, though in the care of a different family, was also abused. “The stories don’t change.”
Milley, now 47, described how a foster family caged her and her brother as punishment. “We were pushed down the stairs in the basement — there’s a cage that’s in the basement, like a dog cage. That’s where they put me if I didn’t listen,” she told the inquiry.
“So I was an animal to the foster parents,” she continued, recalling her screams for help. “I kept crying for my mother, night after night,” she said. Milley also recalled her brother screaming as one of the foster parents burned him with a cigarette. The siblings tried to escape, but Milley said they were on an island and couldn’t leave the community.
She told the inquiry she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and severe anxiety, and is seeing a therapist. “You could never erase an image of trauma, no matter what age you are.”
Milley’s mother was a residential school survivor and, like many other survivors who did not have access to supports, she began drinking. Milley did too, but said she has been sober for almost a year.
The intergenerational trauma resulting from the separation of Innu children from their parents — first in residential schools, then by the province’s child protection system — has been a significant factor in health outcomes for Innu. In 2016, the average life expectancy in Canada was 81 years. But in Sheshatshiu and Natuashish, it was 48 and 47 respectively.
In 2019 the commissioners for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls cited the “removal of children” from their families and communities in their argument that Canada is committing genocide against Indigenous Peoples.
Forced assimilation
Speakers told the inquiry that kids in the system who are raised outside Innu communities by non-Innu foster parents are losing their connection to Innu culture, traditions, language, and even to their families.
One woman told the commissioners she can no longer speak directly with her daughter, who was not able to learn her language while in the province’s custody. Now, she says, her husband has to translate for them.
The couple’s son was six when the province took custody of him. By the time CSSD was ready to reunite the family, the mother said her son had grown attached to his foster family and did not want to return. “He feels sorry for them to leave them,” she said, fighting through tears for much of her testimony. “I told my son that I understand and will allow for him to stay.”
Even when foster parents want Innu children in their care to stay connected to their families, the province has failed to facilitate efforts.
Sheila Cooper, a non-Innu foster parent from Labrador, told the inquiry she adopted her now adult son Jason Katshinak after he told her he did not feel connected to his family or community in Natuashish. She said the province’s refusal to coordinate visits with Katshinak’s family contributed to that disconnection.
The only visits or communication he had with his family was through Cooper, who said she would call them, reach out over social media, or invite them to her house. She recalled telling a social worker that Katshinak “has a right to see his family,” and said the worker replied to Katshinak, “Well, Jason, you don’t know your family.”
Katshinak was 16 by the time CSSD arranged his first visit to Natuashish. Cooper said she tried to get social services to fund language lessons for him, but that was “another fight that I lost.” Katshinak is “not fluent in Innu-aimun” and “only knows sporadic words,” she told the inquiry.
Families left in the dark
Speakers described times when a lack of communication from social workers strained the relationship between parents and their children.
Pien Gregoire’s son Raphael was placed in foster care when he was eight. Over a seven-year period, he was moved to three different provinces.
While Raphael was in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Gregoire and his wife would attend his sporting events. Then, out of fear, they would leave without visiting with him. They said social services never clarified that visits were allowed. Gregoire said Raphael would be upset when he learned they left immediately after his games.
Gregoire said he tried to bring his son home, but the province refused. So he went on a week-long hunger strike outside the CSSD building in his community, but to no avail.
Without informing Gregoire, CSSD sent Rafael to London, Ont. The father later found out from someone else that Rafael had left the province. When Gregoire and his partner managed to contact their son, Rafael told them he didn’t like life in Ontario and wanted to come home. A year later, he was moved again — this time to Regina.
Gregoire told the commissioners it wasn’t until Rafael returned to Labrador at 15 that he learned from a social worker his son had started smoking marijuana after his move to Saskatchewan five years earlier. “It was all failure,” he thought to himself at the time. The province took Rafael from his family and community, promising he would be better off. Instead, he became disconnected.
Rafael now lives in Montreal. When he visits, he no longer asks his mother to cook the food he loved as a kid. “He don’t like to live in Sheshatshiu at all,” his father said. “We lost our family unit, where you have the father, the mother and sisters and brother.”
Meanwhile, the Innu mother who detailed the intergenerational trauma in her family and said she has been sober, told the inquiry that at one point she didn’t receive any updates on her child from CSSD for months.
The mother testified that during a video call her seven-year-old daughter, who is on the autism spectrum, revealed bruises on her body. “I seen the mark on her arm, and I told her to show me — and I started screen-shotting. And it was marks visible, finger marks, that someone was pulling on her arm and hurting my child. This is abuse.”
The mother said that during a separate video call her daughter tried to identify a worker who allegedly assaulted her. “When I asked her who it was, she stood up right away and pointed at the worker,” the mother testified, explaining she couldn’t see the worker on the screen because the phone was directed at her daughter.
She said she requested an investigation, but that “CSSD hasn’t come to me about anything, and they’re trying to deny that it even happened one night.”
Other Innu testified that while their children were in provincial custody, they often went long periods of time without any updates on their childrens’ well-being.
Simeon Tshakapesh, Thunderheart’s father, said that he was not informed his son had gone missing from the youth treatment facility in Saskatchewan. He said he finally found out a month later, when the RCMP contacted him.
Tshakapesh also said he was informed by someone who claimed to witness Thunderheart being assaulted and knocked unconscious in the facility. He said he was never told about that incident either. He asked the RCMP to investigate the events leading up to his son’s death but said he was told there was not enough evidence to lay charges.
“They got away with it,” he told the inquiry.
Reclaiming jurisdiction
In the final days of the inquiry’s hearings in Sheshatshiu, Tshakapesh, his wife Ruby and others led a demonstration outside the CSSD office in the Innu community. They support the inquiry’s work but say the crisis needs swift action.
The inquiry’s commissioners have indicated their work might not conclude until late 2025. That, coupled with the provincial and federal governments’ history of long bureaucratic processes for new policy and legislation, leads some Innu to believe meaningful change won’t happen before more Innu children and families will be harmed by the province.
In 2016, the Innu Round Table Secretariat developed the Innu Prevention Approach as part of its effort to improve the well-being of children and families in Natuashish and Sheshatshiu. The plan identifies several issues Innu say are most important for a strong child protection system, including the development of new long-term programs to replace inconsistent short-term ones, better cultural sensitivity training for workers, upgraded core buildings, and more housing.
Since then, some changes have been made, including the return of Innu children in state custody outside the province back to Newfoundland and Labrador. Several new buildings have been built, including the Sheshatshiu Ussiniun Youth Centre — where the inquiry hearings in Sheshatshiu took place — and a new group home.
The changes represent improvements to the province’s child protection system. But for Innu, reforming a system that is inherently colonial and racist will only do so much.
The Innu mother whose seven-year-old daughter is in provincial care said kids who are in state custody across the province need to be returned home immediately. She also wants new programs focused on helping individuals heal from their trauma.
Meanwhile, Milley told the inquiry that even with improvements, the system is “ not working, and it’s never going to work unless you give it back to our people.” She worries for her nieces and nephews currently in provincial custody and said when she speaks with them on the phone, they ask her to bring them home.
Milley said the community needs more qualified therapists, addiction counsellors, teachers and social workers who understand Innu. She talked about the need for programs that help children understand intergenerational trauma and cope with parents who have alcoholism or other addictions. And programs for adults who need help dealing with trauma and addictions.
She said students in the community’s schools need support programs, like mentorships. She also advocated for more housing, especially for families who would become foster parents. “I’ve gotten calls but I can’t take a child right now because I don’t have a home,” she said.
The inquiry is a key part of ongoing efforts by Innu to reclaim jurisdiction over their children. In 2020, the Innu Round Table Secretariat, which coordinates and administers common priorities between the Innu communities in Labrador, notified the federal government of its intent to take over jurisdiction for child welfare from the province.
In 2019, the federal government introduced Bill C-92, an Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families. The legislation recognizes and affirms that Indigenous communities have the right to self-govern matters relating to child and family services.
As of Dec. 5, 2024, 66 Indigenous governing bodies had submitted notices to exercise jurisdiction over child welfare, 42 filed requests to enter into coordination agreements with the federal and provincial governments, 11 coordination agreements had been signed, and 14 Indigenous laws had come into effect.
Innu Nation expressed concern
Shortly after the bill was announced, the Innu Nation expressed concern about a lack of guaranteed funding for system reforms. Other Indigenous groups and organizations have criticized the federal government for not introducing legislation that would bind Ottawa to providing equitable needs-based funding.
In 2016 the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government had discriminated against children on reserves by inadequately funding the services purportedly developed to help them. In 2020 the Innu Nation filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission that the federal government had failed to comply with the tribunal’s decision.
The complaint noted that until 2017 no funding was given to “any entity” providing child welfare prevention services for the Innu communities in Labrador. The funding provided after 2017 was inadequate, the Innu Nation said, but the money invested in putting Innu children into provincial care was “unlimited.”
The next phase of the inquiry will include investigations into the deaths of six Innu children in provincial care.
Simeon Tshakapesh recently fought cancer, which is now in remission, but he’s getting older and wants to see change in his lifetime.
He says if the federal and provincial governments don’t make immediate changes to the province’s child protection system, including the return of Innu children in provincial custody to Natuashish and Sheshatshiu, he and others are considering occupying Confederation Building in St. John’s until the children are returned.
“We want our children, the Innu children, to return home and rightfully with their own Aboriginal communities and their reservations with their parents so that the work can begin, the healing can begin.”
This story was produced as part of Spotlight: Child Welfare, a collaborative journalism project aimed at improving reporting on the child welfare system. Tell us what you think about the story here.
