On Wednesday October 25, 2023, SIIA representatives Chuck, Jenna and Erica travelled to Chilliwack, BC, in Sto:lo territory, to attend and present at a conference, hosted by the Our Children, Or Way Society. The conference was part of the Governance Engagement Mechanism (GEMs) series. During this adventure, Google Maps directed us to the wrong place twice! After a couple of dead-end roads, and with lots of laughs and jokes about being lost, we thankfully made it to our destination!
This trip was very significant and uplifting to witness and participate in. We were thankful to be able to share what we know, and learn from others, as we all are working towards the same end— reasserting our own jurisdiction over our own children and families.
Our team was invited to share how we have been engaging with our communities to develop our own law for the South Island nations and guest community. We hope through our presentation that we offered those in attendance helpful tools and consideration as they continue their own journey to reclaiming their inherent rights and jurisdiction over their children, youth and families.
We are grateful for the opportunities to walk alongside others in their own journeys, as others have walked alongside us. As an organization, we are committed to sharing all that we can to help other communities who are on their own journeys—as we are all paving the way for our future generations of children, youth and families. We know the systems we are creating now will outlive us. It’s time we take back our power and reclaim what we’ve lost and that was stolen from us. It’s time to heal and change the system and history.
There was a Q&A period after our presentation where we were asked some of the following questions:
- What is our communications strategy?
Our communications strategy is multi-tiered. We are mindful of the different ways information needs to be shared with community members, service providers, and leadership and are working to ensure that our messaging to all of these groups is consistent and accessible.
We have social media pages set up for SIIA on both Instagram and Facebook. We also post regular updates on our website. We are just now working to get a newsletter up and running as another way to share our work with the broader community.
We also rely heavily on our community engagement team to share our work in the communities they are connected to (both personally and professionally). Over the past year, this has been done through community gatherings, craft nights, presentations, social media, and manning booths at large community events.
- How are we engaging with people on the North Island?
Jenna, our Urban Community Engagement Lead, shared that everyone who is an urban Indigenous person is welcome to attend sessions she hosts. She explained she has an open-door policy and doesn’t turn anyone away. All those who attend are welcome to participate, share a meal, do a craft or just visit with community while going through questions around the needs and strengths of the Urban Indigenous community.
- How frequently do we have engagement sessions?
As SIIA represents 8 of the South Island Nations as well as the Urban community, our community engagement team has been busy. When possible, our team members have tried to have community engagement sessions at least once a week. Additionally, our engagement team actively has one-on-one conversations/interviews with knowledge keepers and elders whenever opportunities present themselves.
Jenna shared how important it is to meet people where they are at during these sessions. She spoke about the importance of creating opportunities and time for individuals that aren’t comfortable speaking in front of big groups of people. She also highlighted how important it is to keep our protocols—for example, when there is a death in community, we do not host anything out of respect for the communities and families affected.
We keep all these aspects in our minds and hearts when we are a working community, we adjust our schedules for what works best for the communities we are working with.
- How are we ensuring that we are getting what we need from community members to incorporate into the law?
We have a standard list of questions we ask in the sessions we host in each community. We had law students construct specific questions to gather the information we needed to put into our law. The questions are very simple, clear and directly communicate what we want to hear from the community. These questions are the basis upon which conversations are facilitated with community members.
- How did we create someone who could “Champion” our work?
We discussed the pivotal role that Bruce Underwood, our Board Speaker, has played in our work. Bruce has been involved in this push for jurisdiction for over 20 years, both politically and personally. Bruce has been critical in sustaining the attention of leadership for this work to move forward and holds/shares much of the history whenever he is asked to speak. This question is difficult to answer, as we did not ‘create’ Bruce, but would not be where we are today without him.
- How are we considering the multi-jurisdictional landscape of the urban community?
This is an incredibly complex consideration we are still working on. We know that any child whose Nation has created their own law will likely be under the jurisdiction of their own Nation’s law despite their place of residence. For the children whose Nation’s haven’t exerted jurisdiction as of yet, our intent is for our law to cover them. We are trying to ensure that our law is open enough to accommodate the diverse protocols and teachings of the Nations represented within our urban community. We also know that our law will have jurisdiction over members of our 8 Nations wherever they reside.
One of our guiding principles in our legislation is “Jordan’s Principle” to ensure that all Indigenous children can access the products, services and supports they need, when they need them, and that any jurisdictional considerations will be figured out later.
We know that SIIA will have a legal branch that will be primarily responsible for these multi-jurisdictional questions. We realize as of right now, this is falling primarily on the individual social workers, who are already carrying large caseloads, which we want to alleviate within our future system.
Nations across the country are engaged in these conversations now and there are no easy answers, but we know that our Nations have long and ongoing relationships and protocols with one another that we hope to build upon in our work. We have connected with a couple Nations already to discuss what protocol agreements might look like for their members living here on the South Island.