“How can you be a father if you haven’t had a father?”  That’s a question that faces many aboriginal fathers in Canada today, and it’s a question that had the spotlight in January, with the screening of a CBC documentary on January 14, Blind Spot: What Happened to Canada’s Aboriginal Fathers, which examined the challenges facing three Aboriginal fathers in Regina.  The film, which follows the men on their journey into fatherhood, takes a hard look at the roots of the growing crisis of absent fathers in aboriginal families, and tries to answer one very glaring question: “why has this issue  never before been publicly addressed?” 

The history of residential schools, intergenerational trauma and the many societal obstacles facing Aboriginal fathers have led to many men being absent from their children’s lives. CBC reporter Geoff Leo, who produced the documentary, noted that he was inspired to examine the issue further after realizing that “every time I did a story about aboriginal families, aboriginal social problems, I was almost always talking to the mom or the grandma or the auntie. I never was talking to the dad. All of a sudden the thought kind of occurred to me – putting together what I knew of the literature around the difference dads can make, looking at all the problems in the First Nations community and looking at the absence of fathers, I knew there was some sort of connection here.”  (quoted in Regina Leader-Post)

In the lead-up to the documentary’s screening, CBC radio’s The Current hosted a forum in Whitehorse to shed light on the issue of absent Aboriginal fathers in that community. Some of the statistics that were discussed include:

• Within 10 years, half of all aboriginal children in Canada will be growing up fatherless
• Children without a father in their lives are more likely to be depressed, to have low self esteem and to commit suicide
• Young men born to teen mothers are ten times more likely to become offenders
• One in 5 First Nations women over the age of 15 is a single mom

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Source: www.bccf.ca

Back in the spring of 2010, three women on Vancouver Island got together around a kitchen table to discuss an issue they were becoming increasingly concerned about — the extent of poverty in their communities — and the conversation took a turn for the unexpected.

They started sharing their memories of their “aunties”: women in their families, or their communities, who helped them when they were growing up. “Our Aunties came to our homes to help with the laundry, bake bread and pies, help cook dinner, to sew our clothes – to hold us, to love us and spend time with us – to help raise us and make sure we were cared for.” In the can-do spirit of the aunties, and in recognition of the important role of the aunty in many First Nations and Metis cultures, they decided that it was time to stop waiting for others to solve the problem of poverty in BC, and time to start remembering, as those aunties did, that we all have a collective responsibility to care for one another.

Aunty Poverty was born.  

Those three Vancouver Island women (all aunties themselves) are Diana Elliot, Provincial Advisor for Aboriginal Infant Development Programs of BC, Joan Gignac, Executive Director of the Aboriginal Headstart Association of BC, and Marcia Dawson, Provincial Aboriginal Manager for Success by Six. They’re calling on us all,  men and women, aborignal and non-aboriginal, to join the Aunty Poverty movement and step up to help eradicate poverty in our own families, neighborhoods, and communities. Want to know what can you do?  Read More…

Source: www.bccf.ca