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Race and culture remain important considerations in finding children adoptive homes

Giselle Malagon kisses Alyssa Malagon as she and her husband adopt her on Nov. 20, 2015 in Miami. (Getty)
Giselle Malagon kisses Alyssa Malagon as she and her husband adopt her on Nov. 20, 2015 in Miami. (Getty)

When it comes to finding a permanent family for kids who don’t have one, it appears that sometimes that decision is skin deep.

A Cape Breton foster family complained in mid-November that race was what stood in the way of their bid to adopt a child who had been in their care for 18 months. The child was biracial, the foster family was white. They say they were told the child would be removed from their care and instead placed with another white family that already had one adopted biracial child.

“I’m cried out. I’m just emotionally drained,” the foster mom told The Chronicle Herald. “You fall in love with them, you just can’t help it.”

The case has been criticized for putting considerations of race ahead of the bonds of love, trust and attachment the child had already developed with his foster family.

But common practice in Canada says that a child’s best interest is paramount when adoption agencies are deciding a child’s permanent placement – and that includes taking into account race, culture and language.

How those factors are handled, “does vary from province to province and from agency to agency. There’s not one standard way of doing it,” says Laura Eggertson, chair of the Adoption Council of Canada, an adoptee herself and a white mother of two adopted Ojibway children who are now adults.

“Best practice is to try and consider the culture and language of the child because what we know from the research is children tend to do better in homes where they know their culture, know their identity, speak their language,” she says.

“It’s never a hard and fast rule,” says Pat Convery, executive director of the Adoption Council of Ontario. The province allows local children’s aid societies to develop their own adoption policies and guidelines, while still meeting provincial laws governing adoptions generally. Those laws require consideration of a child’s age, culture, medical and behavioural needs.

“In Ontario, some agencies may lean towards race and culture more heavily than other agencies, but they’re all going to consider it,” says Convery. “Certainly a child is not going to be left in foster care forever because of it.”


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Nova Scotia’s community services department, which oversees adoptions of children in the province’s care, would not comment on the Cape Breton case. However the province legally requires that where possible, children be placed with a family of the same race, culture and language. The province continues to specifically seek out African Nova Scotian, interracial and Mi’kmaq families to adopt children from those ethnic groups.

Although they are controversial, research into “transracial” adoptions reveals that most had positive outcomes, according to a position statement by the Canadian Pediatric Society. But it also shows that children adopted into mixed race families may be exposed to more racist treatment from the world at large than a child in a same-race family and need support to create an identity for themselves that accepts how they look, the heritage they were born into and the one of their adoptive family.

What that support looks like is also important, say some transracial adoptees. Seattle-based writer Chad Goller-Sojourner has described how he only became comfortable with his racial identity as an African American after he left his white adoptive home, despite his parents’ best efforts to expose him to black culture and other black people as he was growing up.

"One of the things I think was hardest for me is I didn't have any independent relationships with black people, especially adult black people, till I was an adult," Goller-Sojourner told National Public Radio. “I was 25 before I saw a black doctor.”

In Ontario’s Peel region, west of Toronto, children’s aid authorities try to recruit foster families that represent the racial and religious make-up of children needing care, both so children can be fostered by families of their same race but also because sometimes those foster families end up adopting them. That avoids the need for making hard decisions about attachments versus cultural compatibility later.

“What we try and do is match as early as possible,” says Bryan Shone, senior service manager for Peel Children’s Aid Society. The society’s biggest challenge in matching children with families, he says, is not race or religion but age, because most children needing permanent homes are older. While children can be permanently placed in homes that do not share their race or religion, the society tries to ensure the family understands the child’s background and actively supports it. Other things like maintaining their relationships with their biological relatives can also be important.

“Is it a simple process? No, it’s not,” Shone says.

First Nations children require specific ‘cultural plan’

Adoption is an especially sensitive issue in Canada’s aboriginal communities, where cases of children adopted out of their birth families and into non-aboriginal homes have been viewed as a form of assimilation and cultural genocide, similar to the disruption caused by residential schools. That problem came to a head during the era called “the Sixties Scoop,” lasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. With aboriginal children representing nearly half of all children in foster care in Canada – some of whom are eligible for adoption – the issue takes on even greater significance.

A Sixties Scoop adoptee weeps at a gathering before a provincial apology in Winnipeg June 18, 2015. (CP)
A Sixties Scoop adoptee weeps at a gathering before a provincial apology in Winnipeg June 18, 2015. (CP)

“It’s an ancestral issue – the importance of keeping ties to our ancestors and the teachings of our ancestors,” says Jeannine Carriere, a Metis adoptee who researches aboriginal adoptions as a social work professor at the University of Victoria. It is also “an inherent right,” she points out, as the right of indigenous children to keep their culture, religion and language is enshrined in the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In British Columbia, the importance of preserving an aboriginal child’s cultural identity must be considered in determining their best interests during an adoption. Best efforts must also be made to discuss the adoption with an appropriate aboriginal community representative. Carriere says aboriginal children in B.C. are supposed to have a “cultural plan,” which guides how they will be kept connected with their culture, although there are no enforcement mechanisms.

In Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq children must be placed in homes where their indigenous language is spoken. Alberta also requires that any family adopting an aboriginal child must support that child’s cultural plan. Adoption standards in Manitoba make a child’s social and cultural background a priority – including aboriginal culture – so that an adopted child can be raised in a culturally appropriate environment. The timing of an aboriginal child’s adoption in Manitoba may also depend on the availability of families that are of the same racial and cultural background.

Although there are many international adoptions in Canada involving parents adopting children who are not of their same race, government policies on how race and culture should be considered only apply to placement decisions for children under the government’s care, not international adoptees.

Regardless of how children come into their adoptive families, Eggertson of the Adoption Council of Canada says “cultural competence” on the part of an adoptive family should be the main concern. The council has pushed for more of the 30,000 children in foster care in Canada to get permanent homes before they become adults. Only about 2,000 children are adopted each year out of the public system.

In her own case, Eggertson had “a lot of support” from an Ottawa-area Aboriginal centre as she raised her daughters, and feels “my kids have a strong idea of who they are.”

“I don’t think that we should put blanket moratoriums or barriers in place to prevent people from forming families across cultural and across racial lines,” she says of her personal view. “The requirement should be people willing to offer a permanent, stable, loving, respectful and nurturing family for children and youth that honours and fosters their sense of identity – which should involve making connections with [their] birth family, if it’s safe to do so, extended family and community.”