Honour The Right To Identity

Editor’s note: On Thursday, child and youth advocate Bernard Richard delivered his third annual “state of our children and youth” address. He also released a background report on the state of children’s access to identity, culture and language, which focused particularly on the children of New Brunswick’s First Nations. The following passages are excerpted from the report.

The right to identity is first and foremost the right to be registered at birth and recognized as a citizen of a given country. Millions of children around the world are denied this right, but it is so universally acquired in Canada that it can be taken for granted.

Article 8 [of the UN convention on the rights of the child] also includes the right to a name and the right to know one’s family. Being deprived of one’s nationality, name or family relations offends the Convention, and its signatories are bound to take swift measures to preserve and restore these elements of a child’s identity when they are stolen or lost. The work of the national reconciliation process regarding a generation of aboriginal people, whose childhoods and identities were compromised because of residential schooling, is a stark reminder to all Canadians of the importance of Article 8.

The disproportionate rate at which First Nations children today continue to be taken from their families and placed in foster care or kinship care raises similar concerns which First Nations, provincial and federal elected leaders must urgently address together. The impact of Indian Act provisions on the granting of status to children or grandchildren of exogamous marriages and the rise in custom adoption practices and its impact on families and parenting roles are issues which lawmakers cannot ignore and which should be addressed with a clear understanding of Articles 8 and 30 [in the UN Convention].

Reinforcing this right to identity… is the separate right of children in these communities to enjoy their own culture, profess and practice their own religion and to speak their own language.

New Brunswickers may pride themselves on being experts in the area of official language minority rights and preserving and protecting official language minorities. However, our record in preserving and promoting indigenous languages and cultures, which are unique to our part of the world, can only be described – given the data available – as an abject failure.

The data on the dwindling numbers of Mi’kmaq and Maliseet speakers who can pass on their knowledge of their language and culture to future generations supports the view that now is our last and best chance to save these languages from extinction. First Nations and non-First Nations New Brunswickers should reflect together on this data and determine what steps must now be taken or whether we will continue to pay lip service to the issue with half-measures, while another generation of First Nations New Brunswickers is schooled in the Queen’s English.

One thing is clear: a child’s right to identity and their right to be heard are intimately connected to one another and to most of the other rights guaranteed under the Convention. Being prepared to listen to a child and to take their right to identity seriously will nurture and support the child’s self-esteem and freedom of expression; this will in turn help guarantee their optimal development as a productive and contributing member of society.

The challenge which we face as a society, in enforcing and respecting both of these rights with respect to children of minority cultural, religious and language groups, is a daunting one.

The New Brunswick experience since the 1960s Equal Opportunity Program points inexorably towards one conclusion: the promotion and protection of minority languages and cultures is a critical factor in shaping our identities, in developing resiliency in our youth and in bridging the gaps in education, health, employment and income levels that too often divide our communities.

Knowing where you are from, being able to speak your own language and enjoying your own cultural traditions are rights which anglophone and francophone New Brunswickers have learned to not take for granted. They are rights to be celebrated, protected and promoted.

First Nations children in New Brunswick need all of us to make sustained efforts in protecting those rights for them, if we are to achieve any significant gains in addressing the disparities that continue to divide us.

Much more needs to be said on the broad topic of language, culture and identity, especially with regards to the shrinking demographic of New Brunswick’s francophone and Acadian community; the urgent need to increase our dwindling and aging population through immigration and other population growth strategies; and the rights and obligations we owe to other minority language or cultural groups who call New Brunswick home.

If this year’s report has focused so squarely on the rights of First Nations children, it is because the data shows quite plainly that this group of children are perhaps the last generation with a faint hope of being raised with their native languages and able to carry forward the stories and songs of their people to future generations, and also because they are the most vulnerable and disenfranchised of our province’s youth.

Every society in every age will always be judged by how it treated its most vulnerable members. It is to the voice of First Nations youth that all of us in New Brunswick must urgently give heed.

 Bernard Richard is New Brunswick’s ombudsman and child and youth advocate. His office’s full report on children’s right to identity, culture and language can be read online at http://www.gnb.ca/0073/Child-YouthAdvocate/PDF/stateofthechild-e.pdf