English - Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies

Genetic tendencies, religion, culture, and geographic region,
together with all the experiences people have both internally
and in relationship to their environments, give rise to their
worldview, or their general way of viewing themselves and the
world around them (Miller, Schlitz & Vieten, 2010).
This Practice Guide is based on five working assumptions:
1. Child welfare professionals are engaged in their work
using a specific worldview whether the worker is non-
Aboriginal or a First Nations, Métis or Inuit person.
No matter what our colour, religion, social status or racial
origins may be, those of us who have grown up within a North
American or European school system, playing with other
children, watching television, reading newspapers and books,
going to college and eventually entering the work force have
learned to participate in a worldview that is common to the
Western industrial nations (Peat, 2002).
2. The dominant Western worldview is not consistent
with an Indigenous worldview. An Indigenous worldview
is based on traditional culture and knowledge
and ways of knowing.
An Indigenous perspective is a spiritually based
humanitarian and environmental perspective. Our
worldview is full of teachings of responsibility, much deeper
than any responsibility to self, but a responsibility to each
other extending beyond, to all of life. The feeling is best
portrayed as love (sic) and when it is taken away, a hole, a
void in the chest is left (Shane Tabobondung, Chief of
Wasauksing First Nation).
The lens of CAS is very mainstream/Western model — ​this is
why CAS does not ‘see’ our stories when we are telling them.
Their worldview is completely different than our own as
Aboriginal people (Focus group participant).
3. The Western worldview considers knowledge to be
something that can be acquired and accumulated.
Based on that belief, this Practice Guide was developed
with the intent that it would be read by child welfare
professionals and used for CAS training. Peat (2002),
however, wrote that “within the Indigenous world the
act of coming to know something involves a personal
transformation.” Using an Indigenous worldview, this
Practice Guide cannot merely be read but must be
accompanied with Indigenous based training.
There are approximately (sic) three
times more Aboriginal children in care
in Canada than at the height of the
residential school system in the 1940s.
While Aboriginal children represent
only five percent of the children in
Canada, they constitute about 40
percent of the children in care in this
country. The incapacities created
within First Nations, Inuit and Métis
communities by the Indian Residential
Schools policy, and other colonial
practices, have led to the current
reality. It is time that those of us in child
welfare acknowledge the
uncomfortable truth that,
notwithstanding the existence of
legislative prescriptions in Ontario
since at least 1984, we have essentially
continued to play the same role as
did the residential schools; that is to
remove First Nations, Inuit and Métis
children from their families and
communities. And in many cases, again
notwithstanding those prescriptions
to the contrary, we are still not giving
them back. - Engelking, 2009
Special Note: The experience of
Northern fly-in First Nation
communities will not be fully
represented in the Practice Guide.
These unique communities are not
easily supported by a southern-based
collaborative service model because
many of the services are not in
northern communities. Northern
communities have created innovative
ways to respond to family violence that
includes services and helpers in the
community.
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