Defiance, Advocacy, and Sovereignty

First Nations Child Protection, the ‘Native Conferences’, and the 1974 Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia

Abstract

This article highlights the contributions of Indigenous participants to a series of Native Conferences that took place around BC in 1974 as part of the consultation process undertaken by the Royal Commission on Family and Children Law (RCFCL).  Struck by the NDP government and chaired by Justice Thomas Berger, and Commission sponsored seven Conferences around the province to gather feedback from Indigenous people on a range of social service and law related topics. While the RCFCL promised to radically change how child welfare operated in the province, the Conference recommendations were shelved with the NDP's election loss of 1975. I argue that despite this,  the Indigenous recommendations remain a critically important archive of defiance, advocacy and sovereignty in the midst of settler colonial violence in the realm of child welfare.  This history also serves as a cautionary tale about the uncritical use of 'the best interests of the child' principle for historians, particularly those in the field of the history of children and youth.