I think it is all three things that you've said. It absolutely is ignorance, a lack of understanding of the situation that many of our native women are in--the extreme poverty they're facing, the barriers they face in getting education and getting access to a real means of providing for their families.
Absolutely it's racism. When a social worker looks at a native child in a classroom who doesn't have lunch, the automatic thought is that this is neglect, not that this is a family in crisis.
It also is the perspective that we have child welfare to protect children from their parents, and we have Status of Women over here to improve the circumstances of women. We're not looking at things as a holistic perspective, as a whole unit.
The best interest of the child is to support the family they're in, not to pluck them out and put them in a group home or in temporary foster care. It's to support that family to do what they can to support, because they're going to be the best advocates, the best support, for that child.
There's this automatic perception that it's neglect rather than a family in crisis. Rather than looking at how we support the family, we tear the family apart to save the child. It's completely backwards thinking. We pull families apart when what we need is what a lot of our communities have talked about, a wraparound approach, whether it be treatment for the mothers, if they need treatment, but also moving that family into a place of safety and food security as a whole family unit, not as fragmented members who are put in different places in the hope that they'll have a better outcome.