When Care Becomes Another Removal

Today, an Ontario court found Becky Hamber and Brandy Cooney guilty on all counts in the death of L.L., a 12-year-old Indigenous boy in their care, and in the confinement, assault, and deprivation of his younger brother, J.L. The details that emerged through the trial are almost unbearable to read. The boys were children. They were in the care of adults who were supposed to protect them. They were in the orbit of systems that were supposed to notice when protection became punishment, when care became captivity, when a child’s body was telling the truth before the adults around him were willing to hear it. According to CBC’s reporting from the decision, Justice Clayton Conlan found the couple guilty of first-degree murder in L.L.’s death, and guilty of unlawfully confining, assaulting with a weapon, and failing to provide the necessaries of life to J.L.

First, We Remember the Children

This is, first and foremost, a story about two children. Not a theory. Not a policy debate. Not an abstraction called “the system.” L.L. was a child who should have been fed, held, believed, protected, and brought home safely into a future. J.L. is a child who survived what no child should have had to survive. A teacher remembered the boys as “smart, curious, funny,” children who were willing to help, children who belonged to the world as more than evidence, more than court exhibits, more than initials under a publication ban.

The Verdict Matters, But It Is Not the Whole Story

The guilty verdict matters. It matters because accountability matters. It matters because children who are harmed in private homes are too often disappeared behind language that sounds softer than the violence itself: discipline, behaviour management, caregiver stress, complex needs, difficult placement. In this case, the court did not accept that softening. The judge described overwhelming evidence. He found that L.L. had been confined, isolated, deprived of adequate food, and denied urgently needed medical attention. He found that the accused controlled whether L.L. received food and medical care, and that their actions caused his severe and chronic malnourishment and weakened physical state leading to death.

That accountability must remain clear. These children were not harmed by colonialism in some vague way that removes responsibility from the adults who held power over their bodies, their food, their movement, and their safety. L.L. and J.L. were harmed by people. They were harmed by adults who had choices. The judge noted there was a reasonable alternative: the children could have been returned to the Children’s Aid Society at any time.

The Conditions That Made Them Vulnerable

But the guilt of the adults does not erase the conditions that made these boys vulnerable. It makes those conditions harder to ignore. An Indigenous child in care may be carrying grief that began before birth, before placement, before file notes, before a diagnosis or the absence of one. They may be carrying the effects of colonial violence, family disruption, poverty, racism, disability, trauma, and cultural severance. These are not excuses for abuse. They are reasons why care must be deeper, more skilled, more accountable, more culturally rooted, and more connected to Indigenous community than the systems have historically allowed.

From the perspective of Grandmother’s Voice, this is not only a criminal case. It is a community loss. It is an Indigenous loss. It is a continuation of a story Canada keeps trying to rename without truly ending. Residential schools were called education. The Sixties Scoop was called child welfare. Foster placement is called care. Adoption is called permanency. But for too many Indigenous children, these words have hidden the same old motion: a child is removed from family, removed from Nation, removed from language, removed from ceremony, removed from aunties and grandmothers and cousins and land, and then everyone acts surprised when the child suffers in a place that was never built to understand the fullness of who they are.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission understood this. That is why the first Calls to Action are not about museums or monuments or commemorative days. They are about child welfare. The very first Call to Action calls on governments to reduce the number of Indigenous children in care, provide adequate resources to keep Indigenous families together where it is safe to do so, and ensure social workers and others are properly educated on the history and impacts of residential schools. The fourth Call to Action calls for national standards in Indigenous child apprehension and custody cases, including a requirement that child welfare agencies and courts take the residential school legacy into account in decision-making.

That matters here because Indigenous children in care do not enter the system as isolated individuals detached from history. They enter a system that has already harmed their people. They enter a system in which the removal of Indigenous children has been normalized for generations. Statistics Canada reported that in 2021, Indigenous children made up 7.7 per cent of all children under 15 in Canada, but 53.8 per cent of children in foster care. The rate of foster care was 41.8 per 1,000 First Nations children, 33.5 per 1,000 Inuit children, and 14.4 per 1,000 Métis children, compared with 2.3 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children.

That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. That is not a few bad placements. It is a national pattern.

In Ontario, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has also documented the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black children in the child welfare system, noting long-standing concerns from Indigenous, Black, and racialized families and communities about systemic racism, lack of trust, and the disproportionate involvement of child welfare agencies in their lives.

When Indigenous communities say “this is still happening,” this is what they mean. Not that every foster parent is abusive. Not that every adoption is harmful. Not that every child welfare worker is careless. Many people inside these systems are trying, often under impossible conditions. But Indigenous children continue to be removed at staggering rates, and too often the systems that remove them are not equally resourced, equally skilled, or equally accountable when it comes to keeping those children connected to culture, kinship, land, identity, and community.

Culture Is Not an Add-On

That connection is not ornamental. It is not something to be added later, once the “real” needs are handled. For an Indigenous child, culture is not a craft project. It is not a poster on the wall. It is not a once-a-year workshop or an agency checkbox. Culture is relationship. Culture is regulation. Culture is identity. Culture is medicine. Culture is the place where a child learns that they are not a problem to be managed, but a person who belongs.

For a child who has experienced trauma, removal, instability, grief, or disability, that belonging is not extra. It is protective.

The language used around children in care can become dangerous when it is not held with humility. “Difficult.” “Defiant.” “Manipulative.” “Aggressive.” “Attention-seeking.” “Non-compliant.” These words are often applied to children who are communicating distress in the only ways their bodies know how. A child who hoards food may be telling a story about hunger. A child who lies may be telling a story about fear. A child who rages may be telling a story about an overwhelmed nervous system. A child who shuts down may be telling a story about survival. A child who cannot meet expectations may not be refusing to comply; they may be unable to meet demands that were never shaped around their brain, their trauma, or their needs.

This is where questions about FASD, disability, trauma, and support become important, not because they explain away violence, but because they reveal what responsible care must require. We do not need to know, and should not speculate, whether either child in this case had FASD or any particular diagnosis. What we can say is that children in care are more likely to carry complex developmental, emotional, physical, and relational needs, and that those needs require skilled, consistent, trauma-informed, culturally grounded support. CanFASD notes that children with FASD are overrepresented in the child welfare system, and Public Health Agency of Canada describes FASD as a lifelong disability that can affect learning, memory, attention, communication, emotional regulation, social skills, motor skills, and physical health.

CanFASD also specifically warns against deficit-based narratives about Indigenous peoples and FASD, naming FASD among Indigenous peoples within the context of historical and ongoing colonial systems, policies, and practices, while also recognizing Indigenous leadership in resisting those narratives and building better approaches.

That distinction is essential. FASD cannot become another colonial label used to pathologize Indigenous children or their families. Trauma cannot become another word used to make children seem permanently damaged. Attachment cannot become another excuse for adults to control, punish, isolate, or restrain. These frameworks should make adults more compassionate, more patient, more skilled, and more accountable. They should not give adults better language for domination.

Love Alone Is Not Enough

When an Indigenous child is placed with a non-Indigenous adoptive or foster family, the standard of care cannot simply be “love.” Love matters, but love is not enough if it is not educated. Love is not enough if it cannot recognize colonial trauma. Love is not enough if it sees culture as optional. Love is not enough if it interprets a child’s distress as personal attack. Love is not enough if it turns to confinement, humiliation, food control, restraints, isolation, or fear. Love is not enough if the child’s Indigenous identity lives only in a file folder.

Children need more than affection. They need adults who know what they do not know. They need adults who understand that Indigenous identity is not symbolic, it is relational. They need adults connected to the child’s Nation, Elders, community, and cultural supports. They need adults trained in trauma, disability, grief, sensory needs, nervous system regulation, and de-escalation. They need adults who can ask for help before they become dangerous. They need systems that do not reward the performance of commitment while ignoring the warning signs of harm.

In this case, CBC reported that the trial heard from social service workers, health professionals, educators, police, both accused, and J.L. The judge stated that this criminal case was not a commission of inquiry or a civil proceeding assigning blame to CAS, doctors, or others. His task was to decide the guilt or innocence of Hamber and Cooney.

That legal boundary is important. It is also not the same as a moral boundary.

A criminal court can decide guilt without answering every question a community is left holding. A verdict can say who committed the crime without fully explaining how a child became so isolated. A conviction can punish the adults responsible without repairing the system that placed Indigenous children into vulnerability in the first place. Justice in a courtroom is necessary. It is not complete.

Child Welfare Is Not a Background Actor

The harder truth is that Children’s Aid Societies cannot be treated as background actors in the lives of Indigenous children. They are not merely administrative bodies. They are powerful institutions with the authority to investigate families, remove children, approve placements, monitor homes, interpret risk, shape permanency plans, and decide whose version of a child’s life is believed. When Indigenous children are so dramatically overrepresented in care, every worker, supervisor, manager, assessor, and decision-maker who touches their lives should be trained to understand not only child protection law, but Indigenous life, culture, kinship, colonialism, trauma, disability, and the long history of harm that child welfare systems themselves have inflicted on Indigenous families.

That is not a symbolic expectation. It is the bare minimum.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said this clearly. Its child welfare Calls to Action call for reducing the number of Indigenous children in care, keeping children in culturally appropriate environments wherever they reside, and ensuring that social workers and others conducting child welfare investigations are properly trained on the history and impacts of residential schools. The TRC also calls for child welfare decision-makers to consider the impact of residential school experience on children and caregivers.

Those calls are not historical footnotes. They are instructions for the exact kind of work CAS agencies claim to be doing.

If front-line workers are visiting Indigenous children in person, they must know how to recognize neglect when it is being disguised as caregiver overwhelm, discipline, therapeutic strategy, food issues, behavioural management, or “complex needs.” They must know that a child’s weight loss, isolation, fearfulness, withdrawal, regression, food anxiety, injuries, hygiene issues, school concerns, or sudden changes in behaviour are not merely data points to be logged. They may be signs that a child is disappearing in plain sight. And when a child is Indigenous, the worker must also understand that the child may already be carrying layers of removal, grief, dislocation, racism, inherited trauma, attachment disruption, and cultural severance before the current placement ever began.

That does not mean every concern is abuse. It means every concern must be read with more skill.

A CAS worker responsible for an Indigenous child should understand the difference between culture as decoration and culture as relationship. They should understand that an Indigenous child does not simply need “exposure” to Indigenous identity. They need living connection. They need relatives where possible, Nation and community connections, Elders, language, ceremony, land-based relationships, and people who can recognize them as belonging to a circle larger than the placement home. Ontario’s own customary care framework recognizes the unique practices of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities in caring for children and youth, and emphasizes that Indigenous communities have their own ways of caring for children.

That should change how CAS workers assess safety. A child may have a bed and still be culturally unsafe. A child may have clothes and still be spiritually isolated. A child may be in a “permanent” placement and still be profoundly disconnected from the people who know how to hold them. A child may be adopted and still be living through another form of removal.

This is why the criticism of CAS must go beyond asking whether a form was completed or a visit occurred. The deeper question is whether the people visiting the child had the training, authority, humility, and cultural grounding to understand what they were seeing. Did they know how to ask different questions? Did they speak privately with the children? Did they listen to teachers and community concerns? Did they understand how caregiver narratives can become dangerous when children are labelled as difficult, manipulative, defiant, disordered, or unmanageable? Did they see culture as central to safety, or as an add-on to be handled later? Did supervisors reviewing those files understand the colonial history beneath the placement, or were they simply assessing compliance with a checklist?

The Ontario Human Rights Commission has already warned that Indigenous children are overrepresented in Ontario child welfare, and that disproportionality and disparity may point to systemic racial discrimination. Its Interrupted Childhoods inquiry examined whether Indigenous and Black children were overrepresented at Children’s Aid Societies, particularly in admissions into care, and called attention to the way child welfare involvement is shaped by deeper social and systemic factors.

So when agencies say they are committed to reconciliation, that commitment must be measurable at the front door and at every home visit after. It must show up in who is hired, who is trained, who supervises, who reviews risk, who consults Indigenous communities, who challenges caregiver explanations, and who has the power to intervene before a child is harmed. It must show up in cultural safety plans that are alive, not filed away. It must show up in a worker’s ability to recognize that Indigenous children are not simply children “with heritage.” They are children with rights, relatives, Nations, histories, and community obligations surrounding them.

And then there is the question of non-Indigenous foster and adoptive families.

This must be said with care because the goal is not to demonize every non-Indigenous caregiver. Many non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents love the children in their homes. Some do the work. Some seek out community relationships, cultural mentors, training, and humility. Some understand that caring for an Indigenous child is not an act of rescue, but a responsibility that must be shared with the child’s people.

But love alone is not enough.

A non-Indigenous family fostering or adopting an Indigenous child has obligations that go far beyond providing food, shelter, affection, and schooling. They have an obligation to understand the history that made that placement possible. They have an obligation to learn about residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, the Millennium Scoop, child welfare harm, anti-Indigenous racism, and the ways “good intentions” have been used to justify removal. They have an obligation to learn the child’s specific Nation, community, family story, cultural protocols, and relational responsibilities wherever that information is available and safe to access. They have an obligation to seek guidance without making Indigenous people do unpaid emotional labour. They have an obligation to bring the child toward Indigenous community, not keep the child at a comfortable distance from it.

They also have an obligation to understand why Indigenous communities may be cautious, angry, guarded, or grieving when non-Indigenous families arrive asking to be welcomed after a child has been removed.

That distance is not “reverse racism.” It is history. It is memory. It is the lived knowledge of grandparents who watched children taken. It is the legacy of agencies that called removal protection and called assimilation opportunity. It is the pain of seeing Indigenous children grow up disconnected from language, land, ceremony, family, humour, food, kinship systems, and the ordinary daily life of their people. It is the knowledge that Indigenous communities have too often been asked to bless arrangements they did not create, repair damage they did not cause, and provide cultural connection after systems have already severed the child from home.

The gap can be mended, but not through entitlement.

It is mended through humility. Through showing up consistently. Through asking, not demanding. Through understanding that community trust may take years. Through making culture part of the child’s weekly and monthly life, not an annual event. Through accepting correction. Through supporting relationships with birth family and kin where safe and possible. Through working with Indigenous agencies, Friendship Centres, Elders, cultural teachers, Native child and family service organizations, and the child’s Nation. Through understanding that the caregiver’s role is not to replace Indigenous identity, but to protect it until the child is old enough to carry it for themselves.

There are resources and pathways, but they must be treated as starting points, not solutions in themselves. Ontario recognizes customary care as a way for Indigenous children and youth to remain connected to their communities and cultural practices. The Adoption Council of Ontario provides education and support for adoptive families, and Indigenous child and family service organizations such as Native Child and Family Services of Toronto describe permanency and adoption for Indigenous children as requiring lifelong connection to family of origin, Indigenous community, and cultural identity.

That phrase, lifelong commitment, matters.

Because an Indigenous child does not stop being Indigenous when the adoption order is signed. They do not stop needing community because the file is closed. They do not stop carrying history because a family says they are loved. The obligation continues through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, identity questions, grief, anger, reunion, ceremony, and the day that child begins asking harder questions about who they are and why they were not raised among their own people.

For CAS and adoption systems, that means non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents should not simply be approved because they are willing. They should be assessed for cultural humility, capacity for trauma-informed care, willingness to maintain Indigenous relationships, understanding of colonial harm, and ability to seek help before a child’s needs become framed as a burden. They should receive serious, mandatory training, not a light cultural awareness module. They should be connected to Indigenous-led supports before placement, during placement, and after adoption. They should be monitored not only for physical safety, but for cultural safety, emotional safety, and the child’s sense of belonging.

And when foster or adoptive parents say they are overwhelmed, systems must respond with support and scrutiny at the same time. Caregiver stress may be real. Complex needs may be real. Disability may be real. Trauma may be real. But none of those realities can become a fog that hides neglect. None of them can become a reason for professionals to lower the standard of care. In fact, the more complex the child’s needs, the more rigorous the oversight must be.

In the case of L.L. and J.L., the criminal court’s job was not to conduct a public inquiry into CAS. The judge said plainly that the trial was about the guilt or innocence of the accused, not assigning blame to child welfare agencies or medical professionals.

The Questions a Verdict Cannot Answer

But Indigenous communities are allowed to ask the questions a criminal verdict cannot answer.

Who was watching?

Who was trained enough to understand what they were seeing?

Who understood these boys as Indigenous children, not just children in a placement?

Who was responsible for ensuring they remained connected to culture, kin, and community?

Who listened to the educators who raised concerns?

Who challenged the explanations offered by the adults in control?

Who looked at the history of child welfare harm and understood that removal itself creates obligations that last long after placement?

And who will make sure that the next Indigenous child in care is not merely visited, but truly seen?

The questions remain. Who was responsible for ensuring these boys remained connected to Indigenous community? Who was listening when educators raised concerns? What supports were offered, and were they enough? What did the agencies involved know about the children’s histories, needs, family connections, cultural identities, and risks? What was shared with prospective adoptive parents, and what training was required of them? Who understood the difference between behaviour and trauma? Who understood the difference between disability and defiance? Who understood the difference between permanency on paper and belonging in real life?

And perhaps the hardest question: when Indigenous children are removed from their families, who is accountable for making sure they are not also removed from the circle of people who would recognize their suffering?

Because Indigenous community is not a symbolic afterthought. It is a safety network. It is aunties who notice. It is grandmothers who read the child’s spirit before the report is written. It is Elders who understand that a child acting out may be carrying something too heavy for language. It is cousins and kin and community members who can say, “That child is not well,” or “That child is disappearing,” or “That child needs ceremony,” or “That child needs to come home.” When a child is severed from those relationships, the child loses witnesses. The community loses the ability to protect. The system becomes the only set of eyes, and too often, the system blinks.

Who Gets to Define Loss

Never again should an Indigenous child be left to wonder why they feel exiled from one world and corrected into silence in another. Why they are cherished in one place and treated as a burden in the next. Why they can feel breathless in one room and voiceless in another. Why their difference is noticed before their gifts. Why their pain is disciplined before it is understood. Why their mistakes are magnified, their grief misread, their anger feared, their silence mistaken for defiance, and their need for belonging treated as something to be managed later.

No child should have to carry questions that were created by colonial systems and then be punished for not having the language to answer them. No child should have to understand racism before they understand safety. No child should be expected to explain feelings they cannot yet name, to cry when they do not know what they are grieving, or to hold back tears because even sorrow has not felt safe. No child should be asked to make sense of generational trauma inside a home, classroom, file, or system that has not done the work to understand it first.

Even in the most extraordinary family arrangements, even where there is love and effort and good intention, Indigenous children placed in non-Indigenous homes can experience a loneliness that is difficult to name. It is not always the absence of care. Sometimes it is the absence of mirrors. The absence of aunties, cousins, Elders, language, humour, ceremony, land, and ordinary belonging. The absence of people who recognize what the child carries before the child has to perform, explain, apologize, or break down.

That loneliness should never be treated as an unfortunate loss to be processed later. It should be treated as an urgent call to action. Child protection agencies should not describe cultural disconnection as a grief the child must learn to live with. They should recognize it as an emergency requiring immediate, sustained, Indigenous-led resources to respect, restore, and reaffirm that child’s place in both worlds.

Because they are not alone. They were never meant to be alone. And the remorse, confusion, fear, anger, shame, and grief that can come from actions rooted in generational trauma are far too heavy for a child to understand alone, far too heavy for a child to carry alone, and far too heavy for any adult or system to expect them to simply survive.

The Sixties Scoop Is Not Just History

This is why the Sixties Scoop is not just history. During the Sixties Scoop, Indigenous children were taken from their families and communities and placed in foster and adoptive homes, often non-Indigenous homes, across Canada and beyond. The harm was not only that children were removed. It was that they were disconnected from identity, language, kinship, and belonging. In the Ontario Sixties Scoop class action, the court recognized that Canada had a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent on-reserve Indigenous children placed with non-Indigenous foster or adoptive parents from losing their Indigenous identities.

That principle has not aged out. It did not end with a settlement. It did not end with apologies. It did not end because agencies changed their language. The question remains alive every time an Indigenous child is placed outside their family and community: what is being done, concretely, consistently, and accountably, to protect that child’s identity, relationships, culture, and belonging?

If the answer is paperwork, it is not enough.

If the answer is occasional cultural exposure, it is not enough.

If the answer is that a non-Indigenous family “supports the child’s heritage” without being actively guided and held accountable by Indigenous community, it is not enough.

If the answer is that there are no resources, no culturally grounded supports, no available kinship options, no funding, no training, no wraparound care, then the answer is not neutral. It is colonial neglect dressed as administrative limitation.

Canada has already been found responsible for discriminatory underfunding of First Nations child and family services and for failing to fully implement Jordan’s Principle. The 2023 Federal Court-approved settlement included $23.34 billion in compensation for First Nations children and families harmed by discriminatory underfunding and narrow application of Jordan’s Principle.

That fact should sit heavily beside this case. Canada knows the child welfare system has harmed Indigenous children. Canada knows underfunding has consequences. Canada knows services have been delayed, denied, fragmented, and fought over. Canada knows Indigenous children have been removed when families could have been supported. Canada knows culture has been treated as secondary. Canada knows.

Knowing is no longer enough.

Grief Must Become Responsibility

From GMV’s perspective, this is where grief must become responsibility. L.L. cannot be returned. The younger brother cannot be given back the childhood that was taken from him. Their family, Nation, community, teachers, and all those who tried to help will carry the pain of what happened. But the rest of us cannot simply read the verdict, feel horror, and move on.

We have to name what this is.

This is a child welfare story.

This is a colonial story.

This is an Indigenous child safety story.

This is a disability and trauma-informed care story.

This is a story about what happens when children are treated as placements instead of relations.

This is a story about what happens when “permanency” becomes more important than safety, when “caregiver commitment” becomes more believable than children’s distress, when professional systems are too fragmented to see the whole child, and when Indigenous community is not centered as a source of knowledge, protection, and belonging.

It is also a story about the limits of good intentions. The public often wants to believe that foster and adoptive parents are automatically heroic because they take children in. Many are loving. Many are doing difficult and beautiful work. But taking in a child does not make someone beyond scrutiny. Wanting to adopt a child does not make someone safe. Being seen as committed does not make someone capable. The more vulnerable the child, the higher the standard must be. The more trauma a child carries, the more support the adults need. The more disconnected a child is from culture and kin, the more urgent the obligation to rebuild those connections.

There must be no romantic language that allows adults to hide behind sacrifice while children suffer.

A child is not lucky to be placed in a home where they are not understood. A child is not saved by being severed from identity. A child is not healed by control. A child is not protected by isolation. A child is not loved through starvation. A child is not cared for by being locked away from the world.

The Word Care Must Mean Something

The word “care” must mean something.

Care means food.

Care means medical attention.

Care means warmth.

Care means sleep.

Care means tenderness.

Care means safety.

Care means culture.

Care means community.

Care means adults who can admit when they are overwhelmed and systems that respond before crisis becomes catastrophe.

Care means that a child’s behaviour is not used as evidence against their humanity.

Care means that an Indigenous child is not treated as a problem to be absorbed into someone else’s family story, but as a sacred being with ancestors, relatives, rights, history, identity, and a future.

Care means that when a teacher calls, someone listens.

Care means that when a doctor is worried, someone acts.

Care means that when a child is losing weight, withdrawing, appearing distressed, or being described in increasingly punitive ways by caregivers, the response is not passive monitoring. It is intervention.

Care means that Indigenous children are not left alone in homes where no one from their community can see them.

Remembering Is an Obligation to the Living

Grandmother’s Voice speaks often about remembering. But remembering is not only for those who have already died. Remembering is also an obligation to the living. It means re-membering children, putting them back into the circle, restoring the relationships that colonial systems have broken. It means refusing to let Indigenous children become files passed between agencies while their spirits are starving for belonging.

L.L. should be remembered for more than what was done to him. The judge said something similar, acknowledging that to keep recounting the details risks continuing to victimize him.

So we remember him as a child.

We remember that he was more than evidence.

We remember that he had a brother.

We remember that he had a mother, a family, a people, a community.

We remember that he had a body that needed food and warmth.

We remember that he had a spirit that needed gentleness.

We remember that he had a name, even if the public cannot speak it.

We remember that he belonged somewhere before the system placed him elsewhere.

And we remember that Indigenous children are not Canada’s children to lose.

The grief of this case should move through every child welfare agency, every court, every school board, every medical office, every foster and adoption program, every ministry, every training room, every policy table, and every reconciliation committee that has ever spoken beautifully about Indigenous children while failing to build the structures that would keep them safe.

Because reconciliation cannot live only in land acknowledgements. It cannot live only in orange shirts. It cannot live only in public statements after a child dies. Reconciliation must live in funding decisions, placement decisions, emergency responses, cultural plans, family preservation, kinship care, Indigenous jurisdiction, disability supports, trauma training, and the courage to intervene when a child is being harmed.

If Canada is serious about ending the colonial removal of Indigenous children, then Indigenous communities must not be treated as optional consultants after decisions are made. They must be resourced and recognized as rights holders, knowledge holders, caregivers, and protectors. Indigenous children must have enforceable rights to culture, kinship, language, ceremony, and community connection. Foster and adoptive parents caring for Indigenous children must be held to a higher, not lower, standard of cultural accountability. Agencies must be required to show not only that a child has a bed, but that the child has belonging. Not only that a child is placed, but that the child is seen. Not only that a child is alive, but that the child is nourished in body, mind, spirit, and identity.

And when the signs of harm appear, systems must believe the child before they believe the story adults tell about the child.

No More Children Left to Wither

This is the lesson we cannot turn away from.

L.L. and J.L. were not failed by context instead of people. They were failed by people inside a context. They were failed by adults who have now been found guilty. They were also failed by a country that continues to place Indigenous children into systems shaped by the same colonial logic that harmed their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents: remove the child, rename the harm, promise safety, and call it care.

Grandmother’s Voice grieves this loss as part of the local Indigenous community. We grieve for L.L. We hold care for J.L. We hold compassion for the biological family and community members who must now carry a pain that no verdict can undo. We honour the teachers, helpers, and witnesses who tried to raise alarms. We call on every system involved with Indigenous children to understand that this moment demands more than sorrow.

It demands truth.

It demands accountability.

It demands Indigenous-led care.

It demands that children are not taken from one danger and placed into another kind of disappearance.

It demands that no Indigenous child is ever again left to wither behind a closed door while systems debate whose responsibility it is to open it.