BC Council for Families

by David Sheftel
Program Coodinator

"How can you be a father if you haven't had a father?" That's a question that faces many aboriginal fathers in Canada today, and it's a question that had the spotlight in January, with the screening of a CBC documentary on January 14, Blind Spot: What Happened to Canada's Aboriginal Fathers, which examined the challenges facing three Aboriginal fathers in Regina.

The film, which follows the men on their journey into fatherhood, takes a hard look at the roots of the growing crisis of absent fathers in aboriginal families, and tries to answer one very glaring question: "why has this issue  never before been publicly addressed?"

The history of residential schools, intergenerational trauma and the many societal obstacles facing Aboriginal fathers have led to many men being absent from their children's lives. CBC reporter Geoff Leo, who produced the documentary, noted that he was inspired to examine the issue further after realizing that "every time I did a story about aboriginal families, aboriginal social problems, I was almost always talking to the mom or the grandma or the auntie. I never was talking to the dad. All of a sudden the thought kind of occurred to me - putting together what I knew of the literature around the difference dads can make, looking at all the problems in the First Nations community and looking at the absence of fathers, I knew there was some sort of connection here." (quoted in Regina Leader-Post)

In the lead-up to the documentary's screening, CBC radio's The Current hosted a forum in Whitehorse to shed light on the issue of absent Aboriginal fathers in that community. Some of the statistics that were discussed include:

• Within 10 years, half of all aboriginal children in Canada will be growing up fatherless
• Children without a father in their lives are more likely to be depressed, to have low self esteem and to commit suicide
• Young men born to teen mothers are ten times more likely to become offenders
• One in 5 First Nations women over the age of 15 is a single mom

Jessica Ball, a professor of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria who participated in both Blind Spot and the Whitehorse radio forum, has been studying aboriginal fathering in Canada for years. "Fathers would say when they play with their child they feel this tremendous sadness because they never ever had a chance to play themselves," she says. "And it just evokes feelings of longing and yearning in the child part of them that never really got nurtured."

To learn more about how to support Aboriginal fathers in your community, check out the resources and DVD for family-serving professionals available through the Intercultural Early Childhood Development Partnerships. Jessica Ball will be presenting a workshop on aboriginal fatherhood in Nanaimo, February 21-23, hosted by the Community Health Associates of BC.