Rise (2016) s01e05 Episode Script
The Urban Rez
1 MAN: Long ago there was a medicine man, sitting there with a sacred pipe.
And the tobacco was talking, but nobody could understand.
So another medicine man grabbed some medicine and put it in his ear.
Once that medicine was in his ear, he could understand everything.
The vision was that a man was gonna come, and that he was gonna have serpents in his arms.
And that these serpent represented two governments.
And that this beast was gonna steal the children.
It doesn't seem that far off.
(Drum beating) We are in the North End of Winnipeg, and we're in the industrial area.
It's very desolate.
On one side, we have the train yards here, and it's just a different world.
This is a scary place.
I'm 6'4, you know? I'm 250.
GITZ: When people think of First Nations, most imagine us living in isolated reservations.
But about half of Indigenous people in Canada live in cities.
Winnipeg is home to the largest urban Indigenous population in the country.
Many live in the North End, one of Canada's poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods.
Here, many families live on less than $23,000 a year.
One in three students drop out before grade nine.
And if you're Aboriginal, you are nine times more likely to be murdered, with Indigenous women and girls comprising a majority of the nearly 9,000 missing person reports filed in the city last year.
I've come to Winnipeg to try and understand why these things are happening, and to meet some of the people who are fighting against the systems that continue to fail them.
This is Winnipeg, Canada's urban rez.
(Radio chattering) Here's a kind of a 21 block area of where a lot of the crime in the North End happens.
And so we're kind of entering that area now.
There's at least four or five pawn shops right in this area.
There would be gangbangers hanging out, you know, selling crack.
Another big problem we have are people getting prescriptions for narcotics from the pharmacies, and then selling them on the street.
This is probably one of the busier hotels and vendors on the strip.
Ooh, I like this! Can you strip search me? (Laughing) Woo, yeah, you can put me on news.
Here, you want some titties? (Laughing) It's karaoke night obviously.
(Laughing) (Yelling) That is awesome! So we normally just check it out.
Everything is cool, there's no one causing problems.
We say hi, let's move out, down to the next one.
- They got a dedication for you, too.
- Yeah.
(Music playing) (Laughing and yelling) How are ya? You waiting for a bus? - How old is your son? - And is he hanging here in the North End, or ? - - Oh, you're just coming to look for him.
- - The hotels right now are pretty quiet.
You could put in a missing person report if you are - if you are concerned.
- - Getting in trouble? - Are you good tonight? Are you safe right now? You're alright? - - Oh, good.
- Well, good luck.
- Seeing that mother look for her son really hits home.
Here in the city, there are lots of ways people can fall through the cracks.
While Indigenous peoples are disproportionately represented in missing person stats, women and girls are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation, such as prostitution and human trafficking.
Have you guys personally responded to a missing persons call? Yeah, there's a lot of them.
They pop up every day.
Um, this will be a girl waiting to get picked up.
Yeah, and she doesn't know we're a police car right now, so And you can see this is a very dangerous secluded area.
There's not a lot of safety net here for them.
REPORTER 1: 15-year-old Tina Fontaine's body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg.
REPORTER 2: Just over a month after she was placed in CFS care.
REPORTER 1: Tina was staying in this downtown hotel prior to going missing.
REPORTER 2: Where kids in care often stay when there aren't enough foster homes or shelter spaces available.
REPORTER 1: Fontaine's murder put the child welfare system in Manitoba into the spotlight.
Aboriginal communities across the country are reeling with this particularly poignant and tragic loss.
REPORTER 3: For now, police continue to hunt for Tina's killer.
GITZ: In Canada, there's an epidemic of disappeared and murdered Aboriginal women and girls.
Tina Fontaine's case is probably among the most well-known.
In many ways, Tina's death galvanized the Indigenous community, and sparked a resurgence of grassroots leadership.
One example of this is the Bear Clan Patrol.
Formed in 1992, the group patrolled the North End to provide people living or frequenting the streets with a sense of security.
As the years passed, the patrol faded away.
But after Tina's murder, co-founders Larry Morrisette and James Favel decided to revive the clan.
I need a large.
I need it oversized.
Their mandate is not to police, but to lend support and impart a sense of safety to the urban rez.
They patrol four nights a week, despite winter temperatures regularly dropping to negative 40 degrees.
You guys always go out, no matter how cold it gets? - Oh yeah.
- So how long have you guys - been going on for? - We've been patrolling for the last nine months, and it took us about nine months preamble, you know, to get everything organized so that we can get functioning.
And why did you start? After Tina Fontaine was found, that was the final straw, and we decided that we would try to get the Bear Clan Patrol going again.
The red dress is a symbol for the murdered and missing Indigenous women, and it's to remember them.
Hello! (Whistling) Your door's open! - - Okay, have a good night.
That's good, she just didn't know.
Well, that's the kind of things we like to take care of.
In a neighbourhood that has a tense history with law enforcement, the Bear Clan offers something else.
Hello! Right on! I think we'll avoid that because they're already working, and we'll stay out of their hair.
Passing a taped-off crime scene while patrolling the neighbourhood wasn't a shock to James at all.
- So, how often of an occurrence is that? - Well, I mean, it all depends.
Around here we see it, you know, every other kind of week.
Have the police requested that you guys go to different areas, or ? The police and the transit want us to patrol on Main Street, but unfortunately what they want us to do there is not in our mandate.
Namely they want us to, more or less, tend to the street people there.
And not that it's not in our mandate, it's just the way they want us to do it, like clear them out of there, and I'm not I can't support that.
You come with me, boys.
Yeah, we're good.
So why are we splitting up here? Just so that everybody can see that we're here.
Yeah, they're accustomed to seeing us at this point, so we make sure that every we go through every area.
And just making sure that there's nobody laying down in the corner somewhere, and kids aren't being bothered.
And what's the reception been like from the community? The reason why we started coming here in the first place was because a community member invited us here to help find her granddaughter, and then later on that evening we found two more.
There was a 16-year-old boy that was suicidal.
And Laura Garcia-Stuart, one of our members, she literally just cradled him in her arms until he calmed down.
And that's the kind of thing we bring to this is, you know The police will come and they'll do their job, and the ambulance will come and they'll do their job, but they're doing a job, and there's no caring, you know, for the people.
So what we try to bring to the table is a little bit of caring.
Like look around, even the train yard over there.
This place kind of seems a bit dangerous to be around.
Well, and again, this is where the girls are hiding out at 4:30 in the morning, you know.
It's not a safe place.
There's got to be a better way.
(Traffic noise) You got the light? Lights? Found something! - What do you got? - Found some needles.
One, two, three, four like about a dozen? Probably from people shooting up.
There's one that's out of its package.
I don't want to take away their clean ones.
Just get rid of their dirty ones.
Alright.
Because they'll be back for them, obviously.
Patrolling the streets is but one example of the growing resistance movement here in Winnipeg.
But James sees it as crucial.
We're trying to tackle some of the non-policing issues, you know, some of the more sociological issues.
And we've had maybe two dozen missing persons reports come to us, you know, in a couple of months.
- It's been crazy.
- So what's the value that you find having our own people, our own Indigenous people patrolling this neighbourhood? I mean, beyond the empowerment that comes from it, I mean, I think that there's we can connect better with the people that we're encountering because we're all the same.
You know, these are my cousins that I'm talking to on a daily basis when I'm out here.
Family members.
It's the taking back of the control over our own circumstances.
It's vital to the growth that we're experiencing here as a community.
Not waiting for somebody else to fix us.
We'll fix ourselves.
GITZ: Larry Morrisette grew up in the North End, and has spent his life advocating for the people who live there.
Along with James, he is also one of the co-founders of the Bear Clan Patrol.
This is where you grew up? Before these developments were built, it was all slums, like really bad housing.
And we lived there, and we moved from there out of there when they evicted everybody.
And then when they built these, we moved back into here.
So we started creating community, and we tried to create community outside the development site.
But people viewed us as being, you know, poor people.
So what happened was eventually the rest of the neighbourhood started cutting us off, and we became a community within a community.
And we would only hang out with people from the developments, we'd only hang out in certain areas, and we became isolated.
This whole end of town is, you know, pretty at risk, eh? - The train tracks? - Yeah.
What it did is separate people, from one side of the track to the other.
You know, you had your territory, you had your you know, where you belonged, right? And people always talk about the North End and the South End, and about the tracks, and I just see the system of separation.
Basically, what we're looking at is a long history of racism, discrimination within a city.
Where we end up is in certain tracts of the city that are heavily impoverished and oppressed.
There's 80,000 Aboriginal people in this city alone.
And we share a city, but we don't share a community with everyone else.
So do you feel that you've changed because of the system? Oh, we had no choice.
You either stand up and fight it, or you get absorbed in it, and then you fall into the abyss.
I understand you were one of the founders of the school? - Yeah, yup.
- So what's interesting about the school that separates it from anything else? It's the first urban-based Aboriginal school in Canada.
So when we developed the school, all we did is replace European concepts with our own.
Instead of reading 10 European books, you read about 10 Aboriginal authors.
Instead of taking big band, you learn about pow wow drumming or other things that are more relevant to you.
The Children of the Earth School represents a taking back Indigenous culture and teachings that were lost from the days of residential schools.
Larry and I have this history in common, as our parents were also part of the devastating system that tore children from their families in hopes of assimilating them into the dominant culture.
More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend the residential schools that operated from the 1870s until the last one closed down in 1996.
The schools were meant to destroy Indigenous culture, and that legacy still remains.
We're here at the Indian Residential School in Birtle.
It's about three-and-a-half hours northwest of Winnipeg.
Originally created in 1894, and then rebuilt in 1930.
I think of my parents, and their schools.
I feel heavy coming into here.
I fucking hate these places.
They had the idea that they'd bring us here, they would save our souls, they would educate us better.
We'd become these model Canadian citizens and an image of what it is to be Canadian.
A child's drawing.
I remember the stories my mom would tell me about having to sit next to her family and not being able to talk to them, not being able to say hello to her brother at all.
Even though he was still just a couple of desks away from her.
Wanting to say hello but worried that she'd get hit.
And he found like some kind of Play-Doh or something, and he constructed a ring for my mom.
And then as he walked past her, he dropped the ring onto her desk and he just kept walking.
He didn't look at her or anything.
And she kept that ring.
It was the only secret affection they could have for one another.
Just, you know It's like her brother is a couple of steps away.
And then he drank himself to death.
You're supposed to learn in these fucking places.
Like, you're supposed to learn in a classroom.
But all I could see and all I could feel is just programming kids to hate themselves, for no other reason than the fact that they're born with brown skin.
Everything in here was just to destroy us.
They're monuments to colonization.
You know, monuments to ignorance and racism.
The Government of Canada recently apologized to the nation for their program of residential schools.
They also launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to educate the public and document survivor stories.
One of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our collective history.
The commission drew connections between residential schools and today's rates of poverty, domestic violence, as well as the overrepresentation of Native children in the child welfare system.
Canada clearly participated in a period of cultural genocide.
The report also said that while more research is needed, the information points to a devastating link between murdered and missing Aboriginal women and the residential school legacy.
We're here in Portage La Prairie Indian Residential School.
This place was constructed in 1960, and it's been standing for about 100 years.
And today we have some residential school survivors that are gonna be taking us around this place.
Do you remember your first memory here? We had long hair when we first went into the residential school.
Beautiful I had ringlets, really beautiful ringlets.
- But they cut your hair - They cut our hair really short.
As it was going on, I kept asking my sister, "What's an Indian?" 'cause I didn't speak English.
The Canadian government created and helped run the residential school system which was meant to kill the Indian in the child.
After being forced to leave their families, many children suffered horrific abuses such as rape, torture, and even death.
I don't think our parents knew what was happening in those schools.
They didn't know the horrors.
They didn't know the loneliness, you know.
The deprivation of food.
They didn't know any of that.
- And we never talked about it, and - And that wasn't talked about after you went home during the summer.
You didn't talk about the beatings, you didn't talk about the being raped or whatever.
You didn't talk about those things when you went home during the summer, you just didn't.
This is the basement of the residential school.
On this side was where the staff ate.
- What kinds of foods did they have? - They had the best they could get.
They had fruit and salads and all this Just the best.
But different story for the residents.
We were used to rabbit, deer meat, and stuff like that.
And here it was like the white man's food.
Did you guys ever refuse to eat? - Yes, we did.
- Oh yeah.
I sat beside a young girl one time, when she was throwing up because it was really lumpy porridge, and then they'd they'd hit us like this, real hard and we had to eat our we still had to eat our our our vomit.
You didn't get There's a part of me that thinks, like, it would be easier to just forget all this, and just like burn this place down, you know? There's been schools that have been burned down where the whole community have actually burned down the schools because of the memories of their schools.
But our chief, at the time, decided we can do something with this building.
We can provide healing ceremonies for our people here.
To be able to go through these places and talk about these memories, does it provide healing for you to be able to do this? Every time, every time, every time it does, yeah.
It lessens the pain.
This is hard for me; my mom went to my mom and dad are both survivors and a lot of the stories that you say, they're echoed even though she's in Alberta.
It's like my mom always talked of loneliness.
There are all kinds of pain in this world, right? There's torture, there's everything.
But they say the greatest pain - is the loneliness.
- Yeah.
To be abandoned, that's what we felt.
The thing that always pops up in my mind when we're here, and this place is here, and they always talk about like people who forget about the past repeat it.
Are you ever afraid that they might do it again? CFS is just another form of residential schools.
Taking children and placing them: same thing.
Do you think that the rates are the same or worse or better? Worse these Yeah, more children in care than ever.
GITZ: I'm at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to meet Cora Morgan, Manitoba's First Nation Advocate for Children in Care.
She's asked to meet me here because she says the museum helped her understand the residential schools were an act of genocide orchestrated by the state.
But Cora tells me that the government practice of separating First Nations children from their parents is not just a thing of the past.
Today, there are more kids in the care of the state than at the height of residential schools.
What are the numbers of kids in care right now? We have over 11,000 here in Manitoba, which is the highest apprehension rate in the world.
Just here in Manitoba.
From one Winnipeg hospital, we have 30 to 40 newborn babies apprehended every month.
What are some of the reasons that these children are taken? If they feel that that mother is living in poverty-like circumstances, if they are previously a ward of CFS, and they're aged out of the system, that is cause.
If there's addiction issues or perceived addiction issues, a newborn baby will be apprehended.
Winnipeg's been the child poverty capital of Canada for several consecutive years.
A single mother on social assistance with a child maybe gets $630 a month.
If that child is apprehended, then a foster placement will get closer to like $1200 to care for that same child.
Are the children who are in care, is that improving their situation? Just this past fall, the Winnipeg Police Service released a stat that in Manitoba 83% of the missing persons were children in CFS care.
We need to paint the picture of the continued institutionalization of our children from residential schools to now.
The very first call that I received from the hospital, the mother's baby was being apprehended because she was formerly in care, and CFS was trying to track her down.
And when they found out she was pregnant, they showed up at the hospital and apprehended the baby from her and her partner.
And so this young couple, they had attended every pre-natal appointment, they had done everything, they had purchased all the things they needed for a baby, they had taken parenting classes, and they were ready for their baby.
And that family, it's been six months, and they still don't have their baby back.
I'm meeting the couple that Cora's been helping since their baby was apprehended by Child and Family Services just hours after birth.
Canadian law doesn't allow us to disclose the family's identity.
I'm joining the parents as they prepare for a supervised visit with their child.
On (Bleep), 2015, (Bleep) gave birth, and four-and-a-half hours later CFS showed up with an apprehension order.
Me and my mother got in contact right away with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs' advocate worker Cora, and they came down and they asked why, and they wouldn't give us a reason why.
And the nurses and doctors tried to talk to CFS and said listen, we don't think this is a case where the child should be apprehended.
But they didn't care, you know.
They have a god complex.
They'll do what they want when they want.
You were in care before? The reason why I put myself in care before I turned 13 was because I was being molested by my uncle at home, right? So I finally was fed up with it, and I said I don't want to live like this anymore.
As much as it was hard to you know like go with my family in a way, like, 'cause I helped take care of my younger brothers 'cause my mom wasn't there.
Anyone that has kids out there, just imagine at any given time them walking into the door and taking your child from you.
- Hi! - Hey! - There's my baby! - Hey, baby! - You see your mommy? - See Mommy? - There's your mommy.
- Mwah, thank you! And how did you guys all meet? - We met at the hospital.
- At the hospital.
They tried to talk to CFS to say that our child should come home with us, and when they still wouldn't listen, that's when they said you need to call Cora.
You know, thank God we did call her because we had no idea what we were in store for.
We still haven't had a proper reason as to why he's been apprehended.
It's like residential schools all over again.
I am a residential school survivor.
Now, it seems exactly the same thing is happening again except it's in a different format, it's a different scenario, but exactly same damages are happening to our children.
Who's taking care of the baby right now? When he was apprehended, he was in CFS care for two days, and then I managed to get him into my home.
I'm fostering.
I couldn't believe that they had a worker waiting for the baby.
You know, I was holding my baby, and he you know, he was taken from me.
- She cried.
- And now I You know, I don't have that bond the way I should with my boy.
Seeing the couple with their son was a painful reminder of what they've lost.
If children are separated at birth and placed with families outside of their own cultures, how will they ever grow up to know who they are? Roughly 90% of children in the care of Manitoba's CFS are Indigenous.
I want to know why, and I'm hoping that former Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross will be able to give me some answers.
I used to be a child protection worker.
And a compliment that I received many years ago was that I was red spirited.
I have some connection with the Indigenous culture, and I can't explain it.
Manitoba has a high rate of child apprehension, and that specifically these rates are higher within the Indigenous population.
What you see within the child welfare system is a symptom, a symptom of residential schools.
Another thing that I've read was birth alerts.
It just seems that those who have been in care, they have a higher probability of having a child taken.
That could be, but it really isn't based on whether that parent was in care or not.
A child is apprehended because they are in need of protection, and that is an assessment that's done by professionals.
They have what they call structure decision making.
That asks some very direct questions about a family.
Who are their supports, how many children they have, any previous history of domestic violence or addictions, where did they grow up.
Workers use their intuition too.
What's the process for a parent who feels that their child was wrongly apprehended? A number of the children that are in care, they're in care related to poverty issues.
And so it really is very difficult for a family to hire a lawyer because of their economics, or their income or lack of income.
I know that parents feel they have no rights within that within that system the way that it is, but that is the legislation in which we work with.
You made mention earlier of the residential schools and its lasting impacts.
The rationale behind it was always based in good intentions.
Even child apprehensions were based in good intentions.
How do you make sure that what the CFS is doing now is different than what the residential schools were doing before? I know that there's this comparison that happens frequently between residential schools and child welfare, but what's different for me is that there is legislation.
It doesn't mean that it's right, but there is legislation that guides it.
We are not denying people to use their language or their traditions.
Do they always have the opportunity? That's the question, right? When you listen to the survivors of residential schools and you listen to children that have been apprehended, there's very similar emotions.
We have to do better.
GITZ: Residential schools were designed to make Indigenous children disappear.
They have shaped every family they tore apart.
And now many people believe that Child and Family Services, or CFS, is continuing the practice of unjustly removing children from their parents.
With more than 10,000 children currently in the care of the state, a lot of kids are still growing up disconnected from their families and culture.
I'm heading to meet Zach, who lived in seven different foster homes before the age of 8 when he was placed with a couple he now calls his parents.
Growing up, affection wasn't very normal.
- What was it like in foster care? - Pretty confusing, why I was taken away kind of thing.
Because they didn't want to say like my parents are on drugs and hitting each other.
It's not nice, you know? And how old were you then, when they took you? Five years old.
I got a big family.
I've got, like, Virgil, Misty, Sky, then me.
And then Claude, Ben, Dakota, Cheyanne.
Were they all there when you got taken? - Do you remember that day? - Yeah, they just kind of busted the door and started picking up people.
Some of us went to a hotel, some of us went to different foster parents.
I remember just in this one hotel, they didn't really watch me too well because I remember 5 years old or so, walking down the hallways, going outside.
Were you Growing up, like in your teens, did you act out at all? After my sister passed away, I actually ended up robbing some people and totally dealt with my anger in the wrong way.
How old were you when that happened? 17 when my sister passed away.
She was raped.
And Virgil, being her older brother, he actually found the guy and beat him to death.
And then he did 6-and-a-half years in Stoney.
She tried to hang herself, and since the lack of oxygen to her brain kind of kept her alive in a way, but also just not there, we kind of pulled the plug on her, and and so that really - really affected him.
- Losing someone's hard.
Like I've lost a bunch of relatives to suicide.
And it always it fucks you up in the worst way possible.
But like, what is your relationship now with your biological parents? I don't talk at all to my dad.
My mom I haven't talked to for maybe a couple years.
She ran away from residential schools when she was younger.
And unfortunately where she grew up, there was plenty of drugs.
And just surrounding herself in those areas, it's not a surprise that you're going to end up down the same kind of road.
You really have to leave the whole situation and land with some really good people like I did.
I'm across the street from a hotel in downtown Winnipeg, one of many places the Child Family Services used to place kids.
I'm about to meet a former worker of the CFS and show you just really how vulnerable these kids are.
Anybody can walk into a hotel.
Tina Fontaine was living in one of these hotels under the care of CFS just a week before she was found murdered.
Her death helped draw widespread attention to the practices of CFS.
And mounting pressure from the public caused the organization to issue a statement that they would end the use of hotel placements due to safety concerns.
Heather is a former CFS worker whose job was to provide temporary supervision to children in care.
Heather says she was watching youth in this downtown hotel after Manitoba's Child and Family Services publicly pledged to end using hotels to house children.
They're placing kids here at a hotel? - How does that work? - They rented a room for us, I guess, and this was my first time meeting that girl.
And we just stayed in the room.
We watched TV, she wanted to go have a cigarette outside.
Mind you, she was 21 years old, but she was cognitively impaired so she functioned like a 5-year-old.
They told me that she has been known to go AWOL, as they put it, and she has an 11:00 curfew.
If she doesn't come back by that curfew, then you have to file a missing persons report.
So, 10:20, she's getting ready, and as she was digging through her items there, she actually took condoms out of her purse.
And she said she was going to Higgins and Main.
Now, if you're from Winnipeg, you know that Higgins and Main is notorious for sex trade workers, right? And 11:00 rolled around at which point then I just did the standard procedure that they told me to do: call the police and do a missing persons report.
It's a lot to wrap my head around.
Was it just disabled youth, like mentally disabled, or were there kids as well that they were bringing into the hotels? Well, to my understanding, it's all different types of kids.
You know, from infants to teenagers.
And that's like instead of putting them in a house, they brought them here to the hotels.
This area that we're in, it's central Winnipeg, you know.
If they go a few blocks that way, there is johns driving around, there is prostitutes on the corner, there's drug dealers.
It's dangerous to put a vulnerable child in an area such as downtown with minimal supervision, right? When they found Tina Fontaine, knowing that she was in care in a hotel, how did that resonate with you? Well, it takes you back Oh, give me a second.
Well, putting myself in the worker's shoes, for her to go missing and ultimately end up murdered under your supervision, that would be a lot of guilt to carry, right? It's a sad reality that Tina Fontaine's not the only one.
How serious do the police take those reports when it's happening every day? I think what's interesting is that you said you were here recently watching a resident at the hotel.
And after Tina Fontaine, who was in the hotel, they made an announcement saying that practice has stopped.
- Mm-hmm.
- But yet you were here, correct? They coined it as an emergency placement.
So I don't know if that rationalized the fact that they weren't supposed to be doing that, because it's an emergency they had nowhere else to put her.
But I knew we weren't supposed to be doing that.
So my question to you is do you think this process is working? It's obvious that it's not working.
Um As in the case of Tina Fontaine, she was in care, she was being supervised in a hotel.
So it's not working.
GITZ: Tina Fontaine's death captured the nation's attention, igniting demands for a national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women.
The last day Tina was seen alive, she had been in contact with paramedics, a CFS worker and police, who did not take her in, even though she was listed as a missing person.
Many kids in care end up homeless.
Some are forced to work the streets, and we rarely hear about the ones who go missing forever.
Some former sex workers who were trafficked as children have invited me to speak with them as they reflect on their struggles and how they got off the streets.
The majority of, like, people on the streets, do they all have a grooming story? I was exploited at the age of 14, and that was like my first sexual experience, was with a john at the age of 14 years old.
For myself I was sexually abused at the age of 6 in my home community.
I never told anybody, so I was acting out in violence towards my siblings, and my mother put me in the care of Child Family Services at the age of 12.
And therefore I was given two options in my community, which was to stay in my community with foster parents, whom I did not care for, or giving me the option to come to Winnipeg.
One of her last words from my Child and Family Service worker was, "Don't come back to this community," right? And she put me on a Greyhound bus in Portage La Prairie.
There was nobody to receive me on the other end.
And I came off the bus, and lo and behold there was a perpetrator standing there.
So I didn't have a place to go to out here, and that's something my Child and Family Services worker should have done.
So, I went back to Ellis and just stood there and worked, and at the age of 12 was my first hit of crack cocaine.
And the drug use would escalate.
And then one of my friends went missing actually just from that corner right there, Sutherland and Main.
I lost it.
I lost it.
I didn't know what to do.
And then back in 2008, when I started realizing I wanted to sober up, realized that all of these community organizations are making decisions on our behalf without our consent.
Like, I sit and I talk with youth.
You know, one thing that I hear continuously is, you know, how CFS looks at them as a number.
It's just the format of the residential school, and many of my sisters are just the plain example to that.
There's actually a girl getting picked up right now.
That truck just picked her up.
It's hard, it's hard to see that.
'Cause they go like people go missing, women go missing.
That could be one of our sisters gone tonight.
And I understand now what they mean by "sister".
Because when I see these women, that's like your younger sister or your older sister.
And it's scary.
Like where they are is a really scary place, knowing that there's johns lurking these streets looking for these women, looking for these transgender people.
By walking these streets, the Bear Clan's presence has helped to deter johns and predators from trolling the North End.
Made up of community members from all walks of life, many of the Bear Clan's volunteers live in the North End.
Their lives have been directly affected by what goes on here.
I caught up again with James and his daughter, Mandy, who regularly brave the cold and patrol with the clan.
Before this started, did you feel safe? Yeah, before the patrol started I guess it wasn't always I didn't always feel safe in this neighbourhood.
I'd be gonna catch the bus, and like cars would slow down beside me to like see if I was a prostitute or what.
And that just kind of feels unnerving, you know? Cause 'then you know that person is driving around looking for somebody, right? It's not a good feeling.
(Chuckling) I have a son, so when he gets older, I'd like him to be able to play outside and not feel unnerved about it.
As an Indigenous woman, Mandy is up to seven times more likely to die as a result of violence.
This is her daily reality.
Here in the North End, it's not uncommon to see community vigils dedicated to Aboriginal women who have gone missing or have been murdered.
(Chanting) Surreal can't even begin to describe what I feel tonight.
This is the crime scene we had walked by when I was patrolling with the Bear Clan a couple nights ago.
At the time, I didn't know that yellow police tape we saw marked the place where Mavis Ducharme, 39-year-old mother of six, had been murdered, stabbed to death in front of her 10-year-old over an incident that was reportedly drug related.
(Chanting) (Sighing) Yeah.
What are you hoping comes from tonight? From taking this stand and remembering her like this? We got to stand up, try to end the violence on the streets.
It's getting ridiculous.
I want us to be walking down this street, 9:00 at night, safe.
That's all I ask.
We've gotta do something about this, but will we? To be here, what are your thoughts on all of this? (Clearing throat) It doesn't make you feel safe when stuff like this happens, but like when we come together as a community, you feel safe that way.
Like how many more vigils are there gonna be in Winnipeg until something's actually done about it? You can't even feel safe in your own home.
People just walk in your door, and just like that you're gone.
Love you, Mavis! I don't care what you guys said, that was my I had She was always drinking with me.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
(Bottle hissing) Goodbye, Mavis.
(Sobbing) I'm so sorry I wasn't here, Mavis.
(Sobbing) One last drink with you.
Cheers, Mavis, cheers.
(Sobbing) I'm gonna miss you forever, my friend.
(Sobbing) GITZ: All over Winnipeg, I've seen red ribbons fly to remind people of the lives lost.
After the disappearance and death of more than 1200 Indigenous women and girls, the federal government has finally launched a national inquiry.
The national inquiry will focus on the root causes of the disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls.
We need to identify the causes of those disparities and take action now.
It's February 14th, Valentine's Day.
In every major city across Canada, people are taking action, marching to raise awareness for missing and murdered women and girls.
I'm meeting Tasha Spillett along the banks of the Red River, before we join with the Bear Clan and other community members to march.
So where we are right now is like the meeting of the Red River and the Assiniboine River.
And for our people, this place is so important because it's always been a meeting place.
So this is the monument that was built for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Because these stories are unfinished, there's no resolution.
Lots of times there's no justice for families.
This is the place where our community can come, like a physical marker, to be with our relatives.
The curve of the monument, like it takes the shape of a woman, and it's so beautiful.
Bodies have been pulled from the Red River, you know, and our relatives who do drag the Red, like going out in their boats, dragging the bottom of the water to maybe put some closure to some of these stories.
And so because that work isn't being done by the police, the families have taken it upon themselves to do that work.
And then I know in the spring, in the thaw, we'll have that worry.
Like, what are we gonna find in the thaw? - Yeah.
- And that's a reality here.
So when I knew we were going to be coming here today, and like today is Valentine's Day, so I brought an offering to make to this place.
But then also all our relatives who haven't come home yet.
You're offering some berries? Strawberries are medicine for the heart.
And they look like hearts, In Cree, we say miteh mushkeeki, which means heart medicine.
An elder once told me, "You can only know where you're going if you first understand where you've come from.
" It feels as though something here in Winnipeg is shifting.
MITCH: There's something happening in our city right now! And that's the mobilization of people! People are waking up! People are saying no more! No more to family violence! No more to community violence! There are vulnerable people in our community.
And we need to love, protect, and empower.
This is a beautiful event on Valentine's Day.
I wish the whole city would come and join us.
We have men, we have women, and we have children walking together in peace, love and harmony.
People protecting each other.
Love you all, thank you for being here.
The Bear Clan is here to stay! Miigwetch! (Cheering) There's a movement happening here in Winnipeg that is undeniable.
At the centre of it are the people who live here, coming together to rewrite a history marked by racism and genocide.
By showing up for each other every day with love and solidarity, they are building a powerful community of Indigenous people.
And the tobacco was talking, but nobody could understand.
So another medicine man grabbed some medicine and put it in his ear.
Once that medicine was in his ear, he could understand everything.
The vision was that a man was gonna come, and that he was gonna have serpents in his arms.
And that these serpent represented two governments.
And that this beast was gonna steal the children.
It doesn't seem that far off.
(Drum beating) We are in the North End of Winnipeg, and we're in the industrial area.
It's very desolate.
On one side, we have the train yards here, and it's just a different world.
This is a scary place.
I'm 6'4, you know? I'm 250.
GITZ: When people think of First Nations, most imagine us living in isolated reservations.
But about half of Indigenous people in Canada live in cities.
Winnipeg is home to the largest urban Indigenous population in the country.
Many live in the North End, one of Canada's poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods.
Here, many families live on less than $23,000 a year.
One in three students drop out before grade nine.
And if you're Aboriginal, you are nine times more likely to be murdered, with Indigenous women and girls comprising a majority of the nearly 9,000 missing person reports filed in the city last year.
I've come to Winnipeg to try and understand why these things are happening, and to meet some of the people who are fighting against the systems that continue to fail them.
This is Winnipeg, Canada's urban rez.
(Radio chattering) Here's a kind of a 21 block area of where a lot of the crime in the North End happens.
And so we're kind of entering that area now.
There's at least four or five pawn shops right in this area.
There would be gangbangers hanging out, you know, selling crack.
Another big problem we have are people getting prescriptions for narcotics from the pharmacies, and then selling them on the street.
This is probably one of the busier hotels and vendors on the strip.
Ooh, I like this! Can you strip search me? (Laughing) Woo, yeah, you can put me on news.
Here, you want some titties? (Laughing) It's karaoke night obviously.
(Laughing) (Yelling) That is awesome! So we normally just check it out.
Everything is cool, there's no one causing problems.
We say hi, let's move out, down to the next one.
- They got a dedication for you, too.
- Yeah.
(Music playing) (Laughing and yelling) How are ya? You waiting for a bus? - How old is your son? - And is he hanging here in the North End, or ? - - Oh, you're just coming to look for him.
- - The hotels right now are pretty quiet.
You could put in a missing person report if you are - if you are concerned.
- - Getting in trouble? - Are you good tonight? Are you safe right now? You're alright? - - Oh, good.
- Well, good luck.
- Seeing that mother look for her son really hits home.
Here in the city, there are lots of ways people can fall through the cracks.
While Indigenous peoples are disproportionately represented in missing person stats, women and girls are especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation, such as prostitution and human trafficking.
Have you guys personally responded to a missing persons call? Yeah, there's a lot of them.
They pop up every day.
Um, this will be a girl waiting to get picked up.
Yeah, and she doesn't know we're a police car right now, so And you can see this is a very dangerous secluded area.
There's not a lot of safety net here for them.
REPORTER 1: 15-year-old Tina Fontaine's body was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg.
REPORTER 2: Just over a month after she was placed in CFS care.
REPORTER 1: Tina was staying in this downtown hotel prior to going missing.
REPORTER 2: Where kids in care often stay when there aren't enough foster homes or shelter spaces available.
REPORTER 1: Fontaine's murder put the child welfare system in Manitoba into the spotlight.
Aboriginal communities across the country are reeling with this particularly poignant and tragic loss.
REPORTER 3: For now, police continue to hunt for Tina's killer.
GITZ: In Canada, there's an epidemic of disappeared and murdered Aboriginal women and girls.
Tina Fontaine's case is probably among the most well-known.
In many ways, Tina's death galvanized the Indigenous community, and sparked a resurgence of grassroots leadership.
One example of this is the Bear Clan Patrol.
Formed in 1992, the group patrolled the North End to provide people living or frequenting the streets with a sense of security.
As the years passed, the patrol faded away.
But after Tina's murder, co-founders Larry Morrisette and James Favel decided to revive the clan.
I need a large.
I need it oversized.
Their mandate is not to police, but to lend support and impart a sense of safety to the urban rez.
They patrol four nights a week, despite winter temperatures regularly dropping to negative 40 degrees.
You guys always go out, no matter how cold it gets? - Oh yeah.
- So how long have you guys - been going on for? - We've been patrolling for the last nine months, and it took us about nine months preamble, you know, to get everything organized so that we can get functioning.
And why did you start? After Tina Fontaine was found, that was the final straw, and we decided that we would try to get the Bear Clan Patrol going again.
The red dress is a symbol for the murdered and missing Indigenous women, and it's to remember them.
Hello! (Whistling) Your door's open! - - Okay, have a good night.
That's good, she just didn't know.
Well, that's the kind of things we like to take care of.
In a neighbourhood that has a tense history with law enforcement, the Bear Clan offers something else.
Hello! Right on! I think we'll avoid that because they're already working, and we'll stay out of their hair.
Passing a taped-off crime scene while patrolling the neighbourhood wasn't a shock to James at all.
- So, how often of an occurrence is that? - Well, I mean, it all depends.
Around here we see it, you know, every other kind of week.
Have the police requested that you guys go to different areas, or ? The police and the transit want us to patrol on Main Street, but unfortunately what they want us to do there is not in our mandate.
Namely they want us to, more or less, tend to the street people there.
And not that it's not in our mandate, it's just the way they want us to do it, like clear them out of there, and I'm not I can't support that.
You come with me, boys.
Yeah, we're good.
So why are we splitting up here? Just so that everybody can see that we're here.
Yeah, they're accustomed to seeing us at this point, so we make sure that every we go through every area.
And just making sure that there's nobody laying down in the corner somewhere, and kids aren't being bothered.
And what's the reception been like from the community? The reason why we started coming here in the first place was because a community member invited us here to help find her granddaughter, and then later on that evening we found two more.
There was a 16-year-old boy that was suicidal.
And Laura Garcia-Stuart, one of our members, she literally just cradled him in her arms until he calmed down.
And that's the kind of thing we bring to this is, you know The police will come and they'll do their job, and the ambulance will come and they'll do their job, but they're doing a job, and there's no caring, you know, for the people.
So what we try to bring to the table is a little bit of caring.
Like look around, even the train yard over there.
This place kind of seems a bit dangerous to be around.
Well, and again, this is where the girls are hiding out at 4:30 in the morning, you know.
It's not a safe place.
There's got to be a better way.
(Traffic noise) You got the light? Lights? Found something! - What do you got? - Found some needles.
One, two, three, four like about a dozen? Probably from people shooting up.
There's one that's out of its package.
I don't want to take away their clean ones.
Just get rid of their dirty ones.
Alright.
Because they'll be back for them, obviously.
Patrolling the streets is but one example of the growing resistance movement here in Winnipeg.
But James sees it as crucial.
We're trying to tackle some of the non-policing issues, you know, some of the more sociological issues.
And we've had maybe two dozen missing persons reports come to us, you know, in a couple of months.
- It's been crazy.
- So what's the value that you find having our own people, our own Indigenous people patrolling this neighbourhood? I mean, beyond the empowerment that comes from it, I mean, I think that there's we can connect better with the people that we're encountering because we're all the same.
You know, these are my cousins that I'm talking to on a daily basis when I'm out here.
Family members.
It's the taking back of the control over our own circumstances.
It's vital to the growth that we're experiencing here as a community.
Not waiting for somebody else to fix us.
We'll fix ourselves.
GITZ: Larry Morrisette grew up in the North End, and has spent his life advocating for the people who live there.
Along with James, he is also one of the co-founders of the Bear Clan Patrol.
This is where you grew up? Before these developments were built, it was all slums, like really bad housing.
And we lived there, and we moved from there out of there when they evicted everybody.
And then when they built these, we moved back into here.
So we started creating community, and we tried to create community outside the development site.
But people viewed us as being, you know, poor people.
So what happened was eventually the rest of the neighbourhood started cutting us off, and we became a community within a community.
And we would only hang out with people from the developments, we'd only hang out in certain areas, and we became isolated.
This whole end of town is, you know, pretty at risk, eh? - The train tracks? - Yeah.
What it did is separate people, from one side of the track to the other.
You know, you had your territory, you had your you know, where you belonged, right? And people always talk about the North End and the South End, and about the tracks, and I just see the system of separation.
Basically, what we're looking at is a long history of racism, discrimination within a city.
Where we end up is in certain tracts of the city that are heavily impoverished and oppressed.
There's 80,000 Aboriginal people in this city alone.
And we share a city, but we don't share a community with everyone else.
So do you feel that you've changed because of the system? Oh, we had no choice.
You either stand up and fight it, or you get absorbed in it, and then you fall into the abyss.
I understand you were one of the founders of the school? - Yeah, yup.
- So what's interesting about the school that separates it from anything else? It's the first urban-based Aboriginal school in Canada.
So when we developed the school, all we did is replace European concepts with our own.
Instead of reading 10 European books, you read about 10 Aboriginal authors.
Instead of taking big band, you learn about pow wow drumming or other things that are more relevant to you.
The Children of the Earth School represents a taking back Indigenous culture and teachings that were lost from the days of residential schools.
Larry and I have this history in common, as our parents were also part of the devastating system that tore children from their families in hopes of assimilating them into the dominant culture.
More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend the residential schools that operated from the 1870s until the last one closed down in 1996.
The schools were meant to destroy Indigenous culture, and that legacy still remains.
We're here at the Indian Residential School in Birtle.
It's about three-and-a-half hours northwest of Winnipeg.
Originally created in 1894, and then rebuilt in 1930.
I think of my parents, and their schools.
I feel heavy coming into here.
I fucking hate these places.
They had the idea that they'd bring us here, they would save our souls, they would educate us better.
We'd become these model Canadian citizens and an image of what it is to be Canadian.
A child's drawing.
I remember the stories my mom would tell me about having to sit next to her family and not being able to talk to them, not being able to say hello to her brother at all.
Even though he was still just a couple of desks away from her.
Wanting to say hello but worried that she'd get hit.
And he found like some kind of Play-Doh or something, and he constructed a ring for my mom.
And then as he walked past her, he dropped the ring onto her desk and he just kept walking.
He didn't look at her or anything.
And she kept that ring.
It was the only secret affection they could have for one another.
Just, you know It's like her brother is a couple of steps away.
And then he drank himself to death.
You're supposed to learn in these fucking places.
Like, you're supposed to learn in a classroom.
But all I could see and all I could feel is just programming kids to hate themselves, for no other reason than the fact that they're born with brown skin.
Everything in here was just to destroy us.
They're monuments to colonization.
You know, monuments to ignorance and racism.
The Government of Canada recently apologized to the nation for their program of residential schools.
They also launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to educate the public and document survivor stories.
One of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our collective history.
The commission drew connections between residential schools and today's rates of poverty, domestic violence, as well as the overrepresentation of Native children in the child welfare system.
Canada clearly participated in a period of cultural genocide.
The report also said that while more research is needed, the information points to a devastating link between murdered and missing Aboriginal women and the residential school legacy.
We're here in Portage La Prairie Indian Residential School.
This place was constructed in 1960, and it's been standing for about 100 years.
And today we have some residential school survivors that are gonna be taking us around this place.
Do you remember your first memory here? We had long hair when we first went into the residential school.
Beautiful I had ringlets, really beautiful ringlets.
- But they cut your hair - They cut our hair really short.
As it was going on, I kept asking my sister, "What's an Indian?" 'cause I didn't speak English.
The Canadian government created and helped run the residential school system which was meant to kill the Indian in the child.
After being forced to leave their families, many children suffered horrific abuses such as rape, torture, and even death.
I don't think our parents knew what was happening in those schools.
They didn't know the horrors.
They didn't know the loneliness, you know.
The deprivation of food.
They didn't know any of that.
- And we never talked about it, and - And that wasn't talked about after you went home during the summer.
You didn't talk about the beatings, you didn't talk about the being raped or whatever.
You didn't talk about those things when you went home during the summer, you just didn't.
This is the basement of the residential school.
On this side was where the staff ate.
- What kinds of foods did they have? - They had the best they could get.
They had fruit and salads and all this Just the best.
But different story for the residents.
We were used to rabbit, deer meat, and stuff like that.
And here it was like the white man's food.
Did you guys ever refuse to eat? - Yes, we did.
- Oh yeah.
I sat beside a young girl one time, when she was throwing up because it was really lumpy porridge, and then they'd they'd hit us like this, real hard and we had to eat our we still had to eat our our our vomit.
You didn't get There's a part of me that thinks, like, it would be easier to just forget all this, and just like burn this place down, you know? There's been schools that have been burned down where the whole community have actually burned down the schools because of the memories of their schools.
But our chief, at the time, decided we can do something with this building.
We can provide healing ceremonies for our people here.
To be able to go through these places and talk about these memories, does it provide healing for you to be able to do this? Every time, every time, every time it does, yeah.
It lessens the pain.
This is hard for me; my mom went to my mom and dad are both survivors and a lot of the stories that you say, they're echoed even though she's in Alberta.
It's like my mom always talked of loneliness.
There are all kinds of pain in this world, right? There's torture, there's everything.
But they say the greatest pain - is the loneliness.
- Yeah.
To be abandoned, that's what we felt.
The thing that always pops up in my mind when we're here, and this place is here, and they always talk about like people who forget about the past repeat it.
Are you ever afraid that they might do it again? CFS is just another form of residential schools.
Taking children and placing them: same thing.
Do you think that the rates are the same or worse or better? Worse these Yeah, more children in care than ever.
GITZ: I'm at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to meet Cora Morgan, Manitoba's First Nation Advocate for Children in Care.
She's asked to meet me here because she says the museum helped her understand the residential schools were an act of genocide orchestrated by the state.
But Cora tells me that the government practice of separating First Nations children from their parents is not just a thing of the past.
Today, there are more kids in the care of the state than at the height of residential schools.
What are the numbers of kids in care right now? We have over 11,000 here in Manitoba, which is the highest apprehension rate in the world.
Just here in Manitoba.
From one Winnipeg hospital, we have 30 to 40 newborn babies apprehended every month.
What are some of the reasons that these children are taken? If they feel that that mother is living in poverty-like circumstances, if they are previously a ward of CFS, and they're aged out of the system, that is cause.
If there's addiction issues or perceived addiction issues, a newborn baby will be apprehended.
Winnipeg's been the child poverty capital of Canada for several consecutive years.
A single mother on social assistance with a child maybe gets $630 a month.
If that child is apprehended, then a foster placement will get closer to like $1200 to care for that same child.
Are the children who are in care, is that improving their situation? Just this past fall, the Winnipeg Police Service released a stat that in Manitoba 83% of the missing persons were children in CFS care.
We need to paint the picture of the continued institutionalization of our children from residential schools to now.
The very first call that I received from the hospital, the mother's baby was being apprehended because she was formerly in care, and CFS was trying to track her down.
And when they found out she was pregnant, they showed up at the hospital and apprehended the baby from her and her partner.
And so this young couple, they had attended every pre-natal appointment, they had done everything, they had purchased all the things they needed for a baby, they had taken parenting classes, and they were ready for their baby.
And that family, it's been six months, and they still don't have their baby back.
I'm meeting the couple that Cora's been helping since their baby was apprehended by Child and Family Services just hours after birth.
Canadian law doesn't allow us to disclose the family's identity.
I'm joining the parents as they prepare for a supervised visit with their child.
On (Bleep), 2015, (Bleep) gave birth, and four-and-a-half hours later CFS showed up with an apprehension order.
Me and my mother got in contact right away with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs' advocate worker Cora, and they came down and they asked why, and they wouldn't give us a reason why.
And the nurses and doctors tried to talk to CFS and said listen, we don't think this is a case where the child should be apprehended.
But they didn't care, you know.
They have a god complex.
They'll do what they want when they want.
You were in care before? The reason why I put myself in care before I turned 13 was because I was being molested by my uncle at home, right? So I finally was fed up with it, and I said I don't want to live like this anymore.
As much as it was hard to you know like go with my family in a way, like, 'cause I helped take care of my younger brothers 'cause my mom wasn't there.
Anyone that has kids out there, just imagine at any given time them walking into the door and taking your child from you.
- Hi! - Hey! - There's my baby! - Hey, baby! - You see your mommy? - See Mommy? - There's your mommy.
- Mwah, thank you! And how did you guys all meet? - We met at the hospital.
- At the hospital.
They tried to talk to CFS to say that our child should come home with us, and when they still wouldn't listen, that's when they said you need to call Cora.
You know, thank God we did call her because we had no idea what we were in store for.
We still haven't had a proper reason as to why he's been apprehended.
It's like residential schools all over again.
I am a residential school survivor.
Now, it seems exactly the same thing is happening again except it's in a different format, it's a different scenario, but exactly same damages are happening to our children.
Who's taking care of the baby right now? When he was apprehended, he was in CFS care for two days, and then I managed to get him into my home.
I'm fostering.
I couldn't believe that they had a worker waiting for the baby.
You know, I was holding my baby, and he you know, he was taken from me.
- She cried.
- And now I You know, I don't have that bond the way I should with my boy.
Seeing the couple with their son was a painful reminder of what they've lost.
If children are separated at birth and placed with families outside of their own cultures, how will they ever grow up to know who they are? Roughly 90% of children in the care of Manitoba's CFS are Indigenous.
I want to know why, and I'm hoping that former Family Services Minister Kerri Irvin-Ross will be able to give me some answers.
I used to be a child protection worker.
And a compliment that I received many years ago was that I was red spirited.
I have some connection with the Indigenous culture, and I can't explain it.
Manitoba has a high rate of child apprehension, and that specifically these rates are higher within the Indigenous population.
What you see within the child welfare system is a symptom, a symptom of residential schools.
Another thing that I've read was birth alerts.
It just seems that those who have been in care, they have a higher probability of having a child taken.
That could be, but it really isn't based on whether that parent was in care or not.
A child is apprehended because they are in need of protection, and that is an assessment that's done by professionals.
They have what they call structure decision making.
That asks some very direct questions about a family.
Who are their supports, how many children they have, any previous history of domestic violence or addictions, where did they grow up.
Workers use their intuition too.
What's the process for a parent who feels that their child was wrongly apprehended? A number of the children that are in care, they're in care related to poverty issues.
And so it really is very difficult for a family to hire a lawyer because of their economics, or their income or lack of income.
I know that parents feel they have no rights within that within that system the way that it is, but that is the legislation in which we work with.
You made mention earlier of the residential schools and its lasting impacts.
The rationale behind it was always based in good intentions.
Even child apprehensions were based in good intentions.
How do you make sure that what the CFS is doing now is different than what the residential schools were doing before? I know that there's this comparison that happens frequently between residential schools and child welfare, but what's different for me is that there is legislation.
It doesn't mean that it's right, but there is legislation that guides it.
We are not denying people to use their language or their traditions.
Do they always have the opportunity? That's the question, right? When you listen to the survivors of residential schools and you listen to children that have been apprehended, there's very similar emotions.
We have to do better.
GITZ: Residential schools were designed to make Indigenous children disappear.
They have shaped every family they tore apart.
And now many people believe that Child and Family Services, or CFS, is continuing the practice of unjustly removing children from their parents.
With more than 10,000 children currently in the care of the state, a lot of kids are still growing up disconnected from their families and culture.
I'm heading to meet Zach, who lived in seven different foster homes before the age of 8 when he was placed with a couple he now calls his parents.
Growing up, affection wasn't very normal.
- What was it like in foster care? - Pretty confusing, why I was taken away kind of thing.
Because they didn't want to say like my parents are on drugs and hitting each other.
It's not nice, you know? And how old were you then, when they took you? Five years old.
I got a big family.
I've got, like, Virgil, Misty, Sky, then me.
And then Claude, Ben, Dakota, Cheyanne.
Were they all there when you got taken? - Do you remember that day? - Yeah, they just kind of busted the door and started picking up people.
Some of us went to a hotel, some of us went to different foster parents.
I remember just in this one hotel, they didn't really watch me too well because I remember 5 years old or so, walking down the hallways, going outside.
Were you Growing up, like in your teens, did you act out at all? After my sister passed away, I actually ended up robbing some people and totally dealt with my anger in the wrong way.
How old were you when that happened? 17 when my sister passed away.
She was raped.
And Virgil, being her older brother, he actually found the guy and beat him to death.
And then he did 6-and-a-half years in Stoney.
She tried to hang herself, and since the lack of oxygen to her brain kind of kept her alive in a way, but also just not there, we kind of pulled the plug on her, and and so that really - really affected him.
- Losing someone's hard.
Like I've lost a bunch of relatives to suicide.
And it always it fucks you up in the worst way possible.
But like, what is your relationship now with your biological parents? I don't talk at all to my dad.
My mom I haven't talked to for maybe a couple years.
She ran away from residential schools when she was younger.
And unfortunately where she grew up, there was plenty of drugs.
And just surrounding herself in those areas, it's not a surprise that you're going to end up down the same kind of road.
You really have to leave the whole situation and land with some really good people like I did.
I'm across the street from a hotel in downtown Winnipeg, one of many places the Child Family Services used to place kids.
I'm about to meet a former worker of the CFS and show you just really how vulnerable these kids are.
Anybody can walk into a hotel.
Tina Fontaine was living in one of these hotels under the care of CFS just a week before she was found murdered.
Her death helped draw widespread attention to the practices of CFS.
And mounting pressure from the public caused the organization to issue a statement that they would end the use of hotel placements due to safety concerns.
Heather is a former CFS worker whose job was to provide temporary supervision to children in care.
Heather says she was watching youth in this downtown hotel after Manitoba's Child and Family Services publicly pledged to end using hotels to house children.
They're placing kids here at a hotel? - How does that work? - They rented a room for us, I guess, and this was my first time meeting that girl.
And we just stayed in the room.
We watched TV, she wanted to go have a cigarette outside.
Mind you, she was 21 years old, but she was cognitively impaired so she functioned like a 5-year-old.
They told me that she has been known to go AWOL, as they put it, and she has an 11:00 curfew.
If she doesn't come back by that curfew, then you have to file a missing persons report.
So, 10:20, she's getting ready, and as she was digging through her items there, she actually took condoms out of her purse.
And she said she was going to Higgins and Main.
Now, if you're from Winnipeg, you know that Higgins and Main is notorious for sex trade workers, right? And 11:00 rolled around at which point then I just did the standard procedure that they told me to do: call the police and do a missing persons report.
It's a lot to wrap my head around.
Was it just disabled youth, like mentally disabled, or were there kids as well that they were bringing into the hotels? Well, to my understanding, it's all different types of kids.
You know, from infants to teenagers.
And that's like instead of putting them in a house, they brought them here to the hotels.
This area that we're in, it's central Winnipeg, you know.
If they go a few blocks that way, there is johns driving around, there is prostitutes on the corner, there's drug dealers.
It's dangerous to put a vulnerable child in an area such as downtown with minimal supervision, right? When they found Tina Fontaine, knowing that she was in care in a hotel, how did that resonate with you? Well, it takes you back Oh, give me a second.
Well, putting myself in the worker's shoes, for her to go missing and ultimately end up murdered under your supervision, that would be a lot of guilt to carry, right? It's a sad reality that Tina Fontaine's not the only one.
How serious do the police take those reports when it's happening every day? I think what's interesting is that you said you were here recently watching a resident at the hotel.
And after Tina Fontaine, who was in the hotel, they made an announcement saying that practice has stopped.
- Mm-hmm.
- But yet you were here, correct? They coined it as an emergency placement.
So I don't know if that rationalized the fact that they weren't supposed to be doing that, because it's an emergency they had nowhere else to put her.
But I knew we weren't supposed to be doing that.
So my question to you is do you think this process is working? It's obvious that it's not working.
Um As in the case of Tina Fontaine, she was in care, she was being supervised in a hotel.
So it's not working.
GITZ: Tina Fontaine's death captured the nation's attention, igniting demands for a national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women.
The last day Tina was seen alive, she had been in contact with paramedics, a CFS worker and police, who did not take her in, even though she was listed as a missing person.
Many kids in care end up homeless.
Some are forced to work the streets, and we rarely hear about the ones who go missing forever.
Some former sex workers who were trafficked as children have invited me to speak with them as they reflect on their struggles and how they got off the streets.
The majority of, like, people on the streets, do they all have a grooming story? I was exploited at the age of 14, and that was like my first sexual experience, was with a john at the age of 14 years old.
For myself I was sexually abused at the age of 6 in my home community.
I never told anybody, so I was acting out in violence towards my siblings, and my mother put me in the care of Child Family Services at the age of 12.
And therefore I was given two options in my community, which was to stay in my community with foster parents, whom I did not care for, or giving me the option to come to Winnipeg.
One of her last words from my Child and Family Service worker was, "Don't come back to this community," right? And she put me on a Greyhound bus in Portage La Prairie.
There was nobody to receive me on the other end.
And I came off the bus, and lo and behold there was a perpetrator standing there.
So I didn't have a place to go to out here, and that's something my Child and Family Services worker should have done.
So, I went back to Ellis and just stood there and worked, and at the age of 12 was my first hit of crack cocaine.
And the drug use would escalate.
And then one of my friends went missing actually just from that corner right there, Sutherland and Main.
I lost it.
I lost it.
I didn't know what to do.
And then back in 2008, when I started realizing I wanted to sober up, realized that all of these community organizations are making decisions on our behalf without our consent.
Like, I sit and I talk with youth.
You know, one thing that I hear continuously is, you know, how CFS looks at them as a number.
It's just the format of the residential school, and many of my sisters are just the plain example to that.
There's actually a girl getting picked up right now.
That truck just picked her up.
It's hard, it's hard to see that.
'Cause they go like people go missing, women go missing.
That could be one of our sisters gone tonight.
And I understand now what they mean by "sister".
Because when I see these women, that's like your younger sister or your older sister.
And it's scary.
Like where they are is a really scary place, knowing that there's johns lurking these streets looking for these women, looking for these transgender people.
By walking these streets, the Bear Clan's presence has helped to deter johns and predators from trolling the North End.
Made up of community members from all walks of life, many of the Bear Clan's volunteers live in the North End.
Their lives have been directly affected by what goes on here.
I caught up again with James and his daughter, Mandy, who regularly brave the cold and patrol with the clan.
Before this started, did you feel safe? Yeah, before the patrol started I guess it wasn't always I didn't always feel safe in this neighbourhood.
I'd be gonna catch the bus, and like cars would slow down beside me to like see if I was a prostitute or what.
And that just kind of feels unnerving, you know? Cause 'then you know that person is driving around looking for somebody, right? It's not a good feeling.
(Chuckling) I have a son, so when he gets older, I'd like him to be able to play outside and not feel unnerved about it.
As an Indigenous woman, Mandy is up to seven times more likely to die as a result of violence.
This is her daily reality.
Here in the North End, it's not uncommon to see community vigils dedicated to Aboriginal women who have gone missing or have been murdered.
(Chanting) Surreal can't even begin to describe what I feel tonight.
This is the crime scene we had walked by when I was patrolling with the Bear Clan a couple nights ago.
At the time, I didn't know that yellow police tape we saw marked the place where Mavis Ducharme, 39-year-old mother of six, had been murdered, stabbed to death in front of her 10-year-old over an incident that was reportedly drug related.
(Chanting) (Sighing) Yeah.
What are you hoping comes from tonight? From taking this stand and remembering her like this? We got to stand up, try to end the violence on the streets.
It's getting ridiculous.
I want us to be walking down this street, 9:00 at night, safe.
That's all I ask.
We've gotta do something about this, but will we? To be here, what are your thoughts on all of this? (Clearing throat) It doesn't make you feel safe when stuff like this happens, but like when we come together as a community, you feel safe that way.
Like how many more vigils are there gonna be in Winnipeg until something's actually done about it? You can't even feel safe in your own home.
People just walk in your door, and just like that you're gone.
Love you, Mavis! I don't care what you guys said, that was my I had She was always drinking with me.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
(Bottle hissing) Goodbye, Mavis.
(Sobbing) I'm so sorry I wasn't here, Mavis.
(Sobbing) One last drink with you.
Cheers, Mavis, cheers.
(Sobbing) I'm gonna miss you forever, my friend.
(Sobbing) GITZ: All over Winnipeg, I've seen red ribbons fly to remind people of the lives lost.
After the disappearance and death of more than 1200 Indigenous women and girls, the federal government has finally launched a national inquiry.
The national inquiry will focus on the root causes of the disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls.
We need to identify the causes of those disparities and take action now.
It's February 14th, Valentine's Day.
In every major city across Canada, people are taking action, marching to raise awareness for missing and murdered women and girls.
I'm meeting Tasha Spillett along the banks of the Red River, before we join with the Bear Clan and other community members to march.
So where we are right now is like the meeting of the Red River and the Assiniboine River.
And for our people, this place is so important because it's always been a meeting place.
So this is the monument that was built for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Because these stories are unfinished, there's no resolution.
Lots of times there's no justice for families.
This is the place where our community can come, like a physical marker, to be with our relatives.
The curve of the monument, like it takes the shape of a woman, and it's so beautiful.
Bodies have been pulled from the Red River, you know, and our relatives who do drag the Red, like going out in their boats, dragging the bottom of the water to maybe put some closure to some of these stories.
And so because that work isn't being done by the police, the families have taken it upon themselves to do that work.
And then I know in the spring, in the thaw, we'll have that worry.
Like, what are we gonna find in the thaw? - Yeah.
- And that's a reality here.
So when I knew we were going to be coming here today, and like today is Valentine's Day, so I brought an offering to make to this place.
But then also all our relatives who haven't come home yet.
You're offering some berries? Strawberries are medicine for the heart.
And they look like hearts, In Cree, we say miteh mushkeeki, which means heart medicine.
An elder once told me, "You can only know where you're going if you first understand where you've come from.
" It feels as though something here in Winnipeg is shifting.
MITCH: There's something happening in our city right now! And that's the mobilization of people! People are waking up! People are saying no more! No more to family violence! No more to community violence! There are vulnerable people in our community.
And we need to love, protect, and empower.
This is a beautiful event on Valentine's Day.
I wish the whole city would come and join us.
We have men, we have women, and we have children walking together in peace, love and harmony.
People protecting each other.
Love you all, thank you for being here.
The Bear Clan is here to stay! Miigwetch! (Cheering) There's a movement happening here in Winnipeg that is undeniable.
At the centre of it are the people who live here, coming together to rewrite a history marked by racism and genocide.
By showing up for each other every day with love and solidarity, they are building a powerful community of Indigenous people.