ROADBLOCK NO. 13: NO PLAN FOR YOUTH

How often have we heard our Chiefs and Councillors publicly state that youth are our future leaders? Yet they do very little to help them become leaders. This is not a criticism of any one Chief or Councillor. As leaders, we have all been guilty of saying these words during community functions involving youth, whether it is a high school graduation, a sporting event, a conference, or an employment orientation for summer students.

The list of challenges youth today face is daunting:

alcohol and drug abuse

early pregnancies

dropping out of school

engaging in common-law relationships while under the age of eighteen

unemployment

homelessness

violence and gangs

suicide

loss of culture and language

no plans for them in their communities

inadequate child protection (sexual and physical abuse)

bullying in schools and in the community, and cyberbullying

no parental support because parents are also lost

missing Indigenous children and youth

All of these problems are serious and deserve attention, but the ones I want to stress here, the ones I see as helping youth help themselves, are education and employment. The truth is, most Indigenous communities don’t provide any of their own funding to support employment and training programs for their community’s youth. Most of them depend on funding provided by Indigenous Services Canada and Human Resources Development Canada to create student employment and training services. But the funding provided by the federal government is limited and is never enough to accommodate all the needs of youth.

For example, in my community from 2007 to 2010, I was the Siksika Employment Manager and then became the Chief of Siksika Nation. We averaged approximately 300 students who applied for summer employment each year over the four-year period. The federal government provided funding to hire approximately 60 students per year, so the funding covered only 20 percent of the students who applied. Rather than going back to the federal government and asking for additional funding support, I met with our treasury department’s Chief Financial Officer and negotiated funding to hire all the students who applied for summer jobs. From 2007 to 2010, we employed approximately 300 students each year, with a record high of 320 students in 2010, my last year as Chief. We wanted to make sure that none of the students—aged fourteen to twenty-five—were left out.

The point I am making here is that our leaders today need to place more emphasis on the youth of their communities. They need to invest in young people so they become strong, healthy adults who at some point will take over as the community’s Chiefs, Councillors, board members, senior managers, employees, and business owners. As long as our leaders do not engage students in long-term planning to support their career endeavours, we will continue to witness many of our young people falling to the wayside, and many will turn to alcohol, drugs, and crime to cope with their life’s pressures and stresses. The bottom line is that we are not doing enough for our youth today to help them to become healthy, contributing members of society.

YOUTH REALLY ARE OUR FUTURE

How we address the needs of our youth will make or break the future of our communities because our communities are young. Statistics Canada’s 2011 Aboriginal People’s Fact Sheet notes that close to half (46%) of Indigenous people in Canada were under the age of twenty-five, compared with 30 percent of the non-Indigenous population. More than half of Inuit (54%) were in this age group, as were 49 percent of First Nations people (52 percent of those living on-reserve and 47 percent living off-reserve) and 41 percent of Métis. All three groups were younger (average 32.1 years) than the non-Indigenous population, whose average age was 40.9.

According to the Financial Post in 2018, one in four Canadians considered part of Generation X (37 to 52 years of age) have saved nothing for retirement. The Financial Post also noted that one in four millennials (18 to 36 years of age) still live with their parents. Because of the widespread high unemployment rates and overcrowding on reserves, the retirement success rates for First Nations people doesn’t look promising, nor do the economic prospects of First Nations youth.

THE HOUSING CRISIS DRAIN

Most First Nations communities use the majority of their own-source revenues to bridge their community’s social gaps in housing, education, health, and family services. For example, the challenge facing many First Nations communities today is building enough houses to address the needs of their community’s homeless families. In Siksika Nation, the senior manager of Siksika Housing says that approximately 400 families are on the department’s waiting list for a home as of July 2019. In most communities, the priorities of the leadership are based on the needs of their people. In Siksika, this means that rather than investing monies in the community’s youth, the community focuses on building houses.

This is a reality facing Chiefs and Councillors across Canada. There is a constant struggle of trying to balance the needs of their communities. First Nations leaders have become expert social workers because they are constantly bridging the social gaps, leaving little time and resources to plan for the future. They are reactive instead of proactive. This results in the perpetuation of poverty within their communities and leaving no plans for youth and their future.

HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT

Of course, youth are not the only ones to suffer from unemployment; all Indigenous people face higher-than-average unemployment rates. Surveys have found that a major reason for the high employment is the level of educational attainment of individual Indigenous people. For this reason alone, First Nations need to make education a priority for their youth; the youth need support so they can reach their educational goals. This will result in many positive outcomes, including growing a pool of qualified people to take over their community’s leadership roles and responsibilities. Youth are not the only segment of the Indigenous population to experience high unemployment, but they are the segment that most impacts the future of communities.

Indigenous leaders need to take a hard look at their community’s youth and the social issues that impact their lives. We cannot afford to lose another generation of people impacted by the intergenerational trauma of the Indian residential schools. We need to invest in our youth today so that as we become the Elders within our communities, we will have healthy leaders looking after the well-being of our people and communities. Just like our ancestors in precontact times who practiced a philosophy of reciprocity in which everyone helped everyone in the community, we need to do the same by incorporating long-term strategies that will develop our youth into strong and healthy leaders for tomorrow.