28    
  Spring/Summer 2026
I am doing everything I can to 
help give Indigenous people more 
power, more access, more support, so 
that we can relentlessly move forward 
and make better change.
- Dawn Maracle
 CHILD WELFARE
The result is a system that too often treats 
poverty and housing insecurity as family 
failure, rather than policy failure. It asks 
Indigenous parents to prove stability 
inside conditions Canada helped create.
Maracle points to Cindy Blackstock and 
the First Nations Child & Family Caring 
Society as examples of advocacy that has 
forced Canada to answer for the treatment 
of First Nations children and families. 
“She’s one of my heroes,” she says. “She 
is phenomenal.”
But those victories also reveal a familiar 
pattern: governments promise repair, 
then spend years resisting accountability.
“Despite politicians like Trudeau saying, 
‘I’m an ally. I’m gonna address these 
issues,’ even though they lose at the 
tribunal stage, they keep fighting it, and 
appealing and appealing and appealing,” 
she says. “They say they’re going to fix it. 
But then they’re actually spending more 
money fighting it than they would spend 
just fixing it, which is a waste in society.”
Still, Maracle’s story is not about what 
failed her – it is also about what held her. 
As a young person, she found refuge in 
movement, sport, dance and public space. 
She was an athlete, a dancer and a reader. 
She remembers the YMCA as somewhere 
she could shower and spend time during 
the day.
“Libraries were my other haven,” she says. 
“The library was the place where we could 
go and discover the world and breathe, 
but always be safe.”
Today, Maracle serves on the Indigenous 
Advisory Council for Toronto Public 
Library, in addition to her role as director 
of Indigenous affairs and engagement at 
TO Live. “I am doing everything I can to 
help give Indigenous people more power, 
more access, more support, so that we can 
relentlessly move forward and make better 
change,” she says.
The housing crisis still asks Indigenous 
women and families to carry too much. 
Child welfare systems still too often arrive 
where housing supports should have 
been. But relentlessness, for Maracle, 
has always been collective. Responsibility 
belongs to everyone.
“We don’t achieve success on our own; 
we need each other,” she says. “Who’s 
the government? We’re the govern-
ment. Who can make the government 
change? We, the people, make the 
government change.”
Maracle was houseless at 15, but her sense 
of home was rooted in people, territory, 
history and future. Today, at 53, her work 
is not only about surviving the systems that 
failed her. It is about changing them – so 
Indigenous women, children and families 
have support before crisis, safety within it 
and always a way home.  •
The Newfoundland Aboriginal Women’s Network
of supporting & empowering Indigenous women 
& their families.
www.nawn-nf.com
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