How to Keep Your Children Connected to Culture While They Are in Foster Care

Cultural connection does not have to stop when a child enters care. As a parent, your visits are protected time for language, story, ceremony, and relationship. And you have the legal right to advocate for a placement that actively supports your child's cultural identity, not just tolerates it.

The separation that comes with a child welfare removal is painful. The cultural disconnection that can follow is a second injury that is slower and harder to see. It is also preventable.

What you can do during every visit

Your visits with your child are your most direct tool for cultural continuity. Use them deliberately:

Speak your language. Even a few words per visit maintains connection and models that the language is alive and valued. If your child is forgetting words, keep speaking. Bring a grandparent who speaks fluently if you can.

Tell family stories. Stories about your parents and grandparents, about your nation’s history, about the land — these are the connective tissue of identity. A child who hears these stories regularly knows who they are.

Bring food. Traditional food is cultural knowledge. Preparing and sharing it together during visits is relationship and teaching at the same time.

Pray, smudge, or bring ceremony into the visit space. If the visit location allows it, make ceremony part of every visit. If it does not allow it, request a different location or request that visits happen in a community setting.

Connect your child to extended family. Request that grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins be included in visits when possible. Relationships with extended kin are part of cultural identity and part of your reunification case.

What you can advocate for from outside the home

Beyond your visits, you have the right to advocate for how the placement is managing your child’s cultural life.

Write to your MCFD worker asking what specific steps the provider is taking to support your child’s cultural continuity. Ask about language programming. Ask about ceremony access. Ask whether an Elder has been involved with your child since the placement began.

If the answers are unsatisfactory, raise them with your lawyer. Under Bill C-92, cultural continuity is not a bonus — it is a legal standard that providers are required to meet.

Ask for a cultural support worker

Request that your child be assigned an Indigenous cultural support worker or liaison who can facilitate cultural activities, connect with Elders, and ensure the placement is meeting its obligations. This position exists in many MCFD offices.

What IFISC measures on this

IFISC Pillar 5 holds certified providers to a standard where language retention, ceremony access, and intergenerational relationships are active requirements — not aspirations. A provider that has earned certification has demonstrated this to Indigenous knowledge holders.

Ask whether your child’s provider is IFISC certified. If not, you have the right to ask why and to advocate for a certified alternative. Contact us at [email protected] or visit ifisc.org/resources/.

If you are an Indigenous family navigating child welfare in BC and need peer support, contact KFT-Families Society at [email protected], call Lori at 604-512-3266, or visit keeping-families-together.com. IFISC operates weekly peer support circles, connects families with culturally grounded resources, and provides guidance to parents at every stage of the child welfare process — at no cost.