New research has uncovered yet anther link between the residential school system and the abundance of Indigenous youth in care.
Performed at the University of British Columbia, Brittany Barker’s work features data collected between 2011 and 2016.
Barker, who is a postdoctoral fellow with the BC Centre on Substance Abuse, surveyed 675 Vancouver residents over that time.
Each of the participants were 35 or under and self-reported drug users, 40 percent of whome identified as Indigenous.
In her research, Barker found that roughly two thirds of Indigenous participants had at least one parent or grandparent who attended a residential school.
Those put them at more than double the odds of Indigenous participants with no immediate family exposure.
Barker says that more research is still required, but it lends more fuel to an argument already made for decades among Indigenous communities.
