Six Innu youth from Natuashish, Labrador, died between 2015 and 2021. All of them had been in the child protection system. Five were sent out of province for care. This spring, after years of testimony, a public inquiry delivered its conclusion: every one of those deaths was "systemic, predictable and preventable."
The Innu child protection inquiry wrapped its final formal hearings in April 2026, documenting 12 systemic failures behind the deaths — cultural dislocation, language loss, reactive removal, governance breakdowns. In Manitoba, where 9,172 children remain in care and 91% of them are Indigenous, those findings aren’t a distant headline. They’re a mirror.
What Investigators Found — and What They Named
The inquiry was established in 2022 to investigate why six young people died after the system meant to protect them had been involved in their lives. The answer, according to APTN News, was structural: "colonial legacies, current inequities, service gaps, cultural dislocation, and governance failures."
The pattern was consistent across all six cases. Children were removed during crises instead of families being supported before they reached a breaking point. Once removed, they were placed in English-only environments — sometimes hundreds of kilometres from home — where they lost fluency in Innu-aimun and contact with their communities. When they eventually returned, there were no reintegration plans.
The death investigations presented at the inquiry identified 12 systemic failings — not as isolated mistakes, but as features of a system designed without the communities it was meant to serve. Out-of-province placements that severed family ties. Care environments with no cultural programming. Agencies with chronic staff shortages and little understanding of life in Innu communities.
Commissioner Anastasia Qupee described a fundamental disconnect. The province "didn’t understand who Innu people were," she told CBC — officials had limited knowledge of Innu communities and the compounding weight of intergenerational trauma on families already under state surveillance.
Innu families who testified drew a sharper line. According to IndigiNews, witness after witness described the child welfare system as a continuation of residential school policy — removal, cultural erasure, family separation. The mechanism changed. The outcome didn’t.
For anyone trying to understand how child welfare works in Manitoba — as a young person, family member, or community ally — our guide to CFS in Manitoba explains the system’s structure and the rights that exist within it.
Fewer Removals, More Surveillance
The inquiry’s data revealed a paradox. According to CBC, Innu child removals dropped 82% between 2018 and 2025 — a dramatic decline that should signal progress. But investigation rates moved in the opposite direction. In 2018-19, Innu families were 2.08 times more likely than non-Indigenous families to face a child protection investigation. By 2024-25, that disparity had widened to 2.87 times.
Fewer children are being taken from their families, which matters. But more families are being investigated, scrutinized, and documented by a system that still treats Indigenous family life as inherently suspicious. The apparatus of state surveillance hasn’t shrunk. It’s producing different paperwork.
It’s a dynamic Manitoba knows well. The province has invested in prevention — keeping 480 families together through early-intervention programs. But the overall count of children in care still went up.
Manitoba’s Version of the Same Story
In 2024-25, Manitoba’s number of children in care rose to 9,172 — a 3% increase and the first rise since 2016-17. According to CBC Manitoba, children’s advocate Sherry Gott called the number "unacceptably high" and said the system continues to uphold "the status quo."
Ninety-one percent of those 9,172 children are Indigenous — in a province where Indigenous children make up roughly a quarter of the child population. The overrepresentation isn’t a gap in the system. It is the system.
The failures the Labrador inquiry catalogued — cultural dislocation, out-of-community placements, language loss, removal instead of prevention — are the same issues Manitoba’s child advocate has been raising for years. The provinces are 3,000 kilometres apart. The problems are identical.
But Manitoba is also building something different. In May 2024, the province signed a historic declaration committing to transfer child welfare jurisdiction to First Nations. Seventeen communities are now pursuing coordination agreements under Bill C-92, the federal legislation affirming Indigenous communities’ inherent right to govern their own child and family services. Peguis First Nation has already begun taking control. The shift is underway — though as Ontario’s $8.5-billion settlement has shown, the funding question remains wide open.
Social workers and CFS staff navigating referrals for youth in transition can review the professionals page to learn how New Steps supports young people moving toward independence.
A Blueprint Written in Hard Lessons
The Innu communities of Labrador and Manitoba’s First Nations are pursuing the same answer to the same problem: Indigenous-led child welfare, governed by the communities the children come from. The inquiry’s 12 findings aren’t just a post-mortem of what went wrong. They’re a checklist for what the new systems must get right.
Keep children in their communities. Fund prevention before crisis. Deliver services in Indigenous languages. Build Indigenous-led oversight into the foundation of every new structure — not as a consultation exercise bolted on after the architecture is set.
Those aren’t abstract principles. The inquiry heard what happens when they’re ignored — children who couldn’t communicate with their caregivers, youth who returned home to communities where they no longer recognized family members, families who were never offered a single preventive service before their children were apprehended.
The inquiry’s final report is due September 30, 2026. When it arrives, it will carry the full weight of four years of testimony. But after the last week of formal hearings — after six death investigation reports, after families described losing their children to a system they compared to residential schools — the commissioners offered one word to describe what they took from all of it: hope.
That hope has to be built into something. On Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, programs like New Steps work with young people aging out of the child welfare system — connecting them to housing, life skills, and cultural programming. The system hasn’t caught up yet. Until it does, the work happens one person at a time. Reach out if you or someone you know could use that support.
