Nunavut Indigenous still hampered by ‘Eurocentric’ family law: lawyer

Law360 Canada (July 23, 2025, 1:40 PM EDT) -- Indigenous people caught in Nunavut’s family law system continue to face child welfare challenges due to a conflict between their need for community-based solutions and the justice system’s “westernized” notions of what constitutes family.

So says Ontario lawyer Andrea Clarke, who recently hosted an online lecture for the Law Society of Nunavut. Clarke, who is licensed to practice in the northern territory, spoke with Law360 Canada not long after delivering her recent talk, which detailed legal issues with family law in Nunavut.

Nunavut has a massive Indigenous population. According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous people accounted for 85.8 per cent of Nunavut’s overall population in 2021. Of those, 98.3 per cent identified as Inuit.

Clarke said the notion of family for Indigenous people is a wider concept than that of the western standpoint. In terms of child welfare, the Indigenous view of family extends beyond bloodline. In this case, community members could be considered family.

This disconnect between the two concepts becomes an issue in interpreting applicable legislation.

“Part of the challenge is all the legislation that we have is Eurocentric, so we look at it from the perspective of a westernized view of what a … nuclear family looks like,” said Clarke, a sole practitioner. “When you’re dealing with different cultures — in this case Indigenous families — their family set-up, traditionally or historically, has been very different, and in some ways, it’s similar to families from the West Indies or the Caribbean islands, where there’s a lot of support in terms of community support. There’s a lot of reliance on extended family members, so very different from what a typical westernized, Eurocentric and nuclear family looks like.”

The Indigenous notion of family, Clarke said, places emphasis on “connectedness and kinship”; it values “collectivism, as opposed to the western view, which places a higher value on the independent individual.”

The application of legislation does not place adequate weight on “collective” child-rearing, she said.

“Interestingly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] called upon Canada to engage in a process of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, particularly looking at the child welfare system, [and] that was one of their specific calls to action.”

The TRC calls to action one through five deal with revamping Canada’s child welfare system. For one, the commission called on the federal, provincial and territorial governments to commit to reducing the number of Indigenous kids in state care by, among other things, keeping them with their families when it is safe to do so, and keeping them in “culturally appropriate environments, regardless of where they reside.”

A recent report from Canada’s government examined the experiences of Indigenous families in the family justice system. At one point, it talks of challenges faced by Indigenous families in remote northern locations — challenges including a lack of “culturally responsive legal services,” limited legal services and facilities, and insufficient “ancillary support” such as mediation programs, social workers and shelters.

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