‘I feel like this job is my thanks’

In the months before Andy Nieman’s new job even existed, the position was the subject of criticism and disappointment from many.

In the months before Andy Nieman’s new job even existed, the position was the subject of criticism and disappointment from many.

Last year, first nations leaders were angry that the territory’s new Child and Family Services Act was created without their input.

The act mandated the government to create another piece of legislation, the Child and Family Advocate Act, which was passed in April 2009 and which garnered the same complaints about a lack of proper consultation.

Earlier this year, former Ta’an Kwachan Council chief Ruth Massie put it bluntly: “Seventy per cent of the children in care are first nations. We should have had a strong voice in the creation of this legislation. We did not.”

The act and the position it created met with further scorn from opposition MLAs when it was tabled in the legislature. Liberal Leader Arthur Mitchell tried to amend the act to give the advocate the power to launch independent investigations, but was voted down by the government majority.

“There are 10 members on that side of the house. Who will speak for the children?” Mitchell railed at the close of debate.

“Not one – not even to stand up and say ‘No, we disagree (with the amendments), and these are the reasons. Silence. Shameful silence.”

But in spite of all these vociferous criticisms, Nieman, who was sworn into the position last Friday, is enthusiastic and optimistic about his new job.

“Legislators are saying the advocate doesn’t have any teeth, it doesn’t have any power, but there’s power in knowledge, there’s power in teaching,” he told the Star this week.

And he isn’t particularly worried about what politicians think of him; the people he is interested in are the ones he is charged with advocating for. And their trust will have to be earned.

“My real power is going to come with my ability to resolve a conflict. Once they see that I am at arm’s-length from the government, that I’m not coming with the government agenda, that I’m coming with the child’s best interest at heart, then I am doing my job.”

Nieman is no stranger to difficult positions. Born in Whitehorse, the 47-year-old man is the son of a Northern Tutchone woman and a Dutch-German trapper.

Because Nieman’s father’s work took him out of the city for much of the year, Nieman and his eight siblings were raised primarily by their mother, an alcoholic.

“I come from a fairly rough childhood,” Nieman says simply.

Although his mother lost her Indian status when she married a non-native, Nieman was eventually sent to residential school anyway. At the age of 10, he was taken to Lower Post, B.C.

“I came through all kinds of abuse there,” he says of his time at the school. “And that basically set a pattern for my life.”

At 16, Nieman dropped out and graduated to a life on the streets of Vancouver. He got hooked on alcohol, cocaine and heroin. He stole and he panhandled to feed his addictions.

“Basically, I lived on the avails of crime for 10 years,” he says.

When Nieman was in his mid-twenties, his mother found God. She began praying for him, he recalls, and urged him to pray himself, to ask God for help in repairing his life. She asked others to pray for her son as well.

One of those people prayed that Nieman wouldn’t be able to enjoy drugs anymore. The day after he heard of this particular request to God, Nieman was in his room with a couple hits of cocaine and a bag of pot.

He began preparing himself a syringe, dissolving the cocaine so he could inject it. But his hand shook, and the mixture spilled into the wooden floor of his single room.

“I was so angry,” he recalls.

“There was no way I could get it back – it was gone. I fixed myself another syringe and a put it in my arm, but I was so angry about losing the first one, I couldn’t even feel it.”

So he rolled himself a joint and smoked it.

“I didn’t get stoned; I couldn’t.”

So Nieman made a pact with a God he hardly believed in.

“I told God if he got me a bed in detox, then I would believe in him. If there was no bed, then I would know he didn’t exist.”

Nieman was setting himself up. He knew there would be no bed. There never was; the detox centre down the street from him was always full.

That night, Nieman tossed and turned as his body began to go into withdrawal. First thing in the morning, he walked the block to the detox centre and knocked on the door.

“The guy opened the door and I asked him about a bed. He said, ‘Boy are you ever lucky; someone just left. We’ve got one bed open.’

“I never looked back.”

In the 16 years since knocking on that door, Nieman finished high school and earned his social work degree. God has remained an integral part of his life, and he is ordained as a minister of the United Pentecostal Church International.

“No matter what life has thrown at you as a child, no matter what pain you have experienced, you can go on to succeed,” Nieman says of his own experience.

In talking about his new job and the issues he will encounter, the effects of residential schools come high on the list.

“Most Canadians don’t know what really went on there,” he says of the abuses doled out to first nations children in the church- and state-run schools.

“They may know that kids were sent to live at these schools, but they don’t have any idea of the horrific things that were done to them.”

And although the current generation of elementary and high school students didn’t directly experience the physical, sexual, and psychological abuses that happened there, they are still affected by them.

Sexual and physical abuses get passed down from one generation to the next. Alcoholism and drug abuse are taught in the home. Old wounds bleed silence into the younger generation.

“Some people won’t touch their children because they are afraid of what it might bring out in them,” he says of the less obvious problems he sees.

“They just give them gifts – whatever they ask for – and so you have these kids who get whatever material thing they want, but they are never hugged and told, ‘I love you.’ They are never disciplined except to hear, ‘Don’t do that. I told you not to do that.’”

This silence has touched Nieman too. After three years working as a therapist at the Kwanlin Dun First Nation’s community wellness program, another three as an outreach worker with Yukon child abuse treatment services and three more as a private therapist, he says he has rarely been thanked for his work.

“There’s a part of me that thinks I don’t need the thanks,” he says. “But part of me really wants it. I feel like this job is my thanks.”

Speaking about the work he sees himself doing as child and youth advocate, Nieman says he sees young people suffering from what he calls the crab-pot syndrome.

“When you tell someone over and over that they are dirty and stupid and will never amount to anything, they start to believe it,” Nieman says of the way children were treated in the residential school system.

“Now you see the effect of that in first nations communities. When someone starts to succeed, everyone else tries to drag them back down into the pot.

“I see it in our youth. That’s why our grad rates are so low. When someone starts to succeed, they’re going against what they’ve been taught to believe about themselves.”

Changing that habit will be an integral part of dealing with the high crime and dropout rates amongst first nation youth, Nieman said.

“The first nations have a lot of expectations, but I have a lot of expectations of them as well,” he says.

“This position is not the answer to every child welfare issue there is. People who think I will be able to single-handedly hold the government responsible have to realize that advocacy works both ways. Parents and communities must be there as well.

“We may wrestle with each other’s points of view, we may wrestle with each other’s philosophies, but as long as we keep the children’s welfare as our number one priority, then we can really help the child we’re dealing with.”