Bringing youth back to the land

Charles Fox and Meladina Hardy-Fox plan to open a group home for eight to 12-year-old Aboriginal children in a Thunder Bay heritage building this coming August.
“Dilico (Anishinabek Family Care) has already confirmed that they are going to send some kids here,” Fox said.
The group home will feature the development of relationship building skills and land-based skills for up to eight children.
“They can learn to create some healthy attachments and then they can develop healthy relationships as they get older,” Hardy-Fox said. “But we’re also looking at having an ECE on staff, early childhood care, to help with their numeracy, their literacy, their comprehension, all those kinds of skills.”
The land-based component of the group home will involve hunting, trapping and fishing out of another home the couple owns in Fort William First Nation.
“We’ll take them back to the land, basically, and teach them all those skills, survival skills in the wilderness whether it’s water or on land,” Fox said. “If they get lost, how to find their way. How to survive in the bush, summer or winter, how to prepare fish, how to prepare game, how to prepare hides.”
Fox witnessed how good it is for youth to go out on the land during the school year while boarding Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC) students in the heritage building.
“We took them out to the reserve on the four-wheelers to go hunting and they really enjoyed that,” Fox said.
Hardy-Fox said the opportunity to go out on the land “made a difference” for the NNEC students.
“A big change happened when Charles would take three or four boys for a hunting trip,” Hardy-Fox said. “Just driving for the day to go hunting and come back. And that’s when they started to let their guard down and start sharing.”
Hardy-Fox said the land-based programming is the big attraction for the childcare agencies.
Fox modeled the land-based programming on his own youth, when his family took him out on the land after he came back from residential school.
“They deprogrammed me and reprogrammed me,” Fox said. “I was a wreck when I got back from residential school. I left when I was about eight years old and didn’t get back home until I was about 20.”
Fox is looking to help children who have been bounced around from foster home to foster home.
“We want to give a grounding; we want to give them a sense of identity,” Fox said. “We just want to teach them all those things, the seven grandfather teachings.”
Fox said the identification of any mental issues the children may have is also a goal.
“All the clinical and those kinds of invasive therapies will be done at the rez so that here (at the heritage building) they can just have comfort, secure and sleeping,” Hardy-Fox said.
Plans include a number of full-time staff in the future once the group home is fully operational.
“Even when we’re here, we’ll have to try to get some night staff so there’ll be someone watching them,” Hardy-Fox said. “We plan to stay here on the third floor for the first while.”
The couple began restoring the heritage building in 2008 to bring it up to code for a group home, which includes fire doors and multiple egress points on each floor.
“It’s over a hundred years old,” Fox said. “It’s a nice old house.”
To keep the original ambiance of the heritage home, Fox and Hardy-Fox covered over a stain glass window above a passageway with plexiglass to provide a safe environment for the children while preserving a piece of history.
Hardy-Fox said the renovations took a long time because every change to the building’s exterior had to go through a heritage committee.