Population: Eighteen female homeless youth, over eighteen years of age and beginning to transition out of homelessness, were recruited through a snowball sampling process involving contacts with service agencies and other homeless youth already involved in the study.

Methods: A longitudinal and qualitative design was followed in this study. Data was collected by conducting interviews. The initial interviews focused on background and experience both before and after entering the street environment; later interviews were organized around themes developed from earlier focus groups regarding the homeless experience in Edmonton and on updates on current life concerns. The interviews were flexible and responsive to what the young women thought was important for the researchers to know or wished to talk about on that day. This article is one of two reporting on a separate analysis of the data involving the nine Aboriginal study participants. The authors were looking for issues in the experience of these youth which would improve understanding, assisting, and planning services for this particular population.

Findings: The findings of the overall study were reported in three earlier articles (LaBoucane-Benson, Ruttan, and Munro, 2009; Munro, LaBoucane-Benson, and Ruttan, 2007; Munro et al., 2008). In this article, the focus is on the strongest themes emerging from the interviews with the Aboriginal participants.

Removal: The Impact of Residential Schools: All the Aboriginal participants involved in this study had family members who attended residential schools. All participants witnessed family violence and substance abuse by adult family members which they frequently attributed to this background. Several young women indicated that they or their mothers had not been believed by their relatives when they told them they had been abused. Six of the participants spoke extensively about the impact of residential schools on their own lives. Based on their own words, the perceptions of these young women regarding the experience and impact of residential schools on their families can be summarized as follows:

The missionaries came to Aboriginal families and said that the children needed education and would not amount to anything if they did not get help and promised to return their children nice and educated. They sometimes even stole the kids and then didn’t let their parents see them. They were not allowed to speak their language or speak to their brothers or cousins; they had their hair cut short and they were told that they were dirty and disgusting. They were taught that their culture was wrong. Some of their parents were culturally oppressed not just by schools but by their own parents who had been to these schools before. Their relatives don’t share their feelings very often. So there are certain things they won’t discuss with them. Discussing residential schools at all is a really touchy, controversial subject. They never talk about it and if they do say anything it is usually short and something like “Yeah, it sucked.” Their relatives were abused and they were told that the abuse was a form of love. The abuse within families started once the children were returned from residential school because they were told that abuse was love and this was transferred to the next generation. This can lead to sexual and other abuse in the next generation. Women [mothers, grandmothers, aunties] who went to residential school often had hard lives. They often experienced substance abuse and addiction. Family members who went to residential schools tend to be more strict, even harsh, in disciplining children, they have high expectations about rules and keeping things just right in the house, they have problems with anger and rage and tend to take things out on or scapegoat some children in the family more than others.

Removal: Relations with Child Welfare and Social Service Programs: The child welfare system was one of the major reported stressors in their lives, both as children and as parents. Child welfare programs and workers have often been experienced as a life-long haunting or shadow.

Participants with children expressed fear of what would happen if they didn’t do exactly what social workers or police told them to. While some participants were helped as parents by social workers, most had not, or only infrequently, and didn’t trust them. Several participants found it frustrating that government social and housing agencies would only help them to transition from the streets when they were pregnant, despite seeking help earlier. A number of participants mentioned that, in contrast, they did look forward to involvement in parenting and support programs offered by community agencies; programs with an Aboriginal focus were particularly seen as helpful.

Re-turning: A Cultural Path: Most of these nine young women knew little about their family background; they said that as teenagers they knew little about Aboriginal history and culture and that they never knew the stories of their mothers and grandmothers. All the parents but one wanted their children to grow up stronger culturally than they had. Looking for ways to transition out of homelessness, many of these young women enjoyed returning to these activities, now identified as aspects of culture with potential as part of a “healing path.”. The participants stressed the importance of being on a healing journey, especially in connection with the anger they carried from their families and finding ways to put that hurt behind them.

Conclusion: Limitations to this research exist. The interviewers were not Aboriginal. Additional research would be valuable, including work with the mothers and grandmothers of indigenous homeless youth. Further, homelessness is experienced by youth of varying backgrounds; most Aboriginal young women do not end up on the streets, not all whose families were affected by residential schools and other social and historical factors become homeless. Further research that addresses what makes the difference is needed.

In conclusion, this research found that the homeless young women were interviewed had family backgrounds that included residential schools and child welfare contact and that they were hungry for cultural knowledge both for their own personal development and in order to teach their children. The process of colonization, by disempowering, is the source of historical trauma. Learning the interconnection of history and future, spirituality, and life course activated their resilience as Aboriginal peoples. Storied identity remains important to Aboriginal youth. These young women do best in programs that emphasize narratives of pride and identity in reconnecting past, present, and future. Health promoting narratives must be reinforced in Aboriginal community-based prevention and healing programs.