Pearl Lorentzen
For South Peace News
Although many of the victims of human trafficking in Canada are Indigenous, until recently Indigenous organizations weren’t connected with the Alberta anti-human trafficking network.
Early this year that changed.
Marlene Orr is the CEO of Native Counselling Services of Alberta (NCSA), which has supported Indigenous people in Alberta in the court system and in other ways for 50 years.
From January to April 2024, Native Counselling led a team which did community engagement with Indigenous people in Slave Lake, Peace River and across Alberta to get a better sense of how human trafficking affected Indigenous communities. This work was put into a report called Indigenous Environmental Scan: Human Trafficking in Alberta.
“According to recent research, Indigenous people make up nearly 50 per cent of human trafficking victims in Canada,” the report reads.
Native Counselling was joined on the team by #NotInMyCity (out of Calgary) and REACH Edmonton Council for Safer Communities. These two organizations focus on combating human trafficking.
Alberta’s anti-human trafficking network had very little Indigenous involvement, Orr says. Before the engagement started, only two Indigenous individuals were part of the network. By the end of the engagement, over 70 Indigenous people had joined the network.
Orr says the engagement showed “our communities knew and were experiencing human trafficking, but didn’t use that language.”
The report
The Native Counselling, Reach and #NotInMyCity team helped the Government of Alberta establish the Alberta Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons (AOCTIP).
The report describes itself as “a collaborative process focused on gathering guidance from Indigenous individuals to better understand their needs to fund human trafficking responses in Indigenous communities across the province.”
This study found that funds to combat human trafficking in Alberta Indigenous communities should focus on three areas: “culturally-aware and trauma-informed services, public awareness and education, and organizational development and training.”
“Our people want Indigenous groups to be funded to work with Indigenous survivors, and that key to helping survivors was Indigenous cultural practices and ways of knowing and being,.” Orr says.
“We truly hope this new organization will respect that,” she adds.
Work has to be culturally specific, Orr says, because the Blackfoot, Cree, and Dene have different cultural practices.
As a result, funds should go toward equipping each community “to work with their own people in their own way.”
The report included province-wide surveys and eight full-day, in-person community engagement sessions, from January to April 2024. The in-person engagement sessions were in Slave Lake, Peace River, Grande Prairie, St. Paul, Fort McMurray, Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge. The report was published in May 2024.
“In some areas the turnout was higher than in others,” says Orr.
“What was surprising was Fort McMurray; the turnout was very low.”
It appeared that community members were afraid to talk about the subject, says Orr, but the handful of experts who attended confirmed that the oilfield camps had a human trafficking problem.
“We also heard that in Grande Prairie,” she adds, “although the turnout was much higher.”
With the history of colonialism in Alberta, Orr says, “our people have always been trafficked for sex and labour. Everywhere we went sex trafficking looked a little different … In some communities, it was very highly organized … In every community, it was very clear we have a problem.
“We learned that no matter what community we were in people don’t trust police,” says Orr, including how the police were likely to respond to human trafficking victims.
The path forward
Research into human trafficking will be taken over by the Alberta Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons, but Native Counselling is still involved in a few ways. Native Counselling is training all levels of staff to recognize human trafficking victims.
“There isn’t a program we have that hasn’t identified survivors and helped them escape the situation they are in,” says Orr.
In Slave Lake, High Prairie, and Peace River, Native Counselling has staff to help Indigenous people navigate the court system, with both criminal and family court matters. In the cities, it has more services.
Native Counselling is also working on education resources for Indigenous people.
“We also discussed the resource material,” says Orr.
“Indigenous people had no connection with it. There wasn’t an Indigenous perspective.”
An Indigenous consultation firm called Four Winds & Associates facilitated the community engagement and analysis.
The survey had 145 individual responses, says the report, representing people from 50 First Nations, Métis districts and settlements, and Indigenous organizations from 40 locations in Alberta. Of the respondents, 12.5 per cent were urban and 87.5 per cent rural.
“I’m hopeful,” says Orr. “I think it would be very useful if this type of engagement happened in two years.”