Care Providers of Indigenous Children and Youth in the Child Welfare System: A Scoping Review

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ABSTRACTIndigenous children continue to be significantly over‐represented in child welfare systems in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. This scoping review represents a subset of a larger review, the objective of which was to consolidate the extant literature on Indigenous child welfare. The results from the broader review were categorized into 10 different subtopics, of which care provider experiences, the topic of this article, is just one. This review summarizes research pertaining to foster parents and kinship caregivers of Indigenous children within the child welfare system. Key findings included caregivers' financial challenges, rewards of fostering, barriers to providing Indigenous cultural and relational connections, barriers to recruiting Indigenous foster parents and mistrust of the child welfare system. Recommendations emphasized Indigenous‐run programmes, education and training for service workers and recruiting foster families willing to maintain youth connections to family and culture. This review further identifies a small but growing collection of Indigenous‐led or co‐authored scholarship that is bringing more balance and knowledge to a topic still dominated by Western research models and biases.