A Quebec court judge has issued a scathing decision identifying major long-standing problems in youth protection services for Inuit children in Quebec’s North, in a case where a teenage girl was sent to 64 different foster homes in less than 10 years.

For most of that time, the teen was placed in foster homes and rehabilitation centres in the South because of a shortage of services in the North.

In a decision April 24, Quebec Court Judge Peggy Warolin ruled the teen — who can’t be identified due to youth protection laws — “was thus deprived of her right to the preservation of her cultural identity.”

“The child had been so cut off from her culture that she found herself in a very advanced process of assimilation,” Warolin said.