The Sixties Scoop (), also known as The Scoop, refers to a series of policies which were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up", Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families.
Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.Walker, Connie. 2018 March 20. "Saskatchewan's Adopt Indian Métis program ." Finding Cleo. CBC Radio. It is estimated that a total of 20,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and fostered or adopted out primarily to white middle-class families.
Each province had different foster programs and adoption policies; Saskatchewan had the only targeted indigenous transracial adoption program, the Adopt Indian Métis (AIM) Program. The term "Sixties Scoop" itself was coined in the early 1980s by social workers in the British Columbia Department of Social Welfare to describe their own department's practice of child apprehension.
The phrase first appears in print in a 1983 report commissioned by the Canadian Council on Social Development, titled "Native Children and the Child Welfare System", in which researcher Patrick Johnston noted the source for the term and adopted its usage. It is similar to the term "Baby Scoop Era," which refers to the period from the late 1950s to the 1980s in which large numbers of children were taken from unmarried mothers for adoption.
The government policies that led to the Sixties Scoop were discontinued in the mid-1980s, after Ontario chiefs had passed resolutions against them, and a Manitoba judicial inquiry had harshly condemned them. Associate Chief Judge Edwin C. Kimelman headed the Manitoba inquiry, which resulted in the publication of "No quiet place / Review Committee on Indian and Metis Adoptions and Placements", better known as the "Kimelman Report".
Multiple lawsuits have since been filed in Canada by former wards of the Sixties Scoop, including a series of class-action lawsuits launched in five provinces, such as the one filed in British Columbia in 2011. Beaverhouse First Nation Chief Marcia Brown Martel was the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit filed in Ontario in 2009. On 14 February 2017, Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba ruled that the government was liable for the harm caused by the Sixties Scoop; and on 6 October 2017, an $800-million settlement was announced for the Martel case.
As Métis and non-status First Nations people are currently excluded from the agreement, National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network—a group led by Sixties Scoop survivors based in Ottawa—has advocated for the settlement to be rejected unless it includes all Indigenous people who were taken from their homes and forcibly adopted.
History Background: Residential schools and the expansion of child welfare The residential school system in Canada was inspired by the Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds by Nicholas Flood Davin in 1879. This report was a survey conducted by Davin in the United States following their respective Indian residential school system. Davin thought that the Indian adult was unable to be assimilated into Euro-Canadian society, placing emphasis on the child generation.
The beginning of the Sixties Scoop coincided with Indigenous families dealing with the fall-out of the residential school project which had negative results on their social, economic, and living conditions. Residential schools eventually lost popularity in favor of assimilating indigenous children into provincial schools with the goal of integration of these children into Euro-Canadian civilization. This would lead to the beginning of the closure of residential schools in 1948 - a process which wouldn’t be complete until 1996 when the last school closed. Canada's residential school system was implemented by the federal government and administered by various churches.
Its purpose was to remove Aboriginal children from their homes and reserves, so they could teach them Euro-Canadian and Christian values. The policies forbade the children from speaking their own languages, contacting their family, or from acknowledging their culture in any way. Despite the collective efforts of Indigenous people connecting and writing their history, the government considered their oral history as biased or unreliable.
Survivors of the residential schools have come forward and spoken out about physical, spiritual, sexual, and psychological abuse that they experienced at the hand of the residential school staff. The lasting cultural impact on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit families and communities has been widespread and extensive.
The Sixties Scoop was an era in Canadian child welfare between the late 1950s to the early 1980s, in which the child welfare system removed Indigenous children from their families and communities in large numbers and placed them in non-Indigenous foster homes or adoptive families, institutions, and residential schools. The Sixties Scoop was further precipitated by the introduction of child welfare services on reserves where social workers argued that Indigenous children were not offered equal services on reserves as non-Indigenous children through provincial social services.
Policies During the Sixties Scoop, children were forcibly apprehended from their Native land and community for an extended period of time, often without knowledge or consent from their families or tribes. Siblings were often intentionally sent to different regions in order to eliminate any form of communication with their families. Residential schools pushed for the transitioning of culture from children by feeding them information that aligns with their policies, as it would "kill the Indian in the child." These children were not allowed to know of their real nationality, history, or family.
When a child wanted to know their cultural identity, they would have to receive consent from their biological parents. Since the government made sure there was no connection between the children and their biological family, they were never able to actually open their birth records. Thus, the children suspected their cultural heritage, but were unable to confirm or deny it with any evidence.
Increase in apprehensions The Canadian government started to close the compulsory residential school system in the 1950s and the 1960s, but the government authorities thought that Aboriginal children would benefit from a better education in the public school system.
By every indicator, health, employment, income, education, and housing left Indigenous people, far from being assimilated, were still separate and second-class citizens. The social, economic, and political outcome with the political assumption that poverty was growing from Indigenous culture, but it was the discrimination and displacement that placed them in these positions.
According to one summary:
This transition to provincial services led to a 1951 [Indian Act] amendment that enabled the Province to provide services to Aboriginal people where none existed federally. Child protection was one of these areas. In 1951, twenty-nine Aboriginal children were in provincial care in British Columbia; by 1964, that number was 1,466. Aboriginal children, who had comprised only 1 percent of all children in care, came to make up just over 34 percent.
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a component of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, was mandated to document the experiences of Indigenous children in residential schools and to share the truth of survivors, families, communities, and others affected with all Canadians. According to the TRC Commission's final report, published in 2015:
By the end of the 1970s, the transfer of children from residential schools was nearly complete in Southern Canada, and the impact of the Sixties Scoop was in evidence across the country.
Resistance First Nations consistently fought to resist these policies in a variety of ways, including the courts (Natural Parents v. Superintendent of Child Welfare, 1976, 60 D.L.R. 3 rd 148 S.C.C) and with their own policies, such the Spallumcheen Indian Band's individual by-law to organize its own child welfare program, with varying degrees of success. Resistance by parents and students did not change the overall pattern of persistent abuse. Any act of defiance may have placed students in unfavorable positions of treatment. Still, thousands of children were always within the policies and conditions that remained to define the forced civilization.
First Nations communities responded to the loss of their children and the resulting cultural genocide by repatriating children whose adoptions failed and working to regain control over child welfare practices related to their children, which started in 1973 with the Blackfoot (Siksika) child welfare agreement in Alberta. There are about 125 First Nations Child and Family Service Agencies across Canada, but they operate through a patchwork of agreements that give them authority from the provincial government to provide services and funding from the federal government.
Adopt Indian Métis program Funded by the Canadian and Saskatchewan governments, the Adopt Indian Métis (AIM) was a program that was started to promote the adoption of First Nations children by middle-class white families in 1967. The project was started by Otto Driedger, who later become Director of Child Welfare for Saskatchewan, and Frank Dornstauder. AIM was the only targeted Indigenous transracial adoption program in Canada.
CBC News produced a television segment about the AIM after the project's first year, in May 1968. It showed several Indian and Métis children playing as the reporter, Craig Oliver, told viewers that they represented only a few of the hundreds of First Nations children ages six weeks to six years who are in need of homes. He stated that there has been an increase in the number of children from these communities who are up for adoption because of the rise in illegitimate births and marriage breakdowns among Indian and Métis people. The government had been taking in nearly 200 children each year as wards of the state and was having difficulty finding permanent homes for them. The news report portrayed the AIM program as a solution to the problem and focused on its quantifiable results by placing 100 children, including several family groups of children, in its first year.
When CBC News ran the segment, all of the children remained with their adoptive families. The program advertised the availability of the Indian and the Métis children for adoption by a marketing campaign with radio, television, and newspaper advertising. The large photographs of these children that ran in provincial newspapers with the AIM advertisements were said to be the most effective aspect of its outreach to prospective families. The program also promised fast adoptions, with completion of the process within as few as 10 weeks.
The original AIM program ran through 1969 and resulted in an increased interest in transracial adoptions. The focus of the program was broadened in 1970 to include all children, but it continued to over-represent First Nations children given the high number that were taken into custody by social workers in Saskatchewan. For example, in 1969, Indian and Métis people represented only 7.5% of the population of Saskatchewan, but their children accounted for 41.9% of all children in foster homes in the province.