Prologue
The following history of Indigenous transracial adoption in Canada interested me on an academic and personal level. While I am an academically trained historian, I am also a Métis adoptee. I carry a strong sense of responsibility to ensure that the history I recount is an ethical, historically accurate rendering that enables scholars, individuals, and communities to understand the historical roots of the Indigenous child welfare crisis in Canada. I have chosen to include a portion of my coming home story in the beginning, as well as at the end of this book. As a Métis academic, I am weaving my âcimisowin together with my historical research and writing.1 I have adopted the approach used by Nêhiýaw/Saulteaux scholar Margaret Kovach and placed important elements of my story in the prologue and the epilogue. As a space for “relational work” Kovach states, “Within Indigenous writing, a prologue structures space for introductions while serving a bridging function for non-Indigenous readers. It is a precursory signal to the careful reader that woven throughout the varied forms of our writing – analytical, reflective, expository – there will be story, for our story is who we are.”2 While it was challenging for me to bring my own experience into my academic work, it was also necessary.3
My adoptive family has always supported me in my search for my biological family, as well as in my academic work. I remember my mother, Helen Lawrence, telling me that I could be whatever I wanted. While neither of my adoptive parents attended university, I was always encouraged and expected to attend. Education was very highly valued by my parents and especially by my grandparents. I feel very privileged to have this opportunity to do work that brings me such satisfaction and often think of my grandmother Barbara Lawrence, the daughter of German immigrants who was forced to leave school in Grade 8 to work cleaning homes to support their large family. My grandparents, parents, and brother Alan are profoundly important to me as I navigate through this work, and through this world. As an adoptee, I am connected to my adoptive family and my biological families in both tangible and intangible ways.
Like many adoptees, for my first nineteen years, I yearned to know where I came from and who I was. I have since discovered that for many Indigenous peoples in Canada, this loss of connection and knowledge is all too common. Maria Campbell shared a teaching she received from elder Peter O’Chiese about the impact of colonization on Indigenous societies. He likened it to a shattered puzzle, with the scattered pieces being histories, teachings, stories, and knowledge. With some stories found in ethnographers notebooks, museums, and archives, she was encouraged to seek out all the places where we might find the pieces in order to put the puzzle back together for future generations. “That’s what happened to our wahkotowin and to our stuff,” he said. “Our kinships, our lives, and our teachings are all over the place.”4 Like these scattered teachings, knowledge of my personal and collective history as a Métis adoptee is scattered through government files, newspaper articles, community history books, and stories told to me. As I put together these pieces, I found that it was important for me to include my own adoption story for two reasons. First, I felt that there are many others like me who may never have the opportunity to speak about or hear experiences of adoption. Second, I wanted to begin integrating my historical training and my Métis background in my work in concrete and innovative ways, historicizing and theorizing a decolonial approach informed by my experience of coming home.
I was born in Saskatoon in 1976 and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan. As an adult, I learned that my biological families both came from Kinistino, Saskatchewan, a small town approximately seventy-five kilometres east of Prince Albert. On my eighteenth birthday I began a search for my biological family by registering for Saskatchewan’s Post-Adoption Registry. My biological mother was interested in meeting me and provided her contact information in the event I should begin a search. In one of my first conversations with my biological mother, she informed me that my biological father had disappeared in 1980. He was the second son in his family of four boys. I found this information to be very devastating, and I mourned for a father I had never met. In 1998 I married Tyler Stevenson and moved from Saskatoon to his family farm near Kinistino in the Rural Municipality of Flett’s Springs. With this move, I came home in ways I did not completely understand until I began this particular research. When I began to investigate the early homestead records and scrip applications of my ancestors for my genealogical research, I discovered that our farm includes land that my Métis ancestors homesteaded at the turn of the century. My husband, Tyler Stevenson, and his father farmed the Fidler field on the NE quarter section 2-44-21 W2, since the mid-1940s. This quarter section was first homesteaded by my great-great-great-grandparents James Edward Fidler and Sarah Ann Swain in 1903.5
When I met my families of origin for the first time in 1996 at the age of 20, I had had no knowledge of my original family. As part of the closed adoption practice of the 1970s, all identifying information was sealed, and children were issued a new birth certificate with their adoptive parents’ names. Non-identifying information was provided for adoptive parents to share with children at the “appropriate time.” While this was not shared with me until I was in my mid-twenties, throughout my childhood my adoptive parents explained to me was that my biological mother was young and unmarried and not able to care for me in the way she wished. While this is a profound oversimplification of a deeply complex and individual experience, their explanation was supported by the adoption documents I have since seen and my biological mother’s rendering of her experience. In the non-identifying information packet provided to my adoptive parents, my mother is described in glowing terms, and my father is briefly mentioned as a twenty-year-old young man of Irish descent who was very attractive, with average to above-average intelligence. It continued to state that while they had been in a relationship for about a year and a half, they did not want to continue their relationship.6 My father’s background as a twenty-six-year old English-Métis was erased from the non-identifying information. Without my biological father’s story, I have tried to fill these gaps through my research. Like many adoption stories, mine is both strikingly common yet also deeply personal.
“Coming home” is grounded in my lived experience as a Métis adoptee affected by the child welfare system, both as an adoptee and later as a foster child, seen through the lens of critical Indigenous methodologies to illuminate historic Métis experiences of erasure and what I call insistence. As an adoptee it was necessary to piece together my kinship relationships through witnessing the Métis migration, replacing and dispersal, using official archival records that were often created in order to manage and racialize Indigenous peoples. I have come to know, through my own genealogical reconstruction and historical research, how my ancestors have engaged in this struggle to remain connected to each other and to the lands in each of their respective time periods. By searching for my own story, and by re-establishing my family connections, I simultaneously tapped into a sense of Métis historical consciousness. I am contributing to this resistance/insistence through utilizing historical reconstruction to resist the settler colonial sundering of my kinship connections, land connections, and Métis identity, and insist upon reclaiming my Métis identity and place on the land.
Themes of exile and coming home figure prominently in Indigenous storytelling. Métis writer and artist Gregory Scofield’s Thunder through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood articulates his experiences growing up without knowledge of his Métis ancestry or understanding of Métis history. In his chapter “Pekwew, Pekewe (Come Home, Come Home)” Scofield recalls his first encounter with Métis culture and history at Back to Batoche Days. After his challenging childhood and youth in British Columbia, he finally found a place where he felt he belonged. He recalled, “As we left Batoche I felt my heart sink into the very landscape, my spirit joining those of my ancestors in the empty ravines and coulees. I had searched so long for a place of belonging, and now I had found it…. Never again would I search for a place of belonging. This place, Batoche, would always be ‘home,’ my home.”7 Neal McLeod devotes a chapter in Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times to Indigenous experiences of spatial and spiritual exile, as well as interrogating the meaning and significance of coming home for Indigenous peoples. He argues that removal of people from their lands, and either confined to reserves, removed to colonies, or displaced to cities is a form of spatial exile. Spiritual exile is the consequence of disrupting transmission of Indigenous languages, songs, and stories. Indigenous people, through the colonization, removal to residential schools, as well as fostering in alien environments hostile to Indigenous peoples, experience both.8
As a Métis adoptee, coming home is an ongoing process and not a destination. It can be experienced in a singular moment, as well as through an evolving sense of groundedness in place, family, and community. My earliest experience of coming home occurred on the first Christmas I spent with my biological father’s family. There, at my aunt and uncle’s house, a homemade quilt waited for me under the Christmas tree. My great-grandmother made each of her grandsons a quilt that they received on their wedding day. Since my father never married and disappeared in 1980, the quilt was passed on to me once I returned home. This quilt, which my family uses each summer on the beach to bring us all together, has deep meaning for me and connects me to my father and his family in a very loving and tangible way. Because I did not have the opportunity to meet my father, grandfather, or great-grandmother, the scraps of material, gathered over time, lovingly stitched together by my great-grandmother’s hands, provides a connection through time and space.
Through this writing I have also experienced the process of coming home as I delved further into the policies and legislation that structured adoption in the mid-twentieth century. It was my intention to make legible the invisible decisions that determined my life and the lives of so many others. With increased attention to the fallout of the Sixties Scoop, I hope that this work will be useful for those seeking the history of Indigenous child welfare in Canada.