Introduction
Saskatchewan/Kisiskâciwan is the heart of Canada’s colonial enterprise. Kisiskâciwan is a Cree term for “it flows fast” and also the name of the river Kisiskâciwani-sîpiy that bisects the contemporary province.1 The north and south branches join at the forks, east of the city of Prince Albert, flowing north-easterly through Cumberland House and into Manitoba. The Cree people call North America “Iyiniwi-ministik” (the People’s Island), and elders say that First Nations have been on this land from time immemorial. First Nations elders in Saskatchewan explain that they were placed here by the Creator.2 Archaeological evidence of human habitation from sites around the province date back 11,000 years.3 European interest in the region first emerged in the late seventeenth century, and in the years that followed French, British, and Canadian fur traders sought Cree, Assiniboine, and Dene furs for European markets. These interactions between European men and Indigenous women in the north-western interior led to the ethnogenesis of a unique people that culminated in the birth a new nation, the Métis, who developed a unique Indigenous culture, language, and political identity rooted in a storied landscape.
The legacies and practices of settler colonialism resonate uniquely in Saskatchewan, and, from its earliest days, Indigenous elimination in Canada has been rendered most violently here.4 It is out of this particular history, of this particular place, that the policies of removing Indigenous children in the second half of the twentieth century are situated.5 In the unilateral application of child welfare laws to First Nations and Métis peoples in Canada, a multitude of well-meaning and not so well-meaning Canadians developed a consensus on Indigenous suffering. In doing so, social workers and social scientists in the post-war period diagnosed the enacting of Indigenous familial roles and responsibilities and the material deprivations derived from the multiplying effects of colonization as a lack of adjustment to Euro-Canadian middle-class norms. However, in their new drive for legitimacy as secular saviours, social workers, social scientists, and politicians employed the logic that had long animated state-based approaches to solving the “Indian problem”: the removal of Indigenous children from the influence of their families, communities, and cultures.
Beginning in the 1950s, First Nations and Métis peoples across Canada experienced an increase in interventions by child protection workers who apprehended Indigenous children and placed them in foster and adoptive homes for their purported protection. The abrupt and seemingly dramatic increase in apprehensions and adoptions by the 1960s has led to this complex set of logics being called “the Sixties Scoop.” The term originated in a passage found in Patrick Johnston’s Native Children and the Child Welfare System, who attributed the over-representation of Indigenous children in the child welfare system to the ethnocentrism of individual social workers. A former B.C. social worker reflecting on her time working in an Indigenous community “admitted that the provincial social workers would, quite literally, scoop children from reserves on the slightest pretext. She also made it clear, however, that she and her colleagues sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the children. They felt that the apprehension of Indian children from reserves would save them from the effects of crushing poverty, unsanitary health conditions, poor housing and malnutrition, which were facts of life on many reserves.”6
On one hand, this quotation points to the benevolent intent of individual social workers who sought to rescue children from the devastating material conditions they faced, but were unable to acknowledge the historical factors that led to those conditions. Indeed, placing the focus on frontline social workers obscures the larger legal and political history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. This settler colonial intrusion into the intimate realm of Indigenous families not only failed to produce the intended outcome of assimilated individualized non-Indians, but rather compounded loss and suffering that it purported to alleviate. Benevolent justifications to enact the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples through removing children is the bleeding heart of settler colonialism.7
In Saskatchewan, First Nations and Métis elders, leaders, and communities did not remain silent in the face of these threats to the integrity of Indigenous nations. For Indigenous women, the historic colonial experience has had a distinctly gendered component. As such, some women have developed a politics of decolonization that takes into account the historic and gendered effects of colonization.8 Initially First Nations and Métis women sought to work interdependently with government to care for families and children facing hardship. The Saskatchewan Native Women’s Movement (SNWM) was a radical grassroots Indigenous women’s group that worked to organize women and create Indigenous solutions to poverty and family breakdown. SNWM emerged as Saskatchewan’s most vocal opponent of Indigenous child removal and transracial adoption, and worked to create Indigenous solutions for Indigenous families. They proposed an Indigenous feminist approach to address the impact of colonization in the lives of First Nations and Métis women in Saskatchewan. For example, they became involved in providing education and support to teen mothers to support their children, and they opened the first Native-run day care centre in downtown Regina in 1973. Their voices are an important alternative to the dominance of experts who were constructing the “problem of Indian child welfare” in the 1980s.9
However, in time, both Métis and First Nations peoples sought to create separate Indigenous systems of caring that better reflected the needs of families and communities affected by colonization and living in a society that regarded Indigenous culture and peoples as inferior. The provincial First Nations’ political organization, the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN), crafted “Taking Control of Indian Child Welfare” and lobbied to end Indigenous transracial adoption. Indigenous peoples argued that when children were removed, adopted, and renamed by Euro-Canadian families, kinship systems, stories, and language transmission were interrupted. Compounding these losses has been the Euro-Canadian cultural justifications that further marginalized Indigenous peoples as poor parents, further feeding negative stereotypes of the lazy Indian, the drunken Indian, the dissolute squaw, and the backwardness of elders. The Sixties Scoop continues as the “Millennium Scoop,” and the logics that animated the scoop persist.10
Maria Campbell, Saskatchewan Métis author of the ground-breaking autobiography Halfbreed, published stories told to her by Métis and First Nations elders. Stories of the Road Allowance People contains oral histories of meaningful, poignant, and sometimes funny Métis stories. One provides a useful starting place to reflect on the ways in which removing children from their families and communities has had lasting impacts on Indigenous peoples individually and collectively:
Excerpt from “Jacob”
Sometimes me / I tink dats dah reason why we have such a hard time / us peoples. / Our roots dey gets broken so many times. / Hees hard to be strong you know / when you don got far to look back for help.
Dah whitemans / he can look back for thousands of years / cause him / he write everyting down. / But us peoples / we use the membering / an we pass it on by telling stories an singing songs. / Sometimes we even dance dah membering. / But all dis trouble you know / he start after we get dah new names / he come a new language an a new way of living. / Once a long time ago / I could’ave told you dah story of granfawder Kannap / an all his peoples but no more. / All I can tell you now is bout Jim Boy / an hees story hees not very ole.
Well my granmudder Mistupuch / he never gets a whitemans name an him / he knowed lots of stories / Dat ole lady / he even knowed dah songs. / He always use to tell me / one bout an ole man call Jacob.
Dat ole man you know / he don live too far from here. / Well hees gone now / but dis story he was about him when he was alive. Jacob him / he gets one of dem new names when dey put him in dah / residential school. / He was jus a small boy when he go / an he don come home for twelve years.
Twelve years! / dats a long time to be gone from your peoples. / He can come home you know / cause dah school he was danm near two hundred miles / away. / His mommy an Daddy dey can go an see him / cause deres no roads in dem days / an dah Indians dey don gots many horses / ’specially to travel dat far. …
Well Jacob him / he stay in dat school all dem years an when he come / home he was a man. / While he was gone / his Mommy an Daddy dey die so he gots nobody. / An on top of dat / nobody knowed him cause he gots a new name. / My Granmudder / he say dat ole man he have a hell of a time. / No body he can understand dat / unless he happen to him.
Dem peoples dat go away to dem schools / an come back you know dey really suffer. / No matter how many stories we tell / we’ll never be able to tell what dem schools dey done to dah peoples / an all dere relations.
Well anyways / Jacob he was jus plain pitiful. / He can talk his own language. / He don know how to live in dah bush. / It’s a good ting da peoples dey was kine / cause dey help him dah very bes dey can. / Well a couple of summers later / he meet dis girl / an dey gets married.11
Jacob and his wife had a son, adopted two daughters, and lived a good life together. One day the priest arrived at the reserve to take the children of the community to the residential school. There was great sorrow among the community, and Jacob demanded that the children remain. The priest insisted that the children must attend and reminded Jacob that he received a good education at the school. Jacob replied, “Yes I go to dah school / an dats why I don wan my kids to go. / All dere is in dat place is suffering.”12 The priest responded that Jesus suffered, and so must everyone else. Jacob further stated that Jesus knew his mother and his father, and he didn’t have to lose his language and leave his home. He even told the priest that he didn’t even know his own name since he’d been given the Christian name Jacob at the residential school. “‘Your Dad hees Indian name was Awchak’ dah prees he say / ‘I tink dat means Star in your language.’ / He never gets a new name cause he never become a Christian.”13 Once the priest told Jacob his name, his wife left in tears. She had discovered that they were brother and sister, since her father was Awchak also. Jacob later discovered that his wife had committed suicide.
Jacob he say / dah ole womans / dey stay wit him for a long time / an dey sing healing songs and dey try to help him / but he say he can feel nutting. Maybe if he did / he would have done dah same ting.
For many years Jacob was like dat / just dead inside.14
One day, once his children were grown, his daughter returned home with his granddaughter.
Jacob he say / he look at dat lil baby / an he start to cry an he can stop. / he cry for himself an his wife / an den he cry for his Mommy and his Daddy. / When he was done / he sing dah healing songs dah ole woman / dey sing to him a long time ago.
Well you know / Jacob he die when he was an ole ole man. / An all hees life / he write in a big book / dah Indian names of all had Mommies an Daddies. / An beside dem / he write dah old names and dah new names of all dere kids.
An for dah res of hees life / he fight dah government to build schools on the / reservation. / “The good God he wouldn of make babies come / from Mommies an Daddies,” / he use to say, / “if he didn wan dem to stay home / an learn dere language / an dere Indian ways.”
You know / dat ole man was right. / Nobody he can do dat. / Take all dah babies away. Hees jus not right. / Long time ago / dah ole peoples dey use to do dah naming / an dey do dah teaching too. / If dah parents dey have troubles / den dah aunties an dah uncles / or somebody in had family / he held out til dah parents dey gets dere life work / out. / But no one / no one / he ever take dah babies away from dere peoples.
Saskatchewan continues to “take dah babies away from dere peoples,” as do provincial and First Nations child-caring agencies across Canada. Statistics point to high numbers of children who live out of their homes, cared for by substitutes paid by provinces or First Nations Child and Family Service Agencies. In Saskatchewan, Indigenous children make up over 80 per cent of children in the care of the Ministry of Social Services, one of the highest rates in Canada. Meanwhile, Indigenous children make up 25 per cent of the total child population. Next door, 90 per cent of children in care in Manitoba are Indigenous.15 Scholars have found that the over-representation of Indigenous children due to child neglect is rooted in factors that include poverty, poor housing, domestic violence, and substance abuse.16 In addition, the federal government has underfunded on-reserve child and family service agencies for decades. In 2016 the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found the government of Canada in violation of the Canadian Human Rights Act for failing to provide the same rates of funding for on-reserve child and family services as provinces provide for off-reserve families and children in need. The impact of the decades-long funding gap led to children being removed from their family homes and communities, living indefinitely in foster care – an outcome that mirrors the disgraced residential schools system of years past.17 Recently the federal minister of Indigenous services, Jane Philpott, characterized this over-representation as a national “humanitarian crisis” and vowed to devote increased resources to prevent apprehensions of Indigenous children.18
While long recognized as problematic by First Nations and Métis peoples, among non-Indigenous Canadians, academic attention turned to Indigenous over-representation in child welfare systems across Canada in 1983. Patrick Johnston’s Native Children and the Child Welfare System revealed that the proportion of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous children in the child welfare system was the highest of all the provinces. First Nations and Métis children made up approximately 63 per cent of all children in the care of social services.19 By comparison, Native children made up 42 per cent of child welfare cases in Alberta, and 50 per cent in Manitoba.20 Almost twenty-five years later, little progress had been made. In 2007, Saskatchewan’s Child Welfare Review Panel released For the Good of Our Children and Youth: A New Vision, A New Direction. The report revealed that numbers of Indigenous children in care rapidly escalated between 2000 and 2009 from 2,470 to 4,382.21 Contributing to the increasing number of children living outside their family homes were poverty and the historic relations between Indigenous peoples and the state. One significant historical contributor in particular was the past practice of Indigenous transracial adoption, now called “the Sixties Scoop.”22
The Child Welfare Review Panel voiced concerns similar to those of social workers and bureaucrats in the early 1960s. The 2007 report determined that part of the reason for the rapid increase in numbers of children was workers’ inability to plan for “permanent” homes for Indigenous children. The broken trust between Indigenous peoples as a result of the Sixties Scoop and transracial adoption policies had culminated in a political and social work climate that saw transracial adoption as untenable. In 1963 a lack of public interest in adopting non-white children drove a campaign to expand adoption for children in care. In an annual meeting of the federal Canadian Welfare Council, provincial child welfare directors discussed the adoption problems they experienced and the need to expand the public’s notion of “adoptability.”23 Directors from the western provinces with larger Indian and Métis populations spoke of the high numbers of Indigenous children in their care and sought to work together to “solve what is a national problem of finding homes for Indian, Métis and Negroes, and other children who are difficult to adopt because of physical handicaps.”24 Saskatchewan’s Director of Child Welfare, Mildred Battel, lamented, “It’s always much easier to find homes for fair-haired, blue-eyed babies…. [I]t’s the mixed-race children that represent the hard, unadoptable group.” She felt that “the answer must be found in a reflection of public opinion.” Alberta’s welfare director suggested that advertising was an “expensive but efficient means to dispel old wives tales about adoption.”25 In 1965, twenty Indigenous children were adopted into white homes in Saskatchewan, but that was but a small fraction of potential adoptees, since over one-third of children in permanent care were Indigenous.26
The problem of placing Indigenous children was transferred to the Saskatchewan public when in 1967, under the direction of Frank Dornstauder, the Department of Social Welfare piloted the project Adopt Indian and Métis, later known as Aim. The idea was to educate Saskatchewan families – through radio, television, and guest speaker appearances at clubs and churches across the province – that Indigenous children were in need of permanent adoptive homes and families. Adopt Indian and Métis stimulated transracial adoption in Saskatchewan. It was the only targeted Indigenous transracial adoption program in Canada. The “Sixties Scoop” – taking Indigenous Canadian children out of their communities and placing them for adoption in non-Indigenous homes – lasted well into the next decade, with the social work field pushing transracial adoption as an ideal solution to the problem of increasing numbers of children leaving the care of their parents and communities.27
Saskatchewan’s review of the Family Services Act (1973) in the second half of 1983 was part of a country-wide movement to address problems that beset provincial governments providing child welfare services to Indigenous peoples and to bring legislation in line with the cultural and legal changes that had taken place over the past decade.28 The Saskatchewan public review offered an explanation and presented recommendations to address the high proportion of Indigenous children in care and the lack of preventative care for families. These explanations didn’t satisfy Indigenous leaders or activists who had sought full control and recognition of their rights to determine the futures of their children. It also provided a public forum to air grievances, as well as raise awareness about these issues in the greater community. In the decade since the Métis Society and the Native Women’s Movement first articulated a challenge to the child removal logic of the Department of Social Services, Indigenous peoples in North America had grown increasingly vocal in protesting the government policies that led to the breakdown of the Indian family, whether for education or protection. Beginning with decolonization movements in both Canada and the United States, control of the provision of child and family services to Indigenous children occupied a central position in discussions of self-determination. Ending transracial adoption symbolized ending the unequal and unilateral policies of integration that had emerged in the years following the Second World War.
Disruption and dispossession figure prominently in the colonization of Indigenous kinship. The main argument of this book concerns the centrality of Indigenous kinship, (wáhkôhtowin in Cree), not only for a sense of family relationships, but as the organizing principle from which Indigenous identity and political sovereignty emerge, hence the ongoing effort to eliminate this essential configuration. Neal McLeod explains that “kinship, wáhkôhtowin, grounds the collective narrative memory within nêhiyâwiwin (Cree language). There are important relationships not only among human beings, but also with the rest of creation… [W]áhkôhtowin keeps narrative memory grounded and embedded within an individual’s life stories. It also grounds the transmission of Cree narrative memory; people tell stories to other people who are part of the stories and assume the moral responsibility to remember.”29 Respected Indigenous legal scholar James Youngblood Henderson argues that Indigenous kinship forms a critical pillar for Indigenous legal orders. “The First Nations law of the relationship (wáhkôhtowin) embraces general concepts of nationhood, society, culture and communities. The law is not entertained as ideals of doctrines, but as relationship or attitudes that generate particular behaviours, as a spirit or mentality, which establishes its central beliefs and unifying teachings.”30 At the outset of this research on Indigenous transracial adoption, it was important to situate the policy history within an Indigenous framework rooted in local understandings of kinship, and attend to local Indigenous expressions of political engagement in resisting child removal.
This study began with three key avenues of inquiry for analysis of historic Indigenous transracial adoption policies in Saskatchewan. First, I sought to explore the relationship between historic federal and provincial First Nations and Métis policies and the emergence of Indigenous transracial adoption when viewed through the lenses of gender and race. Second, I examined the intersection of racial, gender, and social hierarchies in the 1960s through the 1980s in Saskatchewan as it pertained to child removal and transracial adoption. Finally, I explored Indigenous interactions with child welfare authorities and perceptions of transracial adoption.
This book responds to these three avenues by excavating the cultural and legal origins of Indigenous transracial adoption and key theoretical and historical issues of race, kinship, gender, and family in Indigenous and non-Indigenous societies. Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical framework and historical context with which to understand the particular logic of Indigenous transracial adoption in the Canadian context. Chapter 2 provides an ethnohistory of adoption and kinship in Indigenous societies. By examining cases of Indigenous adoptions in the pre-war period, this book argues that Indigenous people attempted to utilize the Euro-Canadian legal system to validate Indigenous family-making and adoption. The indigenizing of the child welfare law with its potential for expanding Indian nationhood and sovereignty came to abrupt halt in 1951 with the revisions to the Indian Act, which made reserves subject to provincial law and adoption of non-Indian children by Indians untenable. Chapter 3 explores Saskatchewan’s provincial policies surrounding Métis rehabilitation, gender, and child welfare legislation with an eye towards locating the origins of Indigenous over-representation in the system between 1944 and 1965. Chapter 4 provides a case study of the CCF Métis policies and the operation of the Green Lake Children’s home. Chapter 5 traces the conflicts between federal law and provincial law surrounding the legal status of illegitimate Indian children from 1951 to 1973, and the outcome of the jurisdictional disputes. It illustrates the rise of professional social workers who sought to adjust “problematic” Indigenous families and communities. Chapter 6 centres on the creation of Adopt Indian and Métis in 1967 in Saskatchewan, and incorporates voices of Indigenous adoptees. It also highlights the use of compelling images of individual Indigenous children in print and televised media first used in the American Indian Adoption Project (IAP), then later in Saskatchewan’s Adopt Indian and Métis program, that enabled non-Aboriginal people to consider adopting an Indigenous child or children. The lineage of using emotional renderings of children had its origins in the child rescue movement of Britain that was embraced by the early adoption reformers in Canada and the United States. Such advertisements appealed to the public by drawing on emotional and heart-rending tropes of child rescue.31 Chapter 7 explains the emergence of local Indigenous resistance to Indigenous transracial adoption by the Saskatchewan Métis Society, followed by the Saskatchewan Native Women’s Movement. Chapter 8 then evaluates the North American Native American and Indigenous movements for self-determination and the restoration of Indigenous family caring. It also historicizes the role of social scientists and local activists joining forces to critique the logic of Indigenous child removal. It draws together historical and theoretical insights into gender, kinship, and citizenship to explore the politicized discourses around child welfare in the 1980s that led First Nations and Métis leaders to characterize transracial adoption as a form of genocide.