Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop in Saskatchewan and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship

1 The Bleeding Heart of Settler Colonialism

Dere’s lots of moving in dah stories of our peoples. Hees a good ting dat dah ole blood hees strong cause udderwise he would be easy to forget who we are. Dats why hees important for us to know dah names of dah places where we was born and growed up cause dem names and dem stories dey keep us hooked up and from dere we can go any place and we always knowed who we are. When we gets unhooked dats when it becomes dangerous.

− John (Dan) Campbell, Stories of the Road Allowance People, 1995

In the fall of 2018 the government of Saskatchewan, in partnership with the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Saskatchewan (SSISS), held sharing circles in Meadow Lake, North Battleford, Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Fort Qu’Appelle, and Regina for Sixties Scoop survivors and family members to share their stories. The information gathered in the sharing circles was used to help inform the government’s apology that took place on 7 January 2019 at the Legislative Buildings in Regina.1 Four years earlier, in June 2015 Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall promised a government apology for removing Indigenous children through programs such as Adopt Indian and Métis in the 1960s and 1970s but made clear that there would be no provincial compensation attached.² This announcement followed Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger’s apology earlier in the month for the province’s role in the Sixties Scoop. He acknowledged, “It was a practice that has left intergenerational scars and cultural loss. With these words of apology and regret, I hope all Canadians will join me in recognizing this historic injustice. I hope they will join me in acknowledging the pain of suffering of thousands of children who were taken from their homes.”3 In May 2018 the province of Alberta formally apologized to families and children affected by the Sixties Scoop after consultations with Indigenous communities around the province. Along with the apology, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley promised to work with Indigenous families and communities to “find a path to true reconciliation.”⁴

Recent apologies by Prairie provincial governments come in response to class action lawsuits from survivors demanding recognition and compensation for the loss of family, culture, and connection, as well as abuse that these policies produced. Regina lawyer Tony Merchant has filed several class action lawsuits against the provinces for the harms of the Sixties Scoop, and in Saskatchewan, for the Indian and Métis adoption program.⁵ Merchant is well known for representing thousands of residential school survivors in their class action against the government of Canada. A federal Sixties Scoop class action that originated in Ontario was settled on 6 October 2017 when Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, Carolyn Bennett, and Chief Marcia Brown Martel announced that an agreement-in-principle had been reached to settle the claims of Indigenous children removed during the 1960s and 1970s. Status Indian and Inuit children from across Canada who had been removed between 1951 and 1991 were eligible for compensation from the federal government for the loss of their culture during the time they spent in non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes. While the initial class action lawsuit pertained only to on-reserve Indian children removed in Ontario between 1965 and 1984, the final agreement included all provinces and territories, and a broader time period. What was striking about the agreement was the lack of recognition of Métis children with similar experiences. The $500–$800 million settlement left out claims of Métis children, causing an immediate reaction from the Métis adoptees and foster children who similarly experienced a loss of culture, family connection, and sense of belonging. The government asserted that during this period it was the provinces that were responsible for the Métis, not the federal government.⁶ Despite the recent apologies by provincial premiers, and the settlement agreement for the federal class action, the issue of the Sixties Scoop lacks broad public understanding. Unlike the Residential School Settlement Agreement, the Sixties Scoop Settlement Agreement did not require a formal statement gathering process or truth commission similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This striking difference leaves many survivors and communities without the opportunity to share their stories, and Canadians without the opportunity to understand the legacy of these policies.

This policy history of the Sixties Scoop draws on a generation of historical work on residential schooling and government Indian policy. Native-newcomer historiography in Canada has detailed the significance of policy and education in shaping relations between First Nations and the state. J.R. Miller has termed policy of the Department of Indian Affairs for Indian assimilation carried out from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War “the policy of the bible and the plough.”7 These policies were embodied in church-run residential schools, reserves, and heavy-handed tactics of cultural and spiritual repression. Taken together, these all aimed to break down communal land-holding on the prairies, with the goal being eventual absorption of First Nations into the body politic. Miller’s later work on residential schools looked specifically at those schools from the perspective of church, First Nations, and government, highlighting the role of the schools in shaping gender identities of Indian children through clothing, work regimes, and curriculum.⁸

More than merely educational facilities, Miller points to the importance of the residential aspect of the schooling, which had children live away from parents and communities for a significant portion of the year. Miller demonstrates that, from early contact onward, Europeans expressed a desire to socialize Indian children in the European context. An experiment began with the first Recollect boarding school, which opened in 1620 in the colony of New France. Four of the eight original pupils sent off eventually ended up in the care of the French. Their European instructors found it difficult to “curb the Indian youths’ freedom loving ways.”⁹ The initial experiment failed but was followed shortly by the Jesuit experiment. The instructors found that removing children from the parents prevented parental interference, stating, “We would not be annoyed and distracted by the fathers while instructing the children.”10 Later, in 1635 Champlain observed that children also played a larger political purpose in establishing relations between the two groups. In exchange for the promises of European goods, Christianity, and military support, the Huron were asked to “next year bring many of their little boys, whom we will lodge comfortably, and will feed, instruct and cherish as if they were our little Brothers.” Miller notes that, indeed, some First Nations groups did surrender children to the French boarding schools in 1636, and also First Nations people requested schooling from officials and in treaties.

From the origins of contact, the acquisition of Indigenous children has served both political and assimilatory purpose. The early experiment in residential schooling was replicated by Anglican missionaries. And by Confederation, boarding schools run by missionary societies were spread through the former British colonies. The schools that were established between 1883 and the turn of the century were part of the federal Indian policy, operated by the missionary bodies.¹¹ John Milloy also explores the residential school system, connecting it with the increasingly coercive post-Confederation colonization regime. Milloy states, “In the vision of education developed by both the church and the state in the final decades of the 19th century, it was the residential school experience that would lead children most effectively out of the ‘savage’ communities into ‘higher civilization’ and ‘full citizenship.’”¹² The system suffered from chronic underfunding, and in 1920 revisions to the Indian Act made attendance compulsory, to bolster attendance to secure greater per capita funding.¹³ Despite the lack of success and the high death rates, schools became routine from 1923 to 1946.

Milloy also finds that after 1946, the department began closing schools in response to the push for Indigenous integration and a desire to wind down the system. However, churches fought to maintain the schools. He notes that after 1951, the schools were less for the purpose of education, and increasingly filled the gap as child welfare institutions: “Those [neglected children] had become in the post war years, a significant portion of the residential school population, giving a new purpose to the schools as elements of an expanding post-war welfare state. That purpose prolonged the life of the residential school system.”¹⁴ Orphaned or “illegitimate” Indian children became inmates in the residential schools, masking the social conditions troubling families and communities in this period.

Studies in comparative Canada-U.S. policy history demonstrate that both countries have drawn upon their British legacy founded on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 when formulating post-colonial Indian policy. Roger Nichols points to the importance of the Royal Proclamation for establishing future treaty-making that called for the separation of Crown and Indian lands. Indigenous people retained their title to their lands, and although the British Crown ultimately held the title, Indian people were permitted to use and occupy those lands.15 Following the American War of Independence, Americans abandoned their colonial agreements, sending Indians on the east coast west of the Mississippi in its removal policy. At that time Canada began to establish its civilization policy, based on the establishment of missions with schools, farming, and political status of wardship.¹⁶ In both countries, wardship was the legal designation given to Indigenous peoples. In the United States it was based on the 1831 Cherokee Nation vs Georgia case, in which Chief Justice John Marshall determined that Indians were “domestic dependent nations,” and their dependency was formally established in law.¹⁷ In Canada, after the 1841 Act of Union and the Bagot Report of 1844, greater emphasis was placed on reducing government expenditures on Indians by encouraging individual assimilation. The Bagot Commission established that the past use of day schools had been unsuccessful, suggesting removal of children from parents to “manual labour schools” run by Christian missionaries and funded by the government as a solution.¹⁸ Nichols found that in both countries, boarding schools became the primary means of securing assimilation, through the use of removal, isolation, and education of Indigenous children.¹⁹

David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 discusses the importance of the boarding school education within the larger project of nation building in the United States. The idea of social evolution, drawn from the research of anthropologist and social theorist Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society: Or How Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery to Barbarism to Civilization provided the intellectual framework for the system. Based on the belief in education for the uplift of Indian peoples from the low status of “upper savagery” or “lower barbarism,” schools sought to offer children the opportunity to advance from the barbarism of their homes and families to the lower rungs of Western civilization. While earlier policies of removal and military conquest had been deemed untenable, assimilation of children replaced it. Wallace states, “After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to destroy them, that the last great Indian war should be waged against children.”20 Two key ideas driving the schools were, first, to educate children on the importance of the nuclear family for property, inheritance, and moral respectability; and second, inculcation of the importance of private property, on which rested the entire edifice of civilization.²¹ The goals of the system were to provide the rudiments of academics, the creation of individuals, and Christianization, while establishing proper gender roles and sexual mores.²²

Margaret Jacobs builds on Wallace’s insights by assessing the contribution of middle-class women to schooling offered by the state to Indigenous children in the United States and in Australia. She situates women’s participation in the context of nineteenth-century maternal feminism. At this time, middle-class women gained legitimacy in the public realm through providing “uplift” to Indian children in schools. Drawing upon the insights of Sylvia Van Kirk into the connection between colonialism and gender, Jacobs traces the close relationships that developed between women responsible for transforming Indigenous bodies of children and homes, as an outcome of their close proximity in the schools.²³ Early in the U.S. boarding school programs, white women reformers played an integral role in implementing child removal. Over the course of their involvement as missionaries, teachers, and matrons, they began to question colonial policies, leading them to organize with Indigenous women against the removal campaigns by the 1920s.²⁴ Jacobs finds that the contradiction in employing white women as maternal agents of the state was, in fact, the intimacy that the boarding school experience engendered. Intimacy led the women to challenge the goals of the Indian Bureau and to demand that children be raised by parents in their homes and concluded that poverty, rather than culture, created the “Indian problem.”²⁵

Along with education, historians who have studied the impact of government policy on Indigenous peoples have connected colonization and ill health. Maureen K. Lux demonstrates, in Medicine that Walks, that disease became a function of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²⁶ Politicians and doctors saw ill health as a racial condition rather than recognizing that poverty and hunger lay at the root of most illness in Indian communities. The turn-of-the-century Plains people faced both bacteriological invasions and economic marginalization. This work demonstrates how the racial construction of ill health functioned as an excuse to deny medical care and proper rations promised in treaties, but most damningly, to deny children in residential schools proper care or to finance improvements. The racialized discourse of Indigenous diseases created a climate where poverty and medical care were denied; likewise because of the neglect, settler populations developed the perception that reserves were “repositories of disease.” In response to demands from white residents, governments imposed harsh measures such as quarantines that prevented already hungry people from either working or obtaining food. Thus, elimination took the guise of racialized discourses of ill health in the post-treaty era.

Mary-Ellen Kelm’s Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–1950 also challenges the contention that poor health is a necessary consequence of contact, by demonstrating that there are also political, social, biological, and cultural causes of ill health. Kelm looks at Aboriginal health not only through policies for Euro-Canadian medical care provided by authorities, but as a larger issue related to the loss of land in British Columbia, an inability to access adequate resources, and the transition from being autonomous entities to becoming imprisoned on reserves. Residential schools were an important element of this period, and ill health dominated the schools. She dismantles the political rationale used to justify the schools, that they were necessary to save children from their homes, and particularly their unassimilated mothers whom, it was believed, failed to understand Anglo-Canadian standards of hygiene. Residential schools, in keeping with her analysis of the construction of Aboriginal bodies, were meant to violently “re-form” children’s bodies through adoption of Euro-Canadian hygienic practices and appearances. The second half of the book illustrates the simultaneous persistence of traditional Aboriginal healing and emergence of the medical profession as the front line in early twentieth century colonialism. In this case, the “combination of a sense of obligation with the notion that cultural change for the First Nations was essential to their physical well-being created a compelling argument for providing First Nations with medical care.”27 Medical care and missionary evangelization often went hand in hand to control and reform Indigenous bodies.

Historians have identified the post-war era as a watershed in the history of Native-newcomer relations. U.S. historian Donald L. Fixico’s Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 traces the development of Indian Affairs policies aimed at terminating tribal land holdings and collective Indian identity. Under President Harry Truman, termination policies attempted the integration of Indians into the American melting pot. The answer to Indian poverty and illness was believed to be equality of opportunity.28 Hugh Shewell’s history of relief provision by Indian Affairs likewise identified the post-war period in Canada as shifting Indian policy toward integration after the revisions of the Indian Act in 1951. While his work is focused primarily on the origins of welfare dependency, he identifies the post-war period of integration and citizenship as a new assimilation scheme. Indian Affairs Branch (IAB) employed a discursive shift from assimilation to integration to consciously signal a rupture with earlier policies of assimilation. Shewell argues, “Beginning in the 1950’s, Indian social policy and social assistance programs increasingly reflected the broad objectives of citizenship and integration. For some time, the Welfare Division was central to these objectives, and was the dominant division within the IAB.”²⁹ The role of the state shifted from that of a protective position to a developmental function. The new secular focus on Indigenous integration through citizenship utilized the research of social scientists through improvements in living conditions and health standards.³⁰ According to Shewell, two obstacles that prevented the success of the new integration model were a lack of desire by First Nations peoples and a lack of acceptance by other Canadians. While Shewell provides an important start, there is no mention of child welfare, there is a lack of attention to gender, and the study ignores Saskatchewan.

Liberalism and the individualizing tendencies of the federal Indian policies is the focus of Jessa Chupik-Hall’s master’s thesis, “Good Families Do Not Just Happen.” In it, she makes an important connection between integration and the increasing overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in child welfare systems across Canada.³¹ First, she documents the absence of preventative family support by IAB. Rather, the IAB utilized its nationwide system of residential schools primarily after the Second World War as child welfare institutions for Indian children whose families were unable to care for them. This system masked the increasing difficulties facing Indian families in the post-war period. Likewise, the application of equality rhetoric, embodied in “They are not Indians, they are just people,”32 served to justify the extension of provincial services, while further accomplishing the goal of integration. While equality rhetoric was portrayed as noble, in fact children did not receive equal treatment because of the lack of in-home preventative services that non-Indian children and families routinely received.³³

John Lutz’s work on wage labour and relief in British Columbia adopts the approach of relationality. Lutz argues, “The state was not a single entity, but rather a hydra-headed being that pursued many different policies at once, some of which were at odds with others, and some of which, at least on particular issues, supported Aboriginal people.”³⁴ He places Indigenous voices in the history, because in doing so, “integrating Aboriginal voices with non-Aboriginal voices turns history into a dialogue.”³⁵ Unlike economist Helen Buckley and Hugh Shewell, he contends that the state did not willingly embrace “welfare colonialism.” Lutz argues that the Indian Affairs Branch paid relief to Indigenous people primarily because the regulations of other provincial agencies limited Aboriginal access to both the subsistence and cash economies. Indigenous peoples, for a variety of factors, were squeezed out of the developing economies of agriculture, fishing, harvesting, etc., and relief became its replacement.³⁶ His study ends in 1970, and he concludes that “welfare has ensured that Aboriginal people did not starve and that they continue to have an alternative to wage work – but at a very high price.”³⁷

Buckley traces the failure of IAB policy to bring prosperity to western Canadian reserve residents, and, like Shewell, is interested in locating the origins of welfare dependency among First Nations people. She begins by insisting on the distinctness of Prairie First Nations from those in the east or British Columbia. In the prairie provinces, First Nations experienced the disastrous demise of the buffalo economy, followed by a stalling in reserve agriculture, while northern communities dependent on the trapline experienced economic decline with reductions in trapline incomes later in the twentieth century. She points out that reserve conditions worsened as white prosperity increased.³⁸ In the mid-twentieth century in western Canada, there was a collapse of the reserve economy, predicated by government policies aimed at making subsistence farmers out of First Nations people, and of economic development that relied on renting out reserve lands to white farmers. Out of this collapse came the contemporary origins of poverty, exacerbated by state-delivered income supplements. Mothers’ allowances came at a time when traplines were circumscribed by CCF policies. Buckley alerts readers to the gendered effects of state policies on families – policies that undermined the role of men as women and children moved into villages and towns for children to attend school. Some men, unwilling to trap without their families, were no longer able to play a provider role. In large part, the purpose of the Native family underwent a profound shift with new sedentary lifestyle in the northern villages.39

Like elsewhere in Canada, Saskatchewan’s provincial government, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), recognized that Indigenous peoples after the Second World War were no longer a dying race and crafted policies aimed at the eventual integration and citizenship of First Nations and Métis peoples through equal access to health and social services.⁴⁰ Previous historical study of CCF Native policy has been approached from traditional topics of political organization and government relations and neglected to fully interrogate the role of the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation in the overall policy of Aboriginal integration. Jim Pitsula has looked at the CCF government liberal ideology of Indian integration, and its three-pronged approach to integration, of which the creation of a single voice for the treaty Indians in Saskatchewan in the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians was but a part.⁴¹ Historian Laurie Barron challenged Pistula’s characterization of the CCF’s liberal democratic individualizing strategy when documenting the Native policies of the CCF. In Walking in Indian Moccasins, Barron argues that the CCF recognized the collective identity of Aboriginal political organizations, whether farmer or Native group, and were sympathetic to aims of the group. He believes that “concern for native community was generated both by the administrative dictates of the day, and by a socialist philosophy predicated on the notion of government assistance to the disadvantaged.”⁴² He argues that Saskatchewan politicians and bureaucrats saw problems faced by Métis and First Nations as similar, stemming from the belief that poverty and marginalization could be overcome through reform and rehabilitation policies that would eventually lead to integration into provincial services.⁴³

In a prior article, Barron focused on the brief development of Métis farm colonies jointly undertaken with the Catholic Church in Willow Bunch, Lebret, and Green Lake. In attempting to explain the logic of establishing the Métis colonies, Barron refers back to the CCF Social Gospel base, which was “premised on the doctrine of love and it proclaims the sanctity of cooperation as opposed to competition, hence it represents an explicit rejection of the ‘survival of the fittest’ ethos.”44 As part of the Métis rehabilitation policy, colonies, like Indian reserves, would enable the Métis to gradually assimilate and become competitive in mainstream society. The colonies were intended to be temporary, perhaps one generation; in actual fact they lasted a little over a decade.⁴⁵ With schooling and farm instruction, co-operatives, and oversight, colonies were meant to enable the Métis to develop the necessary skills and competencies to enter non-Indigenous society. Inherited from the Patterson government, they were under the direction of the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation and were eventually abandoned by 1960 as a viable response to Métis integration, after which the government sought to integrate Métis people individually as they became part of the urban landscape.⁴⁶

While Barron depicts the CCF colony scheme in the southern portion of the province as unproblematic, other historians have been more critical in their analysis. Despite the lofty goals initially envisioned by the CCF, scholars have documented the failure of the CCF Native policy in the colonies and in the north, and the development of Native dependency and increased poverty. While the government provided aspects of protection, such as through health and education, paternalism pervaded the provision of these services.⁴⁷ Despite the rhetoric of rehabilitation, Murray Dobbin and, later, historian David Quiring both argue that the CCF maintained a colonial relationship with the Indigenous people, failing to develop northern resources or a meaningful economic strategy that could bring the First Nations and Métis inhabitants into the economy.⁴⁸ Meetings with communities and the establishment of co-operatives are examples of the reforms pursued in the early days of the CCF in the north.⁴⁹ Once the policy was judged a failure by 1948, Dobbin argues, the government went “into a full retreat in the area of Native rehabilitation.”⁵⁰ What he has characterized as Native rehabilitation was, in fact, not rehabilitation but support of self-determination and, in fact, what took place after this retreat was an oppressive variant of rehabilitation.

After 1950 the combined effects of the policy of centralization, introduction of a cash-based economy in the North, and implementation of the fur-marketing system devastated the Indigenous families who had previously been self-sufficient, semi-nomadic trappers and fishers. Gender roles, which had been stable and equitable prior to these changes, dramatically shifted, with men increasingly unable to provide for their large families.51 Dobbin finds that it “was clear that the government was made aware from various sources, of the crisis that native people were facing and measures needed to halt and reverse the process, and it consciously chose to reject such measures.”⁵² The reason Dobbin gives for this clear example of CCF failure was its ideological and political background. With the CCF roots in agrarian social democracy and populist character, Social Gospel, and egalitarian focus, Indigenous needs did not fit into any paradigm.⁵³ Primarily, the CCF and the Saskatchewan electorate perceived the Métis as impediments to the progress of the province. Dobbin concludes that the CCF party that grew out of the settler colonial project, and its leadership, reflected the concerns of the farmers and small businesses that helped it win its first majority. Quiring attributes the failure of the CCF socialist policies in the North in part vaguely to the white politicians and bureaucrats’ “various non-socialist and non-political beliefs and attitudes,” indicating that the socialist CCF behaved in ways that were similar to other non-socialist governments elsewhere in Canada.⁵⁴

Missing from the historical accounts of CCF Native policy are experiences of Indigenous women, hampering historians’ abilities to fully comprehend gender and racial implications for rehabilitation policies for Indian and Métis people in the province. In the west, historians have demonstrated that as Euro-Canadian settler society emerged after the Northwest Resistance of 1885, racial and gender boundaries became more rigidly enforced, especially for First Nations and Métis women.⁵⁵ During the early settlement period, prairie Indian women were confined to reserves, and Métis women largely became invisible in the rural and urban settlements. After 1945 Indigenous women once again became visible in settler society. The disciplining gaze of the state turned on Métis women who were not conforming to the proper maternal role. With the introduction of mother’s allowances in 1945, which encouraged settlement in villages and small communities so children could attend school, social workers and anthropologists evaluated Aboriginal women’s domestic and maternal abilities through the bodies of Métis children.

While settler colonialism has its focus on ensuring the settler/Indigenous dichotomy, Métis people are a troubling exception to this binary. Excluded from Indian Act legislation and considered outside pioneer and settler society, Saskatchewan’s Métis occupied an increasingly marginalized space in the urban and rural prairie landscape.56 Emma LaRocque’s writing has awakened scholars to the lived experiences of Métis women to challenge neat timelines or idealized versions of Indigenous culture.⁵⁷ The impact of racist and sexist stereotypes on the day-to-day lives of Métis women who experienced violence both inside and outside Indigenous society forms an important element when considering child welfare, especially when it was women who were left with child-rearing responsibilities the majority of the time. In Halfbreed Maria Campbell tells her powerful story of growing up in post-war Saskatchewan and the impact of racism, poverty, and sexism in her life, as well as her perception of child welfare workers.⁵⁸ For these two women, decolonization has meant defending themselves against racism as well as sexism. Stereotypes that emerged at the outset of permanent Euro-Canadian settlement on the prairies have persisted, depicting women as “dissolute, dangerous, and sinister as compared with their fragile and vulnerable pure-white counterparts.”⁵⁹ Métis women experienced a distinctive version of discrimination that effectively segregated them socially and economically from both Indian and white society.

Intimate Integration seeks to fill in the gaps in the current historiography to enlarge both scholarly and public knowledge of the “Sixties Scoop.” It draws on several disciplinary streams for its methodological and theoretical framing. It is first a work grounded in feminist ethnohistorical methodology, emerging from the strong historical foundation built by scholars of Native-newcomer relations and western Canadian history, and influenced by Indigenous historians and post-colonial scholars.⁶⁰Intimate Integration situates Indigenous transracial adoption in a matrix of gendered, raced, and class relations between post-war settler society and First Nations and Métis women and families. As scholars of empire have pointed out, histories of childhood are implicated in racial and colonial politics.⁶¹ In addition, feminist historians have long pointed to the relationship between gender and empire, and British colonialism in particular.⁶² Sylvia Van Kirk and subsequent feminist historians of imperialism and colonization have identified the significance of intimacy in forging “tense and tender ties” in colonial contexts, as well as demonstrating the centrality of Indigenous women and women’s experiences to histories of colonization. Van Kirk’s insights into the intersection of gender, race, class, and imperialism through a historical interrogation of the role of gender in colonization stimulated scholars to trace the social construction of difference and the production of social categories.63

Drawing on Van Kirk’s research, Ann Laura Stoler urges scholars to attend to the practices of comparison of colonial governments in the intimate frontiers of empires, drawing on post-colonial studies and histories of North America.⁶⁴ Her work has demonstrated that colonial authority depends on shaping affect, severing some bonds, and establishing others. Through intimate colonial practices, policies such as child welfare and transracial adoption helped create new types of bodies and structures of feeling, developing new habits of heart and mind.⁶⁵ Integral to assessing Indigenous transracial adoption as a colonial technique of control are the critical interventions of Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” or the management of populations by state-sanctioned actors to regulate and discipline both individual bodies and population bodies.⁶⁶ The increasing surveillance and regulation of Indigenous families, termed here as “technologies of helping,” represent increasing power of the state over the very intimate aspects of Indigenous family life, the birthing and rearing of Indigenous children. By harnessing the opportunities of modern state-controlled adoption, social workers and government agents enabled Indigenous children to be recast, not as members of a doomed and dying race, but as future citizens reared by proper families.

The transformation of Indigenous children after the Second World War, seen through the discourses utilized in the Adopt Indian and Métis Project campaigns by the Saskatchewan Department of Social Services, drew “normal” everyday white families into the business of integration through appeals to their sense of civic duty and the timeless visual appeal of needy children, while simultaneously undermining Indigenous families, nations, and systems of kinship. According to Ann Laura Stoler, “The welding of biopower to racism confers on racism its most virulent form.”⁶⁷ The creation of sexual “others” to be policed through legislation or policy, affirms the superiority of the ruling elites and the degeneracy of Indigenous “others.”⁶⁸ Couched often in language of benevolence, the legacies of the moralizing missions of the imperial interventions are evident in mid-twentieth-century adoption advertising that relied on humanitarian justifications and crisis management. The very policies that made Indigenous families vulnerable are erased and mystified. Stoler notes, “A broader view of imperial practice does not merely underscore that social reform and racism went hand in hand, or that 19^th century liberalism and empire were complementary projects, as Uday Mehta and I each insisted early on. The humanitarian ‘good works’ of empire were part of this very durable architecture – with exacting exclusions and inequities structured through them.”69 This “bleeding heart” of settler colonialism is formative and deeply embedded within the national settler identity.

In addition to contributing to a critical historical analysis of Indigenous transracial adoption, Intimate Integration offers a decolonial history of Indigenous resistance and resurgence. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges.”⁷⁰ It draws inspiration from critical Métis scholars Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, and Kim Anderson who forged a path for decolonial writing in Canada. In part, it provides an ethnohistorical account of Saskatchewan Métis and Cree adoption and kinship informed by oral history conducted with Indigenous elders, adoptees, and leadership. This provided critical insight into the lived experience of Indigenous transracial adoption and provincial child welfare removal policies in the 1960s and 1970s.⁷¹ For this study, I conducted nine interviews in accordance with the ethical and privacy guidelines laid out in the “Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans.”⁷²

Conceiving of Indigenous transracial adoption as a field of historical inquiry requires a thorough consideration of the ethical issues surrounding design, research, and distribution of findings from this project. At the outset, I sought out direction from an elder and leader recognized as knowledgeable about Indigenous practices and contemporary challenges First Nations people face. Midway through my research, I then established a relationship with Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, who also encouraged me on. They put me in touch with Métis elders who would be willing to share their knowledge with me, particularly their involvement with the Saskatchewan Native Women’s Movement. I interviewed several of the original members of the SNWM. I have been guided by the Six Principles of Métis Health Research when conducting interviews with Métis participants. These are, first, this importance of building reciprocal relationships that promote equality between the research and the Métis community. The second principle stresses the importance of respect for the individual as well as the collectivity. The third principle ensures that I provide a safe and inclusive environment for the participants. The fourth principle is to respect the diversity of the Métis people in their world views and beliefs. This concern is based on the recognition of diversity among the Métis and on the understanding that Métis identity can be situated anywhere on a continuum from contemporary to very traditional. The fifth principle stipulates that research should be relevant to those involved, that it should benefit evenly both the researcher and the community. Finally, the sixth principle requires that researchers should be knowledgeable about Métis history and the Métis cultural context.73 I believe that I adhered to each of these principles to the best of my ability. As a Métis adoptee, I feel deeply committed to my community and aspire to have this research reach a wide and diverse audience.

Documents in provincial, federal, and private archives in Canada and the United States supplied the bulk of the material on government policies and individual adoptions. Archivists reluctantly allowed access to documents containing private and sensitive information.⁷⁴ Reading against the archival grain of policy documents and newspaper articles has shed light on the cultural, social, historical, and political forces that brought adoption to the forefront of discussions over citizenship and integration. Indigenous women’s experiences predominated in the case files. As a researcher, I was mindful that considering Indigenous women’s choice is fraught with difficulties. One must be careful to avoid oversimplification and alert to the limitations of such colonial sources. Provincial privacy legislation prevented access to provincial adoption case records, but since First Nations people fall under federal jurisdiction, several Indian Affairs case files have been used to explore transracial adoption and child welfare service to First Nations. Evidence indicates that in some cases Indigenous mothers sought welfare services such as adoption to secure homes for children they felt would otherwise suffer deprivations. It is important to acknowledge that for some Indigenous families, adoption provided an important child-caring option among a limited range of opportunities in a social and political climate that was hostile to Indigenous mothers and children.75 The historically specific and varied responses by First Nations and Métis women in mid- to late twentieth-century Saskatchewan point to the need to take into account changes in gender relations in Indigenous communities. By looking comparatively at transracial adoption in Canada and the United States, as well as the transnational Indigenous resistance it engendered, the following narrative of the Sixties Scoop seeks to find the heart of colonial politics through the management of affective ties and attempts to explain changing national identities that transracial adoption sought to create.

Whether accomplished through residential schooling, child welfare policies, or legal means such as loss of status through Indian Act provisions, Indigenous child removal has a long and sordid history in settler colonial nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.⁷⁶ American historian Margaret Jacobs’ transnational history of Indigenous child welfare, A Generation Removed, illustrates the settler-colonial origins of Indigenous child removal. The late Haudenosaunee scholar Patricia Monture confronted the systemic racism of the child welfare system and courts and reproached the system of committing genocide. In “‘A Vicious Cycle’” she argues that “removing children from their homes weakens the entire community. Removing First Nations children from their culture and placing them in a foreign culture is an act of genocide.”⁷⁷ Like the criminal justice system, the child welfare system removed people from communities. Using the rationale of “best interests of the child” she exposed racism and white privilege. Legal scholar Marlee Kline published a series of articles that explored Aboriginal child welfare law from a critical feminist theoretical approach. In the first article, “Complicating the Ideology of Motherhood: Child Welfare, Law and First Nation Women,” Kline identified the cultural bias inherent in child welfare practice and application of child welfare law. Kline critiques the Euro-Canadian understanding of motherhood to expose the cultural norms of the nuclear family and white middle-class standards that denigrated Aboriginal extended families and community standards, utilizing the judgments from recent court cases.⁷⁸ In a following article, Kline exposed the ideological processes that lead discrimination against First Nations children and families in the courts. Kline deconstructs the “best interests of the child” concept that guides each element of child welfare decision-making. She identified how liberalism has structured racism, and the use of the best interests of the child ideology has “created apprehensions as natural, necessary and legitimate rather than coercive and destructive.”79 Courts and social workers have not viewed children’s identity or culture as an area worthy consideration when determining how best to protect children, since the use of nineteenth-century liberal tenets of individualism, abstraction, universalism, and impartiality eliminate such a possibility.⁸⁰ She identified the origins of the system in a new discourse of integration, with the goal of “economic assimilation of Indians into the body politic.”⁸¹ Kline differentiates the era of integration from the earlier period of assimilation and claims, “The result of the extension of provincial social welfare law on reserve was the further colonization of First Nations and the erosion of the political and social structures.”⁸² Kline’s critical intellectual history of hegemonic notions of family and protection provides a useful starting point for exploring transracial adoption policies in the West.

Adult adoptees and survivors of the Sixties Scoop have generated a significant portion of the current publications on Indigenous child welfare in both academic research and popular media. These personal accounts reveal the human component missing in academic publications.⁸³ Ernie Crey, activist and a survivor of the foster care system in British Columbia, links the emergence of the child welfare system to the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal families.⁸⁴ First-hand experiences of adoption shed light on the complexities and contradictions that run through the lives of Indigenous people who have been made wards of the state.⁸⁵ Adult survivors of child welfare policies seek to make sense of their often individualized experience by writing and researching on adoption and connecting with others who have also been through the system. Though remaining in thesis or dissertation form, much of the recent graduate work has focused primarily on identity and adoption.⁸⁶ Adoptee Jeannine Carrière and co-authors have written extensively on transracial adoption in Canada.⁸⁷ Her dissertation looks at the impact of child removal (adoption) on the health and personalities of the Aboriginal adoptee. Carrière applies both the Western theoretical framework of human ecology and grounded theory alongside Aboriginal scientific theory to better understand the interconnections between adoption and well-being for Aboriginal children. She is especially interested in the spiritual aspect of transracial adoption. She concludes that children removed from their parents and communities suffer from profound loss, on an emotional as well as spiritual level.88 Raven Sinclair’s PhD dissertation from the University of Calgary, entitled “All My Relations,” locates the history of transracial adoption within the framework of colonization. A First Nations adoptee from Saskatchewan, she conducted interviews with adoptees to examine the impact of transracial adoption on the development of Indian identity.

There is no historical study of the Sixties Scoop in Canada in print.⁸⁹ However, Joyce Timpson’s PhD dissertation in social work examined the increased apprehension in Northern Ontario in the 1960s and 1970s, using oral histories from Indigenous peoples, CAS workers, and government employees.⁹⁰ She took a broad approach to the topic of family breakdown and subsequent intervention, concluding that child apprehensions increased due to “serious cultural trauma following relocation, loss of independent means of support, and the new educational systems that were incompatible with their traditional beliefs and lifestyles. These stressors revealed themselves in the high rate of alcohol abuse precipitating incidents involving the child protection agency.”⁹¹

She identified three factors in creation of the child welfare crisis in Northern Ontario: the equality ideology, ignorance about First Nations people, and lack of systemic flexibility for applying different approaches. Her study addressed three factors that shaped disproportionate rates: child welfare policy and programs, the socio-economic context of Native communities, and the response of the Children’s Aid Societies.⁹² Her use of geographical, historical, and cultural specificity enabled readers to grasp the complex and multilayered elements that have contributed to the issue of Indigenous child welfare. Her research also revealed the interrelationship between relocation schemes and the impact on families and communities. In recent years Canadian historians have published histories of adoption, moving the topic beyond the confines of those involved in social work and locating the issue in the larger cultural and historical context, adding further nuance and complexity to the often emotionally fraught topic.⁹³ Karen Balcom’s The Traffic in Babies looked at the development of sound adoption practice in Canada through attempts to stem the illegal cross-border black market adoptions between 1930 and 1972.⁹⁴ Veronica Strong-Boag’s Finding Families, Finding Ourselves brings to light the dilemma that Aboriginal birth mothers face when Indigenous priorities conflict with legal options.95 Karen Dubinsky’s Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration across the Americas moves beyond the confrontational dichotomy between rescue or kidnap framework that has dominated discussion on transracial, transnational adoption. She correctly points to the deeply historic symbolism of children as “bearers, but never makers, of social meaning.”⁹⁶ Her analysis ranges from Cuba, to Canada, then to Guatemala, pointing to the interlocking global issues of economic deprivation, colonialism, and sentimentalized childhood. Her discussion of the Canadian experience utilizes a comparative approach between the relatively successful adoptions of Black children from a Montreal adoption agency and the primarily unsuccessful adoptions of Indigenous children based on readings from adoption files in Manitoba and Montreal. In pointing to the continued over-representation of Indigenous children in the welfare system, Dubinsky’s work challenges scholars working in the area of child welfare, particularly that of Indigenous children, of the dangers in constructing arguments around the use of symbolic children.⁹⁷

This history of the Sixties Scoop in Saskatchewan situates the history of Indigenous transracial adoption in earlier Indigenous children removal policies that functioned in large measure as a primary mode of Indigenous assimilation and elimination. Indigenous transracial adoption, or the intimate integration of Indigenous children in settler families, reflected newly emerging technologies to substitute Indigenous affective ties with those bound to Euro-Canadian lifeways and nation. Through socialization in the intimate setting of families scrutinized by social workers, Indigenous children’s properly modern upbringing – loving, educated, and modelled by the ideal nuclear families – would succeed where past attempts had failed. Whereas First Nations peoples had been subject to legal and geographic separation, integration sought to selectively eliminate such boundaries, and thereby eliminate Indigenous subjectivities, kinship, and nations.

Previous boundaries erected between Indigenous people and settlers relied on a complex combination of state-based legal, and spatial separation, as well as pseudoscientific theories of racial difference and cultural beliefs of inferiority.⁹⁸ At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the early twentieth century, the expanding Canadian state enforced the exclusion of First Nations and Métis peoples in the developing market economy. This form of exclusionary liberalism relied on the dispossession and containment of First Nations, as well as the creation of a web of surveillance that enabled politicians and policymakers a means to know “Indians” while also controlling and segregating them on reserves. Keith Smith argues, “The ways in which imperial powers came to know colonized peoples allowed the creation and maintenance of boundaries and oppositions that were formed in the process of colonization and at the same time justified colonial encroachment.”99 The historically specific conditions of the expanding and modernizing agricultural west, secured for future prosperity of Anglo-Celtic Protestant Canadians, entailed enforcing a strict racial segregation through the pass system, federal and provincial legal statutes, residential schools, and enfranchisement policies.¹⁰⁰

State-based legal and political separations between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians were ideologically maintained by print and news media, academic historians, and government bureaucracies using racial binaries that framed Canadian Indian policy as benevolent, and paternalistic control as justified. The mainstream press historically perpetuated colonial representations of Indigenous peoples to support expansionist colonial policies relying on three stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples: Indigenous depravity, innate inferiority, and stubborn resistance to progress and development.¹⁰¹ In the 1870s and 1880s negative assessments of Indigenous peoples held by incoming Euro-Canadian settlers emerged out of the expansionist movement. Expanding the Canadian nation state westward, incorporating Indigenous societies, and creating an agricultural frontier dependent on British Canadian migration relied on images of unlimited plenty, a gendered and racialized “Eden” that would provide limitless potential for prosperity for Anglo-Celtic farmers.¹⁰² First Nations and Métis peoples, many of whom had undertaken farming prior to the acquisition by Canada, likewise sought to prosper in the emerging economy by engaging in agriculture and learning Euro-Canadian methods of business. In the settlement period, negative accounts of Indigenous peoples circulated to rationalize government policies of segregation. In addition, newspapers and government officials relied on pre-existing racial characterizations of the lazy drunken Indian and the slovenly Indian woman as a handy way to deflect attention from the failure to implement the treaty promises and draw attention away from disastrous government policies.¹⁰³

Ian McKay’s “Liberal Order Framework” provides a useful context for examining the efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples. Explaining the arc of Canadian history as an ever unfolding process of liberal rule, he argues that we should “imagine ‘Canada’ simultaneously as an extensive projection of liberal rule across a large territory and an intensive process of subjectification, whereby liberal assumptions are internalized and ‘normalized’ within the dominion’s subjects.”104 Incorporating newcomers and extending the nation state across the continent, the liberal order is an ideological formation committed to the “belief in the epistemological and ontological primacy of the category of the ‘individual’ and an attempt to plan and nurture, in somewhat unlikely soil, the philosophical assumptions, and related political and economic practices of a liberal order.”¹⁰⁵ Three tenets uphold the liberal order: the primacy of liberty, equality, and private property. In the liberal order framework, the body politic is made up of free and unencumbered individuals, who act independently of external obligations to family, religion, or natural condition. Excluded from its original conception were women, other races, workers, Catholics, and collectivist Indigenous peoples in particular.¹⁰⁶ Key importance was attached to the function of private property.¹⁰⁷ McKay points out that the initial consolidation of the Canadian project required a massive extension of the state and its institutions that were an essential component in the individualization of the citizenry. To liberalize social relations first required the build-up of immense government institutions, often before the development of classes.¹⁰⁸ One example of the extension of the liberal order framework entails the efforts to settle Indigenous peoples permanently on reserves and remove them from their lands in order to repopulate the West with European and Euro-Canadian individual agriculturalists. The remapping of the West with the homestead grid and the creation of “free homesteads” was part of the process by which the common land and resources in the West were violently transformed to private property through a form of “colonial alchemy.”¹⁰⁹ Placed on reserves and under the surveillance of Indian agents and priests, Indigenous peoples were subjected to efforts to remake them into what Thomas Biolsi has called “the minimum definition of the modern individual.”¹¹⁰

With the expansion of the settlement frontier into the West and the creation of Canada as a nation spanning sea to sea, Canada’s myth of two founding peoples – the French and English – elided the critical Indigenous contribution to the county.111 The historic rupture relegated First Peoples to a racialized “other” that would either vanish under the inevitable march of progress or be forced to surrender their land, language, and spirituality to assimilate.¹¹² Patrick Wolfe termed this structure “settler colonialism,” and as distinct from colonialism, it has both positive and negative dimensions. On one hand, it seeks to dissolve Indigenous societies through government policies and, in its place, establish a new society based on European social and political institutions indigenized so as to appear natural. Wolfe termed this process the “logic of elimination” and pointed to the assimilatory government policies of enfranchisement, whether voluntary or involuntary, child removal policies, allotment schemes, replacing Indigenous forms of kinship and genealogy as the key expressions of this process.¹¹³ As he put it, “Settler colonizers came to stay so invasion is a structure; not an event.”¹¹⁴ Since settler colonialism has been driven by the “logic of elimination,” it continually attempts to remove distinctions between groups, ideally achieving its full expression when Indians and Métis cease to exist as a distinct legal and social group. Thus, for the Indigenous people, the struggle against settler colonialism is to maintain cultural and political distinctiveness, keeping the settler–Indigenous relationship going.¹¹⁵

Gender and sexuality are intrinsic to settler colonization and the proliferation of the modern nation state. Scott Morgensen argues that theories of settler colonization must also interrogate how the “political and economic formation is constituted by gendered and sexual power.”¹¹⁶ Morgensen further argues that “gendered and sexual power relations appear to be so intrinsic to procedures of indigenous elimination and settler indigenization that these processes will not be fully understood until sexuality and gender are centered in their analysis.”¹¹⁷ Drawing on settler-colonial studies, this analysis is rooted in an exploration of the impact of the settler-colonial law on race and gender relations, and in particular, the emergence of Indigenous transracial adoption. Indian status has been defined and regulated in an attempt to create uniformity across the nation, ordering the differences between the multitudes of Indigenous belief systems. Morgensen argues that the Indian Act and the settler colonial ideology that underpinned it has, in effect, racialized kinship, thus contradicting “traditional definitions of indigenous nationhood based on genealogy, which may include adoption as well as biological descent, and without making race a determinant of degree of relationship.”118 Applying the law into spaces normally privileged as private, such as the home and family, illustrates the unequal power relationship.¹¹⁹

While Indigenous elimination is at the heart of settler colonial efforts of regulation and intervention, Indigenous peoples have resisted and evaded the law, indigenized adoption laws and policy, and accessed services to supplement or replace lost kinship and social support. Indigenous families responded to material deprivation, unplanned pregnancies, loss of spouses, or eviction from homes in a variety ways. Individual case histories point to a wide array of efforts to ensure support for children in difficult circumstances. The emergence of Indigenous women’s political movements in the 1960s such as the Saskatchewan Native Women’s Movement sought to reassert and reclaim Indigenous women’s roles in ensuring the health of community, opening day care centres and women’s shelters, and demanding an end to coercive transracial adoptions.

Indigenous Legal Orders and the Indian Act

Two legal mechanisms were primarily responsible for ordering relations between Indian nations and the Canadian state until the repatriation of the Constitution in 1982: treaties and the federal Indian Act. While some Indigenous peoples in the Northwest demanded that the incoming Canadians sign treaties to establish relations and secure guarantees for future security, Canadian treaty parties followed the procedures established by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to obtain Aboriginal title to the lands for settlement.¹²⁰ The newly formed Canadian government signed treaties with Western First Nations between 1871 and 1877. These treaties also set out the future relationship with the Crown. In 1868 the Canadian government began to incorporate all previous legislation pertaining to Indian people into one body of laws. The principles of Canada’s Indian policy had been established in the colonial period, prior to Confederation. The three principles that guided pre-Confederation Indian policy – protection, civilization, and assimilation – were incorporated in 1868 into the legislation, entitled “An Act Providing for the Organization of the Department of Secretary of State of Canada, and for the Management of Indian and Ordinance Land,” which became the legislation guiding the administration of the federal Department of Indian Affairs.121 Indigenous kinship and gender systems were increasingly targeted by the legislation as marriage and the reproductive choices of Indian men and women came under the purview of legislators and Indian agents.

While the gendering of legal Indian status had been a feature of colonial Indian legislation from 1857 onward, greater emphasis was placed on male political involvement as well as patrilineage in the nation-building period after Canadian Confederation in 1867.¹²² Laws made in 1869 stripped women of the right to vote in band elections – a landmark moment for gender discrimination in Indigenous communities. That legislation also mentioned the consequences for women marrying non-Indians for the first time, revised in section 6: “Provided always that any Indian woman marrying any other than an Indian shall cease to be an Indian within the meaning of this Act, nor shall the children issue of such a marriage be considered Indians within the meaning of this Act.”¹²³ For their choice in husbands, women and their children could be ejected from reserves. Indian agents had a number of tools at their disposal to enforce conformity to Euro-Canadian ideals of femininity and domesticity. For example, women considered disobedient had their rations withheld or children removed to residential schools by local Indian agents.¹²⁴

Colonizing kinship itself was recognized as fundamental to remaking Indigenous peoples; at the same time, repatterning Indigenous communities to fit with the newly independent nation was an elusive yet essential project for defining what was Canadian. In 1876 the Dominion of Canada passed the Indian Act, for the administration of reserve lands and “Indians” in all provinces and the Northwest Territories. It defined the collectivity who resided on “reserves” – bands – and who was entitled to be included for the sake of the Act – “Indians.” This Act sought to reconfigure Indigenous membership orders, governance, and kinship systems by dictating the terms of belonging and regulating reserve habitation.¹²⁵ Monitored by Indian agents empowered with the ability to dismember bands and criminalize dissidents, the Indian Act instituted a bureaucratic regime that depoliticized Indigenous nationhood.¹²⁶ In the Indian Act, 1876, section 3, “Indian” was defined first as any male person of Indian blood, reputed to belong to a particular band; second, any child of such person; and third, any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person. In section 3 (a) illegitimate children could be ejected from band membership after two years. Section 3 (c) stipulated that women who married anyone other than an “Indian” would no longer be an “Indian” but would retain her treaty annuities and become effectively enfranchised. Section 61 established the system of band governance on reserves with an elected chief and council. Supervised by the superintendent-general or Indian agent, males over the age of twenty-one could cast a vote, the majority of which would decide upon leaders and the matters of local concern that band councils oversaw.127

Historians have illustrated that in nation-building periods, marriage takes on additional significance, since the composition and reproduction of the populace occurs within the family unit. By incriminating some marriages, such as Indigenous marriages outside of the church and Indian women marrying non-Indian men, the state defined what types of sexual relations and which families were legitimate.¹²⁸ Feminist scholar Julia Emberley’s work on the Aboriginal family reveals how the Indian Act legislation was utilized to shift gender allegiances and Indigenous political forms. Early Indian Act polices consistently drove to impose an ideology of patriarchal descent, described as the “disentitling of Aboriginal women from indigenous governance, accomplished by establishing fraternal links between Aboriginal men, created fissures within Aboriginal families along gender lines.”¹²⁹ Gendered discrimination served a twofold purpose: attempting to universalize the Euro-Canadian family model and reconstituting the Indigenous family to reflect it, as well as removing Indigenous women from political influence. Public policy and legislation are thus critical for family formation, racial definitions, and nation building.¹³⁰ Indian status has been defined and regulated in an attempt to create uniformity across the nation, ordering the differences between the multitudes of Indigenous citizenship orders, kinship and legal systems, and genders.

From Wáhkôhtowin to Transracial Adoption

In Indigenous societies, kinship determines both Indigenous modes of governance and forms of land tenure.¹³¹ Marital patterns, child rearing, and kinship relations become the purview of the modern state precisely because they structure society and culture. In Indigenous societies kinship is an active principle of peoplehood, going beyond reproductive and familial connections. The colonization of kinship violently sundered not only intimate and familial ties but also the geopolitical connections that extend beyond human relationships to encompass the ties to land, animals, and ancestors that make up Indigenous identity. Anishinaabe/Ojibway legal scholar John Borrows eloquently articulates how Indigenous identity is rooted in kinship, in “‘Landed’ Citizenship: An Indigenous Declaration of Interdependence.” He observed, “My grandfather was born in 1901 on the western shores of Georgian Bay, at the Cape Croker Indian reserve. Generations before him were born on that same soil. Our births, lives and deaths on this site have brought us into citizenship with the land. We participate in its renewal, have responsibilities for its continuation, and grieve for its losses. As citizens with this land, we also feel the presence of our ancestors and strive with them to ensure that the relationships of our polity are respected. Our loyalties, allegiance, and affection are related to the land.^”132

Indigenous citizenship belongs simultaneously to a political body and to a geographical/landed space. This identity takes shape through the kinship relations expressed through not only biological ancestral connections, but also to places that are claimed through generations. Cree and Métis people share the belief that kinship is of central importance for individual and collective identity and is inseparable from land, home, community, or family.¹³³ Where the Indian Act’s sexual and gendered modes of elimination defined and regulated racial status, wáhkôhtowin (the Cree legal orders of kinship and other indigenous kinship systems) were based on obligations and relationships – genealogical and biological, but also adoptive.¹³⁴

The civilizing logic of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) Indian policy not only targeted Indigenous marital practices in an effort to sever kinship ties but also sought ideological Indian elimination through socialization and education of children in isolated residential schools. Both the churches and government shared the goal of assimilating the Canadian Indian population through child removal policies, a common practice in settler colonial nations.¹³⁵ Churches targeted children because, on the basis of earlier experiences with missionary activities, they considered adults unsuited to the total physical, mental, and moral transformation required for Indians to take their place in the Canadian nation. The origins of the logic of child removal to residential schools stemmed from the belief that only through separating children from their parents could they be effectively assimilated.136 The federal government and the churches considered the on-reserve day schools a failure in the efforts to rapidly assimilate Indian children. Families continued to engage in the Indigenous seasonal activities of gathering and hunting, and children’s school attendance was sporadic. Other justifications included the poor state of the clothing of the children who attended school, and lack of a school lunches.¹³⁷ Schools were often purposely located in remote and inaccessible locations, since visits from families were seen to be disruptive to the civilizing process. Orphans remained the preferred students.¹³⁸

A shift in approach occurred after the Second World War that culminated in growing numbers of children permanently removed from First Nations and Métis families and placed for adoption and in foster homes. While in some respects this points to evidence of a radical readjustment in racial boundaries, in fact much of the logics underlying Canadian Indian policy remained the same. Like past efforts at assimilation, the intimate integration of children initiated by social work professionals and supported by a federal bureaucracy armed with revised legislation and methods sought a reduction in expenditures in Indian Affairs. Between 1950 and the 1980s, when citizenship and integration became the focus of Indian assimilation, Indigenous transracial adoption rose to prominence as a key solution to the “Indian problem.” Social workers asserted their expertise in not only adjusting the personal deficiencies of Indian and Métis clients, but also enacting integration, one child at a time. Beginning in Saskatchewan as a pilot project with the Métis in Green Lake in the early 1950s, transracial adoption peaked in the early 1980s.

In 1951, with additional legal changes to the Indian Act, kinship relations underwent a heightened form of colonization. The application, in particular, of child welfare and adoption legislation to Indian people became an opportunity to secure the intimate integration of Indigenous children outside their communities of origin. Canadian Indian policy between the 1951 Indian Act and the White Paper of 1969 pursued a unilateral direction, that of removing the distinctions between Indian people in Canada and other Canadians, by incorporating them into the education, health, and welfare systems from which they had previously been excluded. While writing on this period has seen this process primarily from the vantage point of the political goals, integration played out in the personal lives of individuals through fostering and adoption policies, particularly once Indian people became citizens of the Canadian nation after 1960. The transracial adoption of individual children was the intimate expression of the larger administrative and political goals: integration and elimination. In this period the Euro-Canadian home and the intimate domain of the nuclear family was enlisted as a site for establishing new methods of shifting affective sensibilities through the colonization of Indigenous kinship.

The variant of Indigenous transracial adoption that emerged between 1967 and 1984 in Saskatchewan differed significantly from that of typical Anglo-Canadian infant adoption. The narrative of white infant adoption typically begins with a young mother with an unplanned pregnancy who seeks to provide a secure family for her infant while she can continue with her future plans. The child, surrendered voluntarily by the mother at the hospital, then becomes a wanted child in a new family, hand-picked by social service experts trained in the management of proper kin relations.139 Privacy legislation in Saskatchewan prevents researchers from undertaking qualitative or quantitative research on adoption files. One must rely on statistics compiled by social scientists for evidence for a study of transracial adoption. According to statistics compiled by Phillip Hepworth in 1979, Indigenous mothers rarely relinquished children voluntarily. Hepworth identified that a high proportion of native children were “illegitimate,” but, unlike white “illegitimate babies,” very few were relinquished for adoption after birth.¹⁴⁰ Hepworth found that the primary reason that Indian and Métis children came into care were for reasons of protection due to neglect. In 1973–74 the numbers varied between 94 and 96 per cent, while for non-Aboriginal children, that number was between 68 and 73 per cent. Thus a “typical adoption” involving an Indigenous infant took place only between 4 and 6 per cent of the time.¹⁴¹ This suggests that the majority of Indigenous mothers attempted to parent children despite economic and social challenges and rarely sought adoption as a voluntary solution. The numbers suggest that Indigenous children came into care primarily through apprehensions, rather than through unmarried parents’ legislation. In other words, the children were “scooped.”

After Phillip Hepworth published Foster Care and Adoption in Canada in 1980, it was undeniable that a worrisome number of First Nations and Métis children in Canada did not live in their family homes. In 1977 over half of Saskatchewan children in care were First Nations, Metis, or non-status, yet they made up only 20 per cent of the child population.142 Rather than diminishing, the figure climbed to 67 per cent in 1979.¹⁴³ In the years examined by Hepworth, 25 per cent of children coming into care were First Nations, and 25 per cent Métis. Of those children who became enmeshed in the provincial child care system, adoption was the outcome for only 3–4 per cent of Aboriginal children. Hepworth observed, “The available evidence suggests that native children once apprehended are less likely to be adopted and more likely to stay in care. The question then becomes whether the care child welfare services can provide is likely to be more beneficial than care provided in the child’s original home environment.”¹⁴⁴ A small number returned to their families, but the majority remained foster children in white foster homes, or moving between families. Analysing the phenomenon of transracial adoption, historian Karen Dubinsky asserts that “numbers provide part of the answer; overrepresentation is simply the racialization of poverty. But so too are the historical interactions of colonialism, which have consistently produced infantilized relations between Aboriginals and the Canadian state.”¹⁴⁵ Adoption of Indian children into non-Indigenous legal families in some cases masked issues that were essentially matters of poverty and colonization. Cross-cultural analysis of adoption through ethnohistorical research will reveal how transracial adoption has become the dominant paradigm through which to discuss Indigenous child welfare despite its statistically rare occurrence.

Saskatchewan led the county in these intervention efforts, with social workers involved at every twist and turn of this decades-long saga of disenfranchising and, more recently, trying to do better by Indigenous families and children. This is the story of a country and a province making policies to address problems without having the courage to name or face the root of the problem: the settler colonialism that undermined the very fabric of Indigenous societies. For First Nations and Métis children, adoption seldom provided a winning solution to the twin problems of illegitimacy and unmarried motherhood. Social workers identified the newly developing social problem of the “unmarried Indian mother” in the 1960s and the illegitimate Indian child, to which the solution was fostering and adoption in non-Native homes.146 These policies and programs were justified by social workers as they argued that adoption saved state welfare agencies money and privatized the solution to the “Indian problem.”

These combined impositions had deleterious effects on the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of Aboriginal people, individually and collectively. The Cree concept of mino pimatisiwin, meaning “living a good life,” encompasses the social and spiritual aspects of health and well-being within Cree societies. According to Maria Campbell, part of that good life includes kinship relations, how people live with and interact with one another.¹⁴⁷ The good life and health are based on how relations are managed and include all of one’s relations. Children had responsibilities to the community. Strong relationships between elders and children were considered critical for maintaining the strength and continuity of the people.¹⁴⁸ For Indigenous peoples, child removal is likened to the violence of warfare leading to the shattering of wáhkôhtowin, the system that connected each member to “all our relations.”¹⁴⁹ Despite these interventions, persistence and survival of Indigenous teachings have endured. Through the examples of adoption that follow, Indigenous families continued to find methods to care for children that reflected Indigenous kinship systems, sometimes aided by Canadian law, other times in spite of Canadian law.