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The Green Lake Children’s Shelter Experiment: From Institutionalization to Integration in Saskatchewan

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The brief headline “Shelter Opened for Métis” in the Regina Leader Post on 29 September 1949 detailed the official opening of the Green Lake Children’s Shelter for orphaned and neglected Métis children. The provincial CCF government built the first non-denominational children’s institution in Saskatchewan specifically for the Métis, which housed up to fifty children and employed fourteen staff members in 1947. The article captured the words of Minister of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation John Sturdy, who spoke of the long-term goals for the children. In “dealing with the rehabilitation of the Métis, they should have pride in their ancestry. It is hoped all these children will eventually be placed in foster homes, or after reaching the age of 16 they will be able to take their place in society.”1 The Green Lake Children’s Shelter closed amid a small scandal in 1951, four years after its opening. It stands as the earliest rehabilitation experiment applied to Indigenous children in the province. The Green Lake Children’s Shelter utilized the application of CCF secular therapeutic assimilation strategy and was the first expression of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous transracial adoption policy.

Rehabilitation was one side of a two-sided coin. On the flip side was relocation. Coinciding with the opening of the children’s shelter was another experiment undertaken with members of the provincial Métis population. The article entitled “Experiment with Métis: Punnichy Settlers Did Not Stay Long – Children’s Home Opened”² detailed the relocation of southern Métis people to the northern community of Green Lake. Saskatchewan readers were given a brief history, complete with pictures of recently constructed buildings, and introduced to the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation’s Métis strategy. The contact zone was depicted as a liminal space requiring proper guidance in order to emerge fully modernized and integrated into the provincial society and economy. The author stated, “Green Lake now hangs precariously – in socio-economic balance – between a fur trade past and a frontier agricultural potential.”3 However, readers were assured that despite the regressive tendencies, indications pointed to a bright future for both the Métis and the north with reassuring images of progress under government supervision. Happy children in front of the newly built children’s shelter stood smiling in one picture, and another had the principal proudly standing in front of the recently constructed schoolhouse. Another picture depicted the recently built church, and another a large and impressive government building. The three agents of modernization – the church, government, and school – would provide the necessary direction to ensure Métis children’s future would be among white society. The photos also provide an eerie representation of Douglas’s agents of intervention to correct the sociological problems of the subnormal family.⁴ Under the photo of the smiling children in front of the shelter, the caption read, “Happy little girls, with children’s Home in Background. Homeless Métis children have a community home financed by the government, until they become adopted into family homes.”⁵ The adoptive homes in question were with white families who the government hoped would play a role in their future.

Green Lake was the destination the government chose to relocate twenty-one Métis families from the Punnichy area and, eventually, several other Métis communities across the province.6 According to the article, “The families had been squatting on road allowances without economic facilities or much hope for the future. They were given 40 acres at Green Lake of bush land with much of it cultivatable, with the option of 40 more acres. Whatever the reason, of the 21 families, 6 remain.” The missing Métis did not seem to dampen enthusiasm for the project. When asked where the majority of the families had gone, the deputy minister of social welfare and rehabilitation, J.S. White, replied, “Where have the other 15 families gone? We don’t know, though some of them did head back for Punnichy.”⁷ It was hoped that those settlers who did remain would stay and prove themselves in the semi-agricultural settlement schemes. The messages printed in Saskatchewan were intended to be positive. The CCF government demonstrated that it was addressing concerns that had been raised about the condition of the Métis by the public and municipalities.

“Experiment with Métis,” Saskatoon Star Phoenix, 1949

The Social Work Profession and the Rationalized Logics of Indigenous Child Removal in Saskatchewan

Addressing the Regional Conference on Social Welfare in June 1946, Tommy Douglas articulated his vision for Saskatchewan in charting a new course for government-administered welfare services: “In terms of technological progress we will measure our success by what society does for the under privileged, the subnormal, for the widow, for the aged and the unwanted child, and recognize her responsibility for the weak in society. Canada will, in this way, take her place among the great nations of the World.”8 Through rehabilitating families to take their proper place in the modernizing province, the CCF envisioned social work professionals providing expert therapeutic services, case by case, for the “subnormals” and others deemed in need of assistance. The recently reorganized Department of Social Welfare would be the vanguard of social welfare and child welfare practice as the state moved in to ensure families carried out their responsibilities toward younger members, and offered therapeutic support for mothers without male breadwinners. The gendered nature of child welfare legislation has been identified by feminist historians to penalize mothers and fathers who were unable or unwilling to provide for offspring.⁹ As Veronica Strong-Boag has argued, “The rights of those who were judged to be inadequate family men were to be limited by the male-led government that would better protect the nations’ human resources.”¹⁰ Métis men, who had been provided the opportunity to be rehabilitated into the proper role of breadwinner and agriculturalist, were deemed to have failed by 1961. Reports of illegitimacy and common-law relationships among the Métis required the interventions of social workers who had become the nation’s leading experts on the “problem of the unwed mother,”¹¹ while offering solutions to the dilemma of Indigenous integration. Métis children entered the child welfare system via three facets of child welfare legislation: apprehension due to neglect, identification through unmarried parents legislation, and legal adoption.12

Social workers came to play a critical role in assisting newcomers to adjust to the norms and laws of Canadian citizenship. As trusted “gatekeepers,” social workers employed strategies to ensure that immigrant families and individuals integrate as modern democratic citizens for the health of the nation itself.¹³ Mildred Battel, Saskatchewan’s first professionally trained social worker, was part of the team engaged in modernizing the Department of Social Welfare, formerly the Department of Reconstruction, Labour and Public Welfare.¹⁴ The development of Saskatchewan’s child welfare legislation and administration had taken place gradually during the early twentieth century. Provincial responsibility for child welfare and social aid had been based on the division of powers at Confederation in the British North America Act, with “all matters generally of a merely local or private nature” given to the provinces.¹⁵ At the time, caring for children was the responsibility of families, the churches, and voluntary societies; by the twentieth century reform efforts in public education, health, and welfare increasingly saw the state playing a larger role. Child protection legislation in Saskatchewan had been closely based on similar legislation first passed in Ontario under J.J. Kelso, entitled “An Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children, 1893.”¹⁶ The defining aspect of child welfare legislation was the transfer of guardianship by the court from biological parents to an agency. Assisted by J.J. Kelso, Saskatchewan passed the Child Protection Act in 1908, after which a number of Children’s Aid Societies arose in cities and towns across Saskatchewan. The Bureau of Child Protection formed in 1911 to administer the legislation and provide services for children in areas not covered by Children’s Aid Societies.¹⁷

In the early years of the child welfare branch, the underlying premise, that “children must be protected,” was based on the courts’ determination of the “best interests of the child.” The primary method of protection was through removing children from the care of parents into the care of the state, utilizing community resources such as foster homes, adoption, and institutions.¹⁸ The Bureau of Child Protection, which operated from 1911 to 1944, had been the government agency responsible for implementing the legislation, and Children’s Aid Societies made up of volunteers were tasked with the administration of protecting neglected or orphaned (primarily non-Indigenous) children. Not until the 1930s was there mention of case work and social work approaches, as well as the terms unmarried mother and putative father. The first social worker in the Bureau of Child Welfare was hired in 1943.19 1940 was the first year that the Métis problem was cited in the annual reports of the Department of Social Welfare revealing the prior exclusion of Métis families and children from social work services, while also separating Métis out as racialized and in need of specialized therapeutic interventions.²⁰

Mildred Battel, child welfare director, 1952–65 (R-A11592-1, SAB)

Children at Green Lake Orphanage, top, and the orphanage building, bottom (images above and on subsequent pages courtesy Lawrence Arnault, Gabriel Dumont Institute Archives)

Theresa Aubichon, Lillian Cook, Stella Aubichon, and unknown

In 1944 the Department of Social Welfare took over responsibility for the Child Welfare Branch and replaced the former Department of Reconstruction, Labour and Public Welfare under Minister O. Valleau.²¹ One of the first projects of the newly reorganized department was planning for a children’s shelter at the Métis settlement at Green Lake “to give proper care and training to upwards of 50 children who are either illegitimate or orphaned” as well as “a long-range plan for the rehabilitation of the Métis population in the province.”22 There were plans for expansion of child welfare, and field staff in child welfare were encouraged to take courses in social work; it was hoped that the department would have a complement of fully trained social workers in the near future.²³

Roy (Kennedy) Eva, unknown, and Morin “Roy” Flavie

The Green Lake Children’s Shelter was a short-lived experiment in providing residential care for Métis children in a remote location using southern white employees. The shelter provided specifically for “Métis children who are wards of department, and from Northern parts of the province, neglected and illegitimate.”24 As the early social welfare professionals in Saskatchewan stated, often “neglected” Métis children were not so much in need of protection from neglectful parents as from poverty. Of prime concern was re-education:

In certain areas of the province, neglect among this group is very serious – neglect arising from inadequate school facilities and improper housing. When it has become necessary to apprehend the children the problem of proper placement is difficult due to prejudice and the difficulty that the children have in adjusting themselves to a new environment. In cooperation with the Department of Municipal Affairs a survey was made of children in the Green Lake Area and as a result of this survey plans were instituted to build a shelter in which an attempt will be made to specifically train these children.²⁵

While at the shelter, the children had access to medical and nursing care and attended a nearby school operated by the Department of Education. The non-denominational shelter opened 5 February 1947 and cared for twenty-five children up to sixteen years old. Non-Indigenous child welfare experts from the southern portion of the province staffed the shelter. Alice Dales, a child welfare consultant and social worker in the province reflected that “the decision was based on the assumption that it would be easier for the children if they were left in the surroundings familiar to them; because of their ethnic origin it was thought it would be difficult for them to move out to integrate with the ‘white’ outside world.”²⁶ The social worker rationalized that Métis children required an institutional setting in Green Lake, rather than direct placement into foster homes, because moving children from their surroundings would have been too abrupt. Once at the home “most of them slept in beds for the first time and enjoyed foods and clothes unknown to the world they had formerly lived in. It was surprising how quickly these children were able to adapt themselves to the standards of their white cousins and how much pride and pleasure they took out of the finer things of life.” Part of the government rationale was that Métis children needed to be trained in Euro-Canadian hygienic standards prior to being fit for adoption into white, middle-class family homes.

In the article documenting the rise and fall of this experiment, Saskatchewan adoption worker Alice Dales documented the shift from institutionalization to integration of Indigenous children. Likewise, she revealed her own and the government’s racial and class-based ideology that informed their approach to the Métis children. The children were characterized as parentless and in need of rescue. She inaccurately claimed, “These children were from broken homes, orphans, children of unmarried parents, and children of unknown origin,”27 rather than admitting that they were far from parentless children, and had possibly been abducted from poor Métis families and incarcerated for this social experiment. What had earlier been characterized as improper housing and lack of access to school facilities in the annual report was recast disingenuously to reinforce tropes of Indigenous inferiority and disordered family relations.²⁸ When explaining the rationale for closing the home, Dales blamed the community of Green Lake itself. She claimed that Green Lake suffered from “regressive tendencies” and was thus unsuitable for a true rehabilitation project.²⁹ She felt that “the standard of living is low, and because of the lack of opportunity and education the Métis appear shiftless and lacking in initiative.”³⁰ Despite the commonly accepted child welfare practice that considered the best place for children was in the natural family setting, the Métis children, because of their race, were categorized as an exceptional case requiring an exceptional response. Forty to forty-five children, aged one to sixteen, had originally been part of the experiment.

Soon after the opening of the Green Lake shelter, difficulties arose. Documenting the radical new approach to integration and caring for Indigenous children, Dales’s article detailed the process by which children were institutionalized then deinstitutionalized in Saskatchewan. Private correspondence also hints at another reason for the demise of the Green Lake Shelter.³¹ Personnel issues and racial tensions between the local Métis and the white staff hired to look after the shelter created political problems for the CCF. Local Métis people resented its presence in their midst and questioned the purpose and quality of care the children received there. They felt the shelter was poorly run, and all positions within the shelter, with the exception of the lowest paid, were staffed by outsiders (white, southern government employees). An official sent north to investigate the charges conceded “the dismissal of the Métis janitor and the employment of the non-Métis person has apparently caused some resentment among the Métis people in this area.”32 Regardless of the precise reason to close the short-lived shelter, the rehabilitation of the Métis children was deemed a success. In this case, “success” meant that the children were deemed suitable to then proceed to white foster homes far from the scrutiny of the local community who could advocate on their behalf.

According to Dales, who reflected the ideology of the CCF government, the official reason for closing the shelter stemmed from a newly developing integrationist, colour-blind philosophy that Indigenous children were no different from Euro-Canadian children. Dales wrote that the government and social welfare professionals questioned the institutional approach, wondering if it were “adequately meeting the needs of the children it was set up to serve and that anyhow an institution was not what we wanted for these particular children, whom we had grown to realize were not different from other children.”³³ A new methodology of caring for Indigenous children was taking shape as special staff meetings were held in various locations as the drive to find foster homes began.³⁴ Social workers sought to engage the public by seeking out church leaders through writing letters and personal visits in order to inform the wider Saskatchewan community of changes underway that required the increased inclusion of foster and adoptive families. Dales commented on the importance of home visits to white communities to inform them about their new role in integrating Métis children: “These visits were enlightening. We learned from them how uninformed communities can be about programs, and how frequently we forget to bring them [the community] along with us. The interest and concern for children aroused by these trips was encouraging, and proved that an enlightened community can make a valuable contribution to our work if given a chance.”³⁵ The local white community was enlisted to assist with rehabilitating the individual Métis children, since the institutional setting had proven unworkable, perhaps expensive, and in a Métis setting that worked against the government’s goals of integration. The Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation deemed the shelter unsuitable to the goals of full integration because of the location at Green Lake with the large concentration of Métis families and conflicting interests of the community and the government concerning Métis children.

Not all the local people saw the merits of the experiment. Social work professionals needed to re-educate the local Catholic sisters about the revolutionary new integration plans. Dales recalled, “During these trips we discussed the virtues of foster homes as compared with institutional care in general terms, without revealing too much of our future plans.”36 At first the nuns who taught the children were sceptical about foster homes because they had developed close relationships with the children and were protective of them. However, after being fully “educated” with the new theories on child rearing, the sisters gave social workers their blessing, even to the point of suggesting people who might have been interested in the program.³⁷

After securing the support of the white community authorities, the task of revising a century of racial orthodoxy and engaging the public began. Dales initially met with resistance when educating the white public about its role in integration and assimilation: “The biggest obstacle encountered was the reluctance of communities and individuals to accept Métis children. We encouraged people to think about these children as children. And not as classes or colours, and helped to see that their wants and needs were the same as those of children the world over. Where it was possible to get this interpretation across, the great majority of people were able to accept the Métis child.”³⁸

The ultimate goal of the project was full integration into non-Indigenous middle-class society; therefore school boards, teachers, merchants, and municipal and public officials were interviewed and acquainted with their plans. The shelter closed in June 1951. Two years later, the children had been moved to various communities in the province.³⁹ From this experiment, Alice Dales concluded, “We learned from this experience that you do not plan impetuously for children, and our premise that a community would not accept a minority group such as the Métis was false. We also learned that in meeting the needs of these children institutional care was not the answer. We found out too what it means to have well informed communities and the importance of having them keep pace with our program.”⁴⁰

Closing the children’s shelter did not immediately stimulate changes to the overall child welfare policies in the province but provided evidence that white families were willing to incorporate Métis children if provided with the proper preparation and compensation. After the Green Lake Shelter experiment demonstrated that white families were willing to foster Indigenous children, emphasis was placed on seeking homes for Métis children and providing services to Métis women.

The legislation guiding and defining family and state obligations toward children expanded in the 1946 Child Welfare Act. Modern notions of gender and childhood held by Anglo-Canadian middle-class reformers in the primarily rural, immigrant settler, agricultural province were reflected in the amendments.41 According to former child welfare director Mildred Battel, underlying the Child Welfare Act of 1946 was “the assumption that children have rights, and the rights of parents can be limited or removed if children could be harmed by the actions of the parents.”⁴² The Act was to ensure that the child who is or is likely to become neglected, within the meaning of the Act, was protected. The Act broadened the scope of the child welfare program and authorized that “any officer of the department, local superintendent, constable or other peace officer may without warrant apprehend and take to a place of safety any child who is within one or more of the following descriptions, and may make entry without warrant into any premises for the purposes of such apprehension.”⁴³

The criteria for determining if a child was neglected were based primarily on the ability of the father as head of household to ensure that the mother and child’s material, physical, and moral needs were met. While Métis and Indian children were not targeted specifically, many would fall under these categories following the removal policies, relocation, and social dislocation in urban centres and road allowance communities. The following criteria for neglect would be most relevant for Métis children living in impoverished circumstances and applied to any child

a: who is found begging or receiving alms in a street, building or place of public resort, or loitering in a public place after 10 o’clock in the evening;…

c: whose home, by reason of neglect, cruelty, or depravity on the part of his parent or parents, guardian, or other person in whose charge he may be, is an unfit and improper place for him;…

i: who is abandoned or deserted by his parents or only living parent, or who is deserted by one parent and whose other parent is unfit or unwilling to maintain him;

j: who is a child born out of wedlock whose mother is either unwilling or unfit to maintain him;…

o: who is subject to such blindness, deafness, feeblemindedness or physical disability as is likely having due regard to the circumstances of his parents or family, to make him a charge upon the public, or who is exposed to infection from tuberculosis or from any venereal disease by reason of proper precautions not being taken or who is suffering from such lack of medical or surgical care as is likely to interfere with his normal development.44

The judge who found the child to be neglected had the option to return the child with supervision to its parents, order the child to be committed temporarily to the care of the department, or order a permanent committal.⁴⁵ When the child was committed, the minister required information about its age, religious affiliation, racial origin, and nationality. Once the child was committed as a ward to the department, the minister became the legal guardian, until he or she reached twenty-one years of age.

Prevalent attitudes towards the Métis in 1944 had led to the continued relocation and isolation of Métis peoples, and thus the initial child-caring solution for Métis children was the short-lived Green Lake shelter experiment. However, the Child Welfare Branch had been gradually reducing the use of institutions for white children by increasing payments to foster families to make substitute caring more appealing. According to historians of child welfare, Rooke and Schnell, this move from institutionalization to foster homes reflected a newly developing “rhetoric of family life [that] meant the best institution had to be inferior to all respectable working class families because families, unlike [institutions], could provide for the psychological development as well as the occupational training of children.”⁴⁶ The move toward fostering is based in part on the belief in the transformative power of respectable family life to properly socialize children as future citizens. Policies that paid householders to receive such children as family members and not as unpaid labour attempted to narrow the class gap between children and households, and limited numbers of children in individual foster homes to ensure individual attention.⁴⁷ Child welfare practice stressed the positive aspects of the “criteria of childhood.”⁴⁸ If children were separated from unsavoury families and moral contamination, in exchange they received placement in respectable homes where they could develop an association with positive lower-class life. This method promised a preventative approach to social disorder through inculcation of the habits of decency, industry, and regularity in stable families.49 Foster families, paid by the state, ensured that the citizens did not question the criteria of disadvantaged Métis families and lent their assistance to socializing Métis children.

Unmarried Parents legislation had been on the books in Saskatchewan since 1930 and provided limited financial assistance to unmarried mothers or guardians, as a protective measure for children. After 1944 increased input from social workers who were ensuring that adoption followed the legitimate procedures led to revisions in the Child Welfare Act of 1946. Although the title sounded gender neutral, Unmarried Parents Assistance was designed specifically for unmarried white mothers who were reported to the director of child welfare by hospital staff after giving birth. Women were then provided the guidance of social workers in planning for their future.⁵⁰ In 1945 the program was transferred to Social Aid Branch, then in 1946 back to Child Welfare Branch, so that services such as adoption, already offered to unmarried parents by the Child Welfare Branch, could be combined to “ensure case work services to these recipients.”⁵¹ The early administration of Unmarried Parents assistance reflected social attitudes toward unmarried mothers and children. No Métis received assistance, mothers with “illegitimate” children received less assistance than those whose children were “legitimate,” and no mother received assistance until the putative father had been contacted.⁵² The objective of this program was to identify potential neglect cases, expand the realm of practice for professional social workers, bring putative fathers within the therapeutic circle, and prevent the feared “black market adoptions.”⁵³

The revised Unmarried Mother’s Legislation (UML) passed in 1946 has been deemed “a revolutionary move” in an era when having a child out of wedlock was scandalous.⁵⁴ Some critics argued that the legislation condoned unwed motherhood.⁵⁵ In part the UML provided financial assistance to unmarried mothers and assisted women to obtain the financial support of putative fathers. The act read, “A single woman may apply to the director for advice and protection in matters connected with her child or the birth of her child and the director may take such action as may seem to him advisable in the interests of such single woman and child.”⁵⁶ While financial assistance was available, in many of the cases children were simply surrendered for adoption.⁵⁷ If mothers opted to retain children, they were required to apply to the Social Welfare Board for financial assistance. The legislation stated that the board was responsible to “determine whether or not such mother has made reasonable effort to provide a suitable home for the child, has assumed the duties and responsibilities of motherhood and has made a reasonable effort to obtain support from the father pursuant to the provisions of this act … if in its opinion the application is meritorious the board may authorize the payment of a monthly allowance to the mother of such child, on the recommendation of the director, the allowance may be cancelled without notice.”58

The board had the authority to judge the mother’s ability to parent, and if she was found acceptable, would offer financial support. On the other hand, if found lacking, she would likely have to relinquish her child for state care, where the child would be either placed in foster care or placed for adoption.

The revisions also made it mandatory, rather than voluntary, for hospitals and maternity homes to report births to unwed mothers. This action brought all unwed mothers under the gaze of the state. The legislation simultaneously offered assistance and technologies of helping that would provide unwed mothers, often deemed “neurotic girls,” the ability to resolve their hidden psychological tensions and relinquish babies for adoption to proper families.⁵⁹ As Mildred Battel recalled, “An unmarried mother was told of the services which were available. If she wished to give up her child, this problem was worked through with her. Their difficulties were many – sometimes it was concern about the father and her feelings in this area; sometimes her family; and frequently a complete lack of financial resources.”⁶⁰ Within two weeks of the date a single woman entered an institution for pregnancy, the institution was required to fill out a form with the date of the birth and send it to the director. The legislation stated, “Any person violating subsection (1) shall be guilty of an offense and liable on summary conviction, to a fine of not less than $10 and not more than $100.”⁶¹ Hospitals, maternity homes, and midwives were required to inform Child Welfare Branch or face violating the new law. Each woman was required to submit to the technologies of helping offered by social work professionals to ensure their parenting plans met with the branch approval or face removal of children.

Prior to the late 1950s, Métis mothers were excluded from receiving Unmarried Mother’s allowances. Neither did Métis mothers and children obtain state-based adoption services available to white infants and mothers.62 Several possibilities may explain why. In part it had been feared that Métis women would “reproduce carelessly” and look to the state for assistance, since it was believed that there was not a cultural stigma attached to unwed motherhood.⁶³ Perhaps homes could not be found for Métis infants, or it was simply a matter of discrimination.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, after the success in placing Métis children from the shelter, the argument that white families would not accept Métis children could no longer be sustained. When attempting to determine how best to address the tensions involved in bringing Métis women into the definition of unwed mothers, Mildred Battel asked of this new approach, “How can there be provision for overall assistance without it being interpreted and publicized as a right?”⁶⁵ If Métis mothers did not internalize a sense of shame at having an unplanned pregnancy and did not identify as an “unwed mother,” it was unlikely that they would respond to the interventions of social workers as the helping pseudo-mother. This aspect of “case work” planning and therapeutic intervention was highly racialized and culturally relative.⁶⁶ While some may have accessed adoption services voluntarily, Métis mothers now came under the intense scrutiny of social workers armed with legislation to assess their abilities as parents and to judge the validity of their “plan.”

The Department of Welfare officially abandoned the Métis colony scheme in 1961, suspended support to Métis colonies, and encouraged the Métis to leave rural Saskatchewan and take up residence in the towns and cities.⁶⁷ In reflecting on the outcome of the colony schemes, Director of Welfare Talbot stated,

The lack of resources in these communities has made it almost impossible to provide for the Métis people living there and we have directed our efforts toward diminishing the Métis population in these communities. We have encouraged and helped those who are able to do so to take work in urban centres and our vocational training program has trained and placed 39 Métis youngsters in permanent employment. Our problem at present involved those Métis between 17 and 30 years of age who have very low academic education coupled with some indifference to vocational training and employment.⁶⁸

These men faced a bleak future and would have few economic prospects when entering the cities and competing with white men for jobs.

Child welfare statistics clashed with the positive assessment of Welfare Director Talbot, who wrote, “There has been a reduction in numbers of families in most depressed areas as a result of these activities, and discussion with city welfare officials does not disclose any special problems with those who have moved to urban centres and been employed.”69 The Child Welfare Branch became the primary department tasked with the policy of Indian and Métis integration in the years after 1961. Growing numbers of Métis and First Nations people came to the attention of child welfare authorities as Métis moved from colonies and road allowances to cities.⁷⁰ Social welfare workers observed the changing demographics: “It appears that more services are being provided to Indian unmarried mothers than in former years. More services as they move off reserve.”⁷¹ In the 1959 annual report of the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation, the first mention was made of the province’s Indian and Métis population becoming problematic, or over-represented. However, the department was optimistic in its new role of integrating children: “A serious attempt is being made to equip all children to become as useful citizens as possible.”⁷²

While official messaging spoke to colour-blind and uniform services for Indian and Métis children, the annual report for the Child Welfare Branch in 1960–1 was the first year in which wards of the department were differentiated on the basis of race. Of the 1,482 children in foster homes, 580 were Métis or Indian. Since Roman Catholic adoption and foster homes were in short supply, and many families were reluctant to accept Indian or Métis children, the department made concentrated efforts to find white adoption and foster homes for Indigenous children. It was believed that even for Indian and Métis children, if the child whose parents were no longer the guardians was legally free, the best plan was adoption.⁷³ Newspaper, radio, and television were used to entice white families in Saskatchewan to become foster and adoptive parents.⁷⁴ Not surprisingly, the increase in children entering the child welfare system was attributed to the greater number of Indian and Métis families moving to cities.⁷⁵

A new problem was beginning to take shape on the horizon, threatening to derail the hopes of social workers that initially proposed to solve the Indian and Métis problem through integration into welfare services. Since white families were the essential ingredient in socializing Indigenous infants and small children, their unwillingness proved a serious liability. In 1963, at the annual meeting of the federal Canadian Welfare Council, provincial directors of child welfare discussed the adoption problems they experienced, and the need to expand the public’s notion of “adoptability.”76 Social welfare professionals were constructing the “problem of the overrepresentation of Indigenous children,” mystifying the loss of land, homelessness, poverty and severed kinship ties that post-war policies engendered.⁷⁷ At the national meeting, directors from the western provinces with large Indian and Métis populations spoke of the many children of mixed race who were being supported by provincial governments in foster homes. The directors 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.”⁷⁸ Mildred Battel’s problem was the hundreds of Métis and Indian children for whom she was responsible. She lamented, “It’s always much easier to find homes for fair-haired, blue-eyed babies … it’s the mixed-race children that represent the hard, unadoptable group.” Education could solve this dilemma. She felt that “the answer must be found in a reflection of public opinion.” Mr MacFarlane, welfare director for Alberta, noted that 1,300 Métis children were in foster homes in his province and endorsed advertising these children to find them homes. He termed the advertising an “expensive but efficient means to dispel old wives tales about adoption.”⁷⁹

Racial attitudes in Saskatchewan proved intractable and contributed to obstructing the idealized solution for permanent wards. According to Mildred Battel, Indian families rarely came forward to adopt children. However, as the following chapter will illustrate, Indian parents were indeed interested in adopting Indian children, but the legal and policy barriers prevented the adoption of Indigenous children into First Nations’ family homes. Home studies, poverty, legal distinctions between children and parents, the need for marriage licences, forms, and medical exams all made social worker–sanctioned adoption unattainable or unappealing to Indian and Métis families. In 1965 twenty Indian children were adopted into white homes, but that was but a small fraction of potential adoptees, since one-third of children in permanent care were of Native ancestry.⁸⁰

Increasing numbers of Indian and Métis children apprehended meant that children were placed in foster care with no possibility of permanent family connection, whether adoptive or biological. In 1965 the number of children apprehended from white parents began to decrease while Indian and Métis apprehensions increased. A total of 131 more children than the previous year were apprehended, and all from Indian and Métis parents. In addition, Indian and Métis mothers began to relinquish infants for adoption, whether voluntarily or because they were coerced by social workers armed with Unmarried Mothers legislation.81 Rather than seeking an alternative to the apprehension of Indigenous children from poor families or those who lived in substandard housing in urban areas, the government pursued the transracial adoption solution with greater intensity. In discussing the problem in the local newspaper, Battel explained, “Not only is it essential that homes be found for Métis and Indian children, but the acceptance and attitude of the general public must change. It is hoped that the adoption of a non-white child will become just another adoption rather than a special placement.”⁸² Battel and other directors responsible for child welfare proposed this as the best solution to the emerging problem of over-representation of Indigenous children in the system. The key, she believed, was to craft a message that would transform adoption from what had previously been a mirror to the biological nuclear family, into a liberal experiment in race relations and integration.⁸³

The CCF government under Premier Tommy Douglas initially developed a Métis policy founded on the program of rehabilitation articulated in his 1933 master’s thesis, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family.” This was premised on relocating, segregating, and rehabilitating entire communities of Métis in colonies, with the eventual goal of integration. Métis people came under the jurisdiction of the provincial CCF government, which had committed to applying reformist strategies aimed at the Indigenous family through the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation, rather than addressing land loss and racial intolerance. The failure of the Métis rehabilitation experiment of segregation and rehabilitation was replaced with integration of children into the child welfare system. The case of the Green Lake Children’s Home represents a bridge between the past policy of segregation and relocation through institutionalization, and the later policy of integration into Euro-Canadian foster and adoptive families. Also the Green Lake experiment is the earliest example of a government-directed transracial adoption program. This published example set the stage for how future Indigenous children could be integrated into the larger provincial system. The experts viewed the Métis people, as both Indigenous peoples and provincial citizens, as best suited to integration.

While the CCF government had plans to solve the “Métis problem” when first elected, the “problem” tested the limits of expert knowledge. Furthermore, it highlighted the persistence of settler colonial mentalities in the drive to eliminate Indigenous land rights and self-determination. This early Métis relocation and rehabilitation experiment informed the government’s approach to providing services to the Indian people after 1951. By viewing the needs of Indian and Métis people through the lens of welfare and rehabilitation, assimilation took the guise of benign and de-racialized technologies of helping. Likewise, Indigenous people also sought to negotiate the best option for their children amid the era of government neglect and racial marginalization. They engaged the government to address their political and economic grievances rather than accept paternalistic welfare services. The activist CCF provincial government sought to utilize a range of child welfare and adoption legislation to rehabilitate single mothers and Métis children, whereas the federal Indian Act sought the sexual reorganization of the Indian family and reduction of expenses. Adoption of Indian and Métis children slowly gained traction as a viable method for integration in the repertoire of child welfare caring options. The Métis were the first recruits in the early CCF years but they would not be the last.