Conclusion: Intimate Indigenization
Indigenous transracial adoption, promoted and publicized through the Adopt Indian and Métis Project, dismantled Indigenous kinship systems in pursuit of Indigenous elimination. Transracial adoption integrated Indigenous children into the Euro-Canadian nuclear family to be socialized for proper Canadian citizenship. Technologies of helping applied by professional social workers armed with provincial child welfare legislation applied unilaterally to all Indigenous peoples reflected the secular evolution in the bleeding heart of settler colonialism. Indigenous suffering from almost a century of colonial dispossession, residential schooling, poverty, trauma, and dislocation from loss of land was recast as a child welfare matter, leading to interventions and the crisis of over-representation in child welfare systems across Canada. Specifically, for First Nations women and children, conflicts between provincial and federal laws created a state of limbo, where the provincial Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation and social welfare workers became a substitute for ensuring the care of enfranchised women and children. For Métis peoples, failed relocation and rehabilitation schemes were replaced by individualized responses to child neglect and lack of housing. The over-representation of Indigenous children in the 1960s and 1970s emerged from post-war Indian policies and gendered and racialized laws meant to enforce a singular version of the formation of the nuclear family on Indigenous peoples. Child removal and integration into Euro-Canadian (and in some cases Euro-American) adoptive homes were but another mechanism in the continuum of the colonization of Indigenous kinship.
A new direction for Indian Affairs in Canada took shape after the Second World War, symbolized by the transfer of the Indian Affairs Branch from the Ministry of Mines and Resources (1936–50) to the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration (1950–65). With the new focus on citizenship came a revision in the legal regime that directed bureaucrats in administering the policies that dominated the lives of Indian people in Canada. The Indian Act, an evolving body of laws respecting Indian people in Canada, underwent further revision in 1951 to remove the most egregious aspects while placing greater emphasis on the preparation of Indian people to accept the voluntary nature of democratic citizenship.1 A new terminology reflecting voluntary citizenship replaced the more coercive terminology as Indian assimilation shifted to Indian integration.2 The alteration of tribal kinship systems and gender relations to mirror that of Euro-Canadian heterosexual nuclear families, as in previous times, was an essential aspect of preparation for Canadian citizenship.3 After 1951 colonization of Indigenous kinship by policing genealogies and removing women who married non-Indian men, as well as the application of provincial laws on reserves, meant that Canadian citizenship became gendered and racialized more than ever before.4 The gendered and racialized laws activated unique forms of disadvantage for Indian women and children. On one hand, the Indian Act was a disincentive to legal marriage and destabilized families. It also enhanced gendered form of compulsory enfranchisement that originated in the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1857 when women were enfranchised along with their husbands.5 While feminist scholars recognized that this provision has contributed to the historic and current gender tensions among First Nations men and women, there are also implications for child welfare. The tenuous nature of this arrangement, the sole dependency of enfranchised women on their male provider, becomes evident through research into transracial adoption and child welfare history.6
The outcome of gender tensions, combined with new theories in child socialization and the rise of therapeutic government, legitimized child removal and transracial adoption as a “common sense” solution to colonization. This complex history of the child welfare system, with its colour-blind experiment in Indigenous transracial adoption, took shape immediately after the Second World War, when Canada embarked on a modern nation-building project. Childhood socialization was one area where the origins of Indian difference was thought to be located.7 Early childhood socialization took on greater significance once the pseudo-science of racial theory had been dismantled. Knowledge gained of the intimate through “scientific inquiry” by experts in psychology, ethnology, or anthropology could be wielded to effect integration with “complete consent and satisfaction.”
During the review of Indian Act legislation in 1946–8, social welfare experts represented by the Canadian Association of Social Workers and Canadian Welfare Council, positioned themselves as ideally suited to assist the Department of Indian Affairs with integration of Indian people into Canadian social and economic life. Their expertise in adjusting personalities and individuals to the new social realities, working with unwed mothers, juvenile delinquents, and putative fathers in white society, could be applied to Indian people. The submission acknowledged crises facing Indian people, such as poor housing and the high rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality.8 On malnutrition, the submission pointed to the 1945 medical survey, which concluded that malnutrition, rather than racial characteristics, likely contributed to “Indian malaise”; the characteristics historically termed ”shiftlessness,“ “indolence,” and “improvidence and inertia,” “so long regarded as hereditary traits in the Indian race, may at the root be really manifestations of malnutrition. Further it is probable that the Indian’s greatest susceptibility to many diseases, paramount among which is tuberculosis, may be attributable among other causes to their high degree of malnutrition arising from lack of proper foods.”9
The elusive causes of Indian poor heath, starvation, and poor housing were the consequence of federal Indian policies.10 However, these were brushed aside by social welfare experts to shift to their primary concern. Directly following the references to ill health and malnutrition was the concern about increasing rates of prostitution and juvenile delinquency, the practice of custom adoption, illegitimate Indian children being forced off reserve, and lack of provincial legislation on reserves. The recognition that such outcomes were due to failed government policies was erased. Instead, attention was directed to the social pathologies and individual maladaptation that social work professionals felt could be alleviated with their specialized knowledge.
Social welfare professionals strongly positioned themselves to participate in partnership with Indian Affairs by aligning themselves with the goal of Indian assimilation. They stated, “In our judgment, the only defensible goal for a national program must be the full assimilation of Indians into Canadian life, which involves not only their admission to full citizenship, but also the right and opportunity for them to participate freely with other citizens in all community affairs.”11 As members of a profession seeking legitimacy, which had gained respect from work with immigrant and urban populations during the Depression, they found that Indian Affairs appeared to provide a virtually unlimited field for their specialized services. Social workers recalibrated the Indian problem as one of personal, social, and economic adjustment, offering the tools of their trade, such as adoption and apprehensions, to enact integration. Like past attempts at assimilation, “success” proved elusive.
Saskatchewan was an early pioneer in utilizing social welfare expertise to solve the manifestations of settler colonialism that have been referred to as the “Indian problem.”12 Under the direction of Tommy Douglas, Métis rehabilitation was orchestrated through the provincial Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation. Marginalization, poor health, extreme poverty, lack of education, and poor housing characterized Métis experience through the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the First Nations people, Métis did not fall under the Indian Act legislation and as such were provincial citizens. However, they remained outsiders to provincial Euro-Canadian social and economic life. Like First Nations people, Métis suffered from the Euro-Canadian belief that they stood outside modernity as relics of a bygone era.13 After the defeat of Louis Riel in 1885, Métis people recreated small communities on road allowances.14 The CCF government experiment in the rehabilitation of the “subnormal” Métis initially took shape in relocating families to colonies to be trained as subsistence farmers and housewives. Métis children were to be educated in schools run by the Department of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation. When the government officially abandoned the relocation and brief colony scheme in 1961, rehabilitation attention shifted to prioritizing children and unmarried mothers. From 1961 onward, social workers were on the front lines where they could best enact the rehabilitation of Métis women and children through child welfare legislation.
The colonization of Indigenous kinship after the Second World War departed from earlier attempts through education of children in residential schools and domestication of women in the home and shifted to integration into the child welfare system and surveillance by social workers through provincial child welfare laws surrounding “neglect.”15 Indigenous children removed from families and communities increasingly became wards of Saskatchewan’s Social Welfare Department. Social workers proposed establishing kin relations with non-Indigenous parents through “modern adoption” as a potential solution. The Adopt Indian and Métis program enticed Euro-Canadian families in Saskatchewan to consider adopting either a First Nations or Métis child through an extensive television, radio, and slide-show advertising campaign. After the successful pilot in the southeastern portion of the province, the Adopt Indian and Métis program was extended to include the rest of Saskatchewan.
State-directed Indigenous transracial adoption represented a radical rethinking of racial boundaries that had been erected between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on the prairies. Transracial adoption was the most intimate form of integration that Canadian policymakers had attempted. It erased children’s history of indigeneity and severed ties to family and communities. Simultaneously, the problems of Indian and Métis families were individualized and pathologized. Social work professionals became a primary group in Canadian to manage the fallout from loss of land, sovereignty, poverty, residential school abuse, and gender tensions that followed from Indian Act legislation. Managed by professional social workers and bolstered by legal protections, transracial adoption promised “safety, naturalness, and authenticity.”16 The rational and professional methodology used by social workers – such as regulation, interpretation, standardization, and naturalization – promised to minimize the potential risk in creating families through transracial adoption. These softer “technologies of helping” appealed to post-war Euro-Canadian politicians and citizens. Adoption was promoted as a legal, safe, and morally neutral method to create families and manage Indigenous relations. Adoption services provided by Saskatchewan’s Department of Social Services promised privacy for adoptive and birth parents. Closed records gave children new futures, as past histories were eliminated. New homes in chosen locations with chosen families gave individual Indian and Métis children opportunities to enjoy the advantages of working-class or middle-class status. However, the hegemony of “modern adoption” essentially abolished the practice of Indigenous adoption that had taken place for centuries without the assistance of social workers, under their Indigenous legal systems of government. With the extension of provincial adoption laws onto reserves, Indigenous adoption essentially became illegal, or at the least, an illegitimate form of family making.
In 1966–7 Indian and Métis transracial adoptions in Saskatchewan accounted for only 10 per cent of all adoptions, but by 1977 rose to 35 per cent.17 According to social scientist Phillip Hepworth, social workers, not surprisingly, viewed adoptions as preferable to institutionalization. He, like many in this field, felt that infant adoption was the best solution to the problem of illegitimacy for unmarried, single, or poor mothers, and was a preventative measure for children likely to suffer from maternal deprivation or neglect. In Saskatchewan 50 per cent of all children committed into care were Indigenous, yet very few ended up in adoptive homes. Indigenous mothers tended to keep their children, only to have them apprehended when they were older and, therefore, given less opportunity for adoption placement. In 1980 Philip Hepworth noted, “As one of the major reasons of Indian and Métis children coming into care is poor housing, it is more than likely that more of them will stay in care rather than return home.”18 Hepworth shared the perspective of other social work professionals, who viewed adoption as in the “best interests of the child,” because it provided the care of two parents and established a permanent, legal relationship. In addition, it was vastly cheaper than both fostering and institutional care.19
This point of view diverged from that of members of Saskatchewan’s Native Women’s Movement (SNWM), who were as concerned as Hepworth about the growing numbers of single girls and women giving birth. They proposed an Indigenous feminist approach to address the impact of colonization in the lives of First Nations and Métis women in Saskatchewan. For example, they provided education and support to teen mothers to support their children. Also the SNWM opened the first Native-run day-care centre in the downtown core of Regina in 1973. Their voices were an important alternative to experts who were constructing the “problem of Indian child welfare” in the 1980s.20 When researchers are considering agency and choice, their work can be fraught with difficulties and may oversimplify a complex situation that is affected by the limitations of the sources consulted. There is evidence that Indigenous mothers sought out welfare services such as adoption to secure homes for children they felt would otherwise suffer deprivations. Adoption provided an important child-caring option from a limited range of options in a social and political climate that was hostile to Indigenous mothers and children. The historically specific and varied responses from 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 resistance it engendered, the research in this volume 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.
Reproductive justice for Indigenous women means being accorded the opportunity to parent children free from coercive policies, or secure child welfare services that do not presume Indigenous mothers are pathological. Archival evidence and published adoptee accounts demonstrate that in some cases Indigenous women opted to relinquish their children for adoption. It is important to acknowledge that some Indigenous women may have pursued this option, from among a small range of choices. The right to Aboriginal motherhood and to define Aboriginal motherhood and kinship are a key area where decolonization is taking place. White ideology of Aboriginal motherhood – as the pathological unfit mother – shaped responses to child neglect and Indigenous forms of child care.21
Exploring the history of transracial adoption brings into focus the malleable nature of racial difference, while illustrating simultaneously the persistence of settler-colonial logics that structure Indigenous child removal. It highlights how child welfare responses contributed to First Nations and Métis marginalization, albeit in new and virtually unrecognizable ways. Evidence presented here demonstrates that the policies and legislation developed by the Department of Indian Affairs, particularly on Indigenous gender relations, manifested with growing poverty, family breakdown, substance misuse, unplanned pregnancy, child neglect, and apprehension. The effects were mystified and submerged through programs such as Adopt Indian and Metis, REACH, and the Indian Adoption Project and later through demands by First Nations leaders for control over child welfare.22 Indigenous people rejected the narrow scope for relations that the creation of adoptive kinship ties provided through the modern secretive adoption process. While adoption promised the permanency of loving families and legal protections for Indigenous children that the fostering system could not, Indigenous peoples, globally, have rejected this form of child welfare service. While transracial adoption has been rejected by the vast majority of Indigenous people, culturally relevant alternatives are slowly emerging in Saskatchewan.23 Nevertheless, it is clear that there must be proper oversight to ensure the safety of vulnerable children who are placed in kinship care or through adoption, and La Ronge Child and Family Service Agency provides one promising template.24
During the 1980s, when Indian child welfare became politicized in Canada, Indigenous leaders and legal experts looked south to consider the relevance of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act for First Nations in Canada. Indian boarding schools and transracial adoption programs, such as the Indian Adoption Program and ARENA, were recognized in the United States at that time as to be a national phenomenon detrimental to the future of Native American tribes. This form of cultural genocide interrupted the transmission of language and culture, and prevented Native American children from claiming their identities as rights-bearing Indigenous peoples. ICWA (1978) challenged the logic of child removal in the United States. It established a legal framework to ensure the role of tribal governments in crafting locally relevant solutions while providing funding to preserve Indian families.25 In Canada the federal government has remained the reluctant funder of on-reserve child and family service agencies and provided provincial governments with dollars to provide services to Indian families. No national equivalent in Canada provides direction, evaluation, or guidance to Indian child welfare.26
The first five “Calls to Action” for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada call on all levels of government to reduce the number of children removed from families and address the lethal legacy of residential schools.27 While the first seeks to reduce the number of children in care with several suggestions for culturally based preventative social work, the second calls for all levels of government to conduct research into their programs and report annually on their progress. Reducing the numbers of children apprehended in the first place through culturally appropriate forms of preventative family support is a message that has been articulated for several decades by Indigenous peoples. The much more complex yet urgent task, to decolonize child welfare, appears to be on the horizon.