60s Scoop settlement no good if you can’t prove you qualify
The multi-million dollar settlement for survivors of the ‘60s Scoop’ was meant to be a step forward by Canada to make amends to thousands of indigenous children removed from their homes and communities — but for one Hatter, it’s just another frustrating chapter on how those like herself who grew up in foster care are being failed.
“The government made a promise to give me a better life,” said Karen Gagne, who has registered with the law firm that won the class-action suit for 60s Scoop victims. “They took me out of a home that was inappropriate, and as a government protected me from that environment — yet they put me straight back into it, broke their promise, did not give me a better quality of life.”
An agreement reached in October earmarked $750 million for individual compensation, or $25,000 to $50,000 per claimant from the federal government. But there’s a catch: Claimants have to prove they have Indian status, or would qualify for status.
“I don’t have the proof,” said Gagne, adding she simply cannot afford the sort of research needed to prove she qualifies.
It’s “placing the burden of proof on the victim” she said, and it means those who are in an even worse position than she is — those who are homeless, have addictions, and so on — won’t be compensated.
Gagne was born in 1973 in Dryden, Ont. Her mother was 17, father unknown. At three months old, she was taken by her mother to B.C. to escape family violence, specifically from an alcoholic father.
Gagne was five when she and her two half-brothers were taken by B.C. child services, and soon separated from each other. She knows her mother was not fit to raise her. But to her knowledge, family services never tried to contact family in northwestern Ontario to see if they would take her into care.
Dryden is surrounded by multiple First Nation communities, and has a large aboriginal population.
In the few family photos Gagne has seen of her mother’s family, they appear to be aboriginal.
But she has no records — B.C. child welfare ones included — that can link her back to her family.
“Had the ministry done the search in Ontario, I can almost guarantee that would have found family that especially would have wanted me,” she said. “They knew about me, and never got to have any connection (with me).”
Instead, she was moved around to 22 different foster families over the years.
This instability, she explained, is why she didn’t graduate high school. She says she was never provided a safety net or education on life skills as she aged out of care — “all of the things you’d be teaching your children before they go out into the big world.”
“You feel invisible, you feel forgotten, you feel like you’re nothing, you feel you don’t matter ... you feel irrelevant, it’s exactly how I grew up feeling,” she said, and all of this has had a negative long-term effect on her life, from job instability, poverty, an abusive marriage and more.
The Scoop took place mainly between the 1960s and 1980s, with children taken from their native families and communities and placed in non-native foster or adoptive families. Most never knew about their heritage, and were cut off from family, community, language and culture. Many were abused and have longstanding trauma.
The harm experienced extends beyond those who are First Nations, said Gagne.
“Whether I have any native blood in me ... it doesn’t really matter in the end. All of the children who were in care were ripped (away), and put into care that was foreign and scary, and intimidating ... It doesn’t matter where you came from or what your family history was, you struggled and suffered.”