‘Terrible legacy’ of ’60s Scoop still lingers
Survivors on hand in Ottawa as government announces $800-million settlement
OTTAWA— Priscilla Meeches was just days old when she was removed from the care of her Indigenous mother and put up for adoption by a non-Indigenous family.
Meeches says that her adoptive parents were wonderful and loving and yet she had always had a yearning “to find out who I was and where I belonged.”
“Everything they did in their power to give me a good life, for me, I still had that loss,” she said.
Meeches, 48, is among thousands of Indigenous children caught up in the ’60s Scoop when they were taken from their parents, moved out of their Indigenous communities and placed with non-Indigenous families far from their homes, sometimes even out of the country.
It would be years, decades even, before many of them uncovered the tale of their past, a discovery that often launched them on a daunting task of reconnecting with family and trying to learn their Indigenous culture.
“Their stories are heartbreaking. They talked of their identity being stolen. They talked about not really feeling that you belong anywhere because people have been moved so often or that they didn’t really have a home,” said Carolyn Bennett, minister of crown-Indigenous relations and northern affairs.
On Friday, Bennett announced an agreement-in-principle had been reached to resolve a drawn-out legal battle.
The settlement includes $750 million for individual compensation of up to $50,000 each for survivors.
Another $50 million will be used to establish a foundation for healing and education in language and culture. And $75 million will go toward legal fees.
Bennett called the ’60s Scoop a “terrible legacy” that was the result of “misguided policies.”
Stewart Garnett was born to an Indigenous mother in Winnipeg and put up for adoption by a family that raised him in Arkansas and California. He praised his adoptive parents as the “greatest family on the planet.”
“But I had something on my back the whole time, which was this: the loss of culture, the loss of language. It’s dragged with me my whole life,” said Garnett, 43.
He’s moved back to his birthplace in Winnipeg and attempted to connect with biological family, but said it’s been “very turbulent.”
“Sometimes the connections are challenging. Me being raised in the non-Indigenous world has been a big part of it,” said Garnett, who was on Parliament Hill for the announcement.
Peter van Name, 46, was born in northern Alberta, and, within a few months, was adopted by a family in New Jersey.
It wasn’t until he was in his early 20s that he truly became aware of his Indigenous roots. He had gone to a Philadelphia theatre to see a play about Native American history. People there mistook him for a fellow Indigenous cast member and told him to “hurry up and get backstage,” he said with a laugh.
“That’s where it started. The people took me in,” he said.
He recalled his first trip to his birthplace after connecting with his mother, travelling from the urban sprawl of the Philadelphia area to the rural solitude of northern Alberta.
“It was such a cultural shock . . . It was like taking a ride into the sticks,” he said.
Marcia Brown Martel, lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said she hoped the agreement would prevent such action from happening again.
“I have great hope that because we’ve reached this plateau, that this, again, will never, ever happen in Can- ada again,” said Brown Martel, chief of the Beaverhouse First Nation in northern Ontario.
“We need our children back in our communities,” she said.
“We need to be together, every community. I don’t care what part of the world you’re from. You need to have the people, so that they can continue in tradition, culture, language, so these great things can be part of their lives.”
Bennett said the lessons of that “dark and painful chapter” decades ago must be remembered today, saying the child welfare system needs to be “totally” overhauled.
“Too many children are still being taken from their families,’ Bennett said.
For those taken from their parents, Friday’s announcement was bittersweet, providing a measure of compensation but failing to make up for what was lost.
Meeches said the impact of children being taken from their biological families will be felt by generations of Indigenous people. Taken from her mother within days of birth, she was ignorant of her own culture and today struggles to pass along Indigenous lessons to her own children and grandchildren.
“I don’t know how I’m going to be able to help them learn their culture because I wasn’t raised that way,” she said.