Sixties Scoop survivors share traumatic stories
Frank Krawchuk was two years old when he was removed from his home on a reserve in Saskatchewan and put in foster care. A survivor of the Sixties Scoop, the 67-year-old now wants to make sure the mistakes of the past are never repeated.
“I didn’t have a normal life. I was made to work really hard on a farm and I got physically abused a lot, I got beat up. I was a bad fellow for a long time. Now I’m over it. I’m getting better,” said Krawchuk. “Foster parents and social workers need to be educated on what happened to us, and when they know what happened to us then they can maybe deal with situations better than they did in the past.”
The Sixties Scoop refers to the mass removal of Indigenous children from their homes throughout Canada during the 1960s, when they were placed in foster homes or put up for adoption.
On Wednesday, Krawchuk was one of a few hundred survivors who attended an engagement session hosted by the Alberta government as it seeks to learn more about survivors’ experiences in preparation for an upcoming official apology. Calgary was the fifth of six engagement sessions the government is hosting in partnership with the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Alberta.
“We all have stories that resemble trauma and abandonment,” said Adam North Peigan, president of the society and a survivor himself.
“What I’m looking for is an opportunity also to educate mainstream Canadians as well as Albertans that after the residential schools, when they began to close their doors, there was something else that happened within our community as part of our Indigenous history,” said North Peigan, who was removed from his community in the Lethbridge area as a child and became a permanent ward in non-Indigenous foster homes and children’s shelters.
“Canadians need to know and understand the atrocities of the Sixties Scoop, and that it was a dark chapter in Alberta’s history.”
The Alberta government has committed to issuing an apology for the Sixties Scoop following its engagement sessions with survivors. Other sessions have already taken place in Peace River, St. Paul, Fort McMurray and Lethbridge, with another planned for Edmonton.
“One of the things I think is really important for us to remember is that there is no magic pill here and everybody knows that. It’s not like we can make the past disappear,” said Indigenous Relations Minister Richard Feehan, who has attended each session along with Minister of Children’s Services Danielle Larivee. “This engagement session is a small step, it’s a step in the right direction and it’s just the first of many steps. It’s not the end of the process, it’s the middle of the process.”
North Peigan said he’s looking for an apology that’s sincere and “has some depth.”
“Basically, what we’re looking for is an acknowledgment from the Alberta government that it was a wrong and that it shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “And an acknowledgment of the pain and the suffering and the trauma that we had to endure.”