‘ISLANDS UNTO OURSELVES’
Todd Coon was among thousands of Indigenous children taken from their families in the 1960s. Fifty years later, 75 ‘sixties scoop’ survivors are meeting in Ottawa.
Todd Coon and his sister Patsy were “scooped” by child welfare authorities when they were just toddlers after a 1966 Winnipeg house fire. Coon’s father could make only one request: that his children be adopted together.
The pair were shuffled through foster homes over two years before they were adopted by a family in Ontario. For Coon, it was far from a happy childhood.
“I seemed to be bullied because of my skin colour. I didn’t know why,” says Coon, now 53.
Coon was 11 before he understood that he was Indigenous and learned much later he was part of the “Sixties scoop” generation. Between the 1960s and 1980s, thousands of Indigenous children were adopted by white families. Like Coon, many found themselves with a foot in both cultures, but feeling alienated by both.
He will be among the 75 scoop survivors gathering in Ottawa this week from as far away as New Zealand, an event organized by National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare. In a way, it is a reunion of people who may not know each other, but who share the same scars.
“A lot of us went through the same things,” Coon says. “I thought I was alone.”
Almost 20,000 Indigenous children were removed from their families during the scoop, but it isn’t just a historical matter, says the network. More than 14,000 Indigenous children under the age of 14 were in foster care by 2011, a situation that has been dubbed the “millennium scoop.”
Network co-founder Colleen Cardinal was scooped along with her two sisters from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, near Edmonton. She grew up in Sault Ste. Marie in an adoptive family and now lives in Ottawa.
“In high school I fit in better with the punk rockers and the headbangers than other Indigenous kids. We were islands unto ourselves. It was hard to reach out to others. We don’t have to explain to other survivors what it was like growing up,” says Cardinal, who didn’t know about residential schools until she went to college and only later learned that her mother had attended one.
The network started in Ottawa, but soon attracted inquiries from all over the world. Adoptees wanted to reach out to learn about their culture and their home communities, but it was “culture shock” when they got there, says Cardinal, who is estranged from her birth and adoptive families alike.
“We were raised in middle-class white homes and we go back to communities without context. We see poverty and addiction. We deal with our guilt if we have lost the context of extended family. We face anger and jealousy,” says Cardinal, now 44.
Raven Sinclair, an associate professor of social work at the University of Regina’s Saskatoon campus, says research has shown that transracial adoptions have positive outcomes for adoptees, but the same has not been true of Indigenous transracial adoptions. Studies have found breakdown rates of between 85 and 95 per cent by the time the adoptee reaches his or her mid-teens.
In her research, Sinclair has only come across one adoptee with a truly positive experience and no desire to meet her birth family. At the same time, many adoptees have reported they were not readily accepted back into their communities.
“These gatherings are important because there aren’t many other people who understand it,” she says.
The gathering will start with a feast on Thursday and end with a blanket ceremony on Sunday. Survivors want to focus on healing and building community, says Cardinal. But on the political side, “we want to make sure we are not forgotten.”
In June 2015, Manitoba became the first province to apologize formally to adoptees. The network is advocating for a national apology, and calling for reparations for scoop survivors and an end to child welfare policies that remove children from their communities. In January 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government discriminates against children on reserves by failing to provide them the same level of child welfare services that exist elsewhere.
Coon says that even now he experiences a certain emptiness.
“I had no knowledge of my culture,” he says. “What is a family? I don’t know what a family is. I go to powwows and socials, but I don’t feel part of it. You see other Indigenous people interacting, but you don’t feel like part of the family.”
If Cardinal could write an alternative history for herself, what would it be? She says in that story, her grandmother would have raised her.
“I would have known my language. I would have grown up in poverty, but I would have grown up knowing my family,” she says. “Sure, we would have been poor, but I would have belonged somewhere.”