Scooped children struggling to fit in anywhere

More than 40,000 children are in care in Canada. That’s more children than were resident in boarding schools at the height of that failed program.

While Indigenous children make up 7.7 per cent of the Canadian population, our people represent half the children in care nationwide.

This is both a national disgrace and a humanitarian crisis that is a continuation of the ’60s scoop. For 60 years, overzealous social workers have been scooping children from homes and hospitals. A young mother may have just given birth, but someone in a faceless department has deemed that she is not fit to raise her own child.

Indigenous social workers agree that once a child is taken from the home it’s next to impossible to re-integrate the child with the home environment.

The statistics are overwhelming enough, but recently I did a documentary and interviewed some of the survivors of the child welfare scoop. The stories were so horrific that we had to dumb them down for a general audience.

One woman told me she was sexually abused by her adopted father from the time she was a preteen until she managed to run away after high school. Her teenage years were lost years and she suffered low self-esteem and lived in terror. She managed to move to another province and raise a family, but her life is forever scarred.

Another adoptee I spoke to was basically used as a slave on a farm. Every day, he had to get up early and do chores, and more work waited when he came home. The home was loveless, and it was obvious to him and his brother that they were treated as livestock. They lived in the basement and were not allowed upstairs. As soon as he could leave, he did.

Throughout the years the scooped children

and their families had no say in where they would go. As a result, Indigenous children were quite literally sent all over the world. Many went to the United States, others went to Europe and still others went to Australia and New Zealand. The families lost track and in most cases, they had no idea where their children went. One by one the lost children would reach adulthood and search for their roots.

Every day in Canada, an adult returns home and while they are welcomed back, they have a different upbringing and they struggle to belong. They meet cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents they never knew. It’s a sad and difficult reunion and it may take years to fit in, if ever.

The reason for this disaster goes back to overzealous social workers, homes with overcrowding and poverty or dysfunction caused by generations of residential school experience. It’s a tragedy that cannot be undone; it must be stopped.

The system is based on the racist premise that white parents will do a better job, which has been proven wrong repeatedly. Even if a child is lucky enough to be placed in a loving home, they lack the cultural upbringing and the close sense of family that Indigenous people share.

Jane Philpott, the Indigenous Services Minister, recently announced that the federal government was going to draft new child welfare legislation in co-development with the three national organizations representing the Metis, First Nations and Inuit.

Any legislation must recognize the cultural foundation that supports our families. Traditionally the women — the mother and grandmother — ran the household. The grandmother would oversee the family and if there were problems the children would be placed with other family members until things worked out.

There were no social workers or outside influences. Our people took care of their own and adoption was within the family unit. Often one of the grandchildren would be sent to live with the grandparents and help chop wood, haul water or any other strenuous labour. In return the old people would tell them stories and teach the culture.

This new legislation can’t come fast enough, but it must also be meaningful and abolish the old colonial system where other people thought they knew better how to raise our children. They took our culture and family ties so lightly and did serious, irreparable damage as a result.

It’s a tragedy that cannot be undone; it must be stopped.