Documentary chronicles Sixties Scoop kids’ tale
Four Indigenous siblings, separated during the Sixties Scoop, profiled in documentary
The documentary Birth of a Family follows four siblings spending a week together in a tiny condo in Banff, but the week of outings and catch-ups in the fall of 2015 wasn’t what you would call a family reunion. “This is a family union,” one of the siblings Rose Yopek says in the film.
What she meant is the get-together marked the first time Betty Ann Adam, Esther Vandenham, Yopek and Ben Tjosvold were together as a family.
The four were all taken from their Dene birth mother during the Sixties Scoop that, between 1955 and 1985, saw the Canadian government remove approximately 20,000 children from Indigenous mothers and adopt them out, or place them in foster care in white families.
Adam stayed with her mother until she was three years old, Rose was removed from the home at the age of three months, and both Esther and Ben were taken from Mary Jane right after she gave birth. The children went to different families, a different province, and even a different country.
“One of the things I really love about my siblings is I see my mother in them,” said Adam, who was the only sibling to meet their mother, Mary Jane Adam, before she died in 2006 in Vancouver at the age of 72.
The quest to reunite the family began with Adam more than 30 years ago when she was a dental assistant intern in Uranium City — a mining settlement in Northern Saskatchewan and her birthplace — and discovered she had another sister and brother. (Adam and Yopek had already met through a cousin when they were aged 14 and 11 when they were living only 150 kilometres apart in Saskatchewan.)
Adam then set about finding the other siblings. Years later, through word of mouth and a post-adoption agency and plenty of government hoops, Vandenham and Tjosvold were found in Edmonton in 2012 and Southern California in 2014 respectively.
In 2015, Adam, a longtime reporter for the StarPhoenix newspaper in Saskatoon, told her story to Marie Wilson, the commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who in turn asked her who was going to document the story.
That job fell to director Tasha Hubbard and the result is the movie that premiered to acclaim at the Hot Docs festival last spring in Toronto. A special screening of Birth of a Family will be shown at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Theatre for the Arts on Jan. 24. It is free and will include a Q&A session with Hubbard and Adam.
“The first moment the siblings were all in the same physical space was very emotional for everyone involved, including the crew and the airport bystanders,” said Hubbard about the initial meeting in Calgary.
“We all realized the significance of that moment and felt the sadness that it took 50 years for siblings to be able to hug each other all at once.”
While Adam was searching, she applied for and received her mother’s Common Experience Payment of $16,000. The payment was the result of a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit brought against the government and churches that ran the residential schools. Mary Jane was at the Holy Angels Indian Residential School in Fort Chipewyan, Alta.
“(Myself and Rose) agreed that we were not going to touch that money until we found our siblings and we were going to use it to pay for travelling, if travel was needed.
We had no idea where they were,” said Adam.
Despite large distances and no shared direct family experiences, the stories of the siblings have similarities.
“We all grew up being outsiders,” said Adam about the shared experience of being Indigenous kids raised in white families.
“We shared the experience of having our adoptive families saying ‘you are a member of the family and this is your grandmother and this is your cousin and your auntie.’ That was the thing they tried to create for us. We were all Indigenous and in white homes. There was what they tried to create, but there’s also the knowledge that that in fact isn’t you, and you don’t see yourself reflected anywhere.”
By shining a light a on the story, Adam hopes this will strengthen families in the Indigenous communities. She hopes people will see a resilience in her and her siblings and realize that Indigenous people are strong and can overcome terrible circumstances.
“We need policies to change and we need to be free to solve our problems our own way — and we need to be heard. It’s a tall order.
“It’s big and complex, but I would say my easiest answer is that the government of Canada must obey its own Human Rights Tribunal and comply with the order of the human rights tribunal which has found that Canada discriminates,” said Adam. “It’s a human rights violation Canada discriminates against Indian child welfare. If that one thing was stopped it would be a big step forward.”