Sixties Scoop survivors sought for cash settlement
Michael Sadler was just an infant when he was taken from his teenage mother.
Half native, he was adopted by a Caucasian couple who knew next to nothing of his First Nations heritage.
“My parents told me I was part First Nations, but they said Indian back in those days,” he said.
Sadler’s biological mother was considered white, but her family shipped her off to live with her great aunt to separate her from her First Nations boyfriend.
She soon discovered she was pregnant. After she gave birth, her mother gave Sadler to children’s services.
There, he was caught up in a government-sanctioned program that removed First Nations children from their homes and placed them with white foster families for adoption, now called the Sixties Scoop.
At least 20,000 First Nations children across Canada were stripped of their family names, their language and their culture under provincial child-welfare policies beginning in the 1950s and persisting in some cases all the way up to 1991.
Sadler’s adoptive family lived in Vancouver and Prince George until his parents split up. He would eventually finish high school while living with his father in southern Alberta.
At no time did he have meaningful contact with other First Nations people.
“I felt different,” he said. “I was dark, they were light. My sister was white. There was a lot of stigma, so I wasn’t proud of being an Indian kid.
“Mostly people associated First Nations with what they saw downtown, where people were struggling with alcohol addiction and looking down and out. I would lie to people and tell them I was Hawaiian or something like that because I was ashamed.”
Sadler reconnected with his heritage as an adult, while pursuing a career in teaching and then First Nations social development. He holds a master’s degree in education from Simon Fraser University.
“At my first teaching job at the Native Education Centre, people would ask me where I was from and I couldn’t tell them,” he said. “People would ask me if I was a status Indian and I didn’t even know what that meant.”
He found his biological family with a single phone call to the Gitxsan reconnection society.
“The lady I spoke with said, ‘We know all of our lost children and I know your story. We’ve been waiting for you to call,’ ” he said. “It was really overwhelming.”
He met his parents a month later and talks to them and his biological siblings regularly.
Sadler is also rediscovering his culture.
“My work path took me into First Nations communities working in education, housing, health, all with our people,” he said.
Today, Sadler is a member of the Kispiox First Nation.
He has three daughters and works hard to be active in their lives, but Sadler has struggled with relationships and trust.
“I’ve had trouble maintaining relationships with my partners and I think being adopted and then seeing my parents divorced contributed to that,” he said. “I ended up living with my dad, so I learned not to make close relationships.”
Those are hard lessons to unlearn, he said.
For Sixties Scoop survivors, reconnecting with family can mean dredging up hurt feelings and even re-experiencing trauma in cases where their adoptive upbringing was abusive.
“People get into fostering kids for a whole variety of reasons, (but) they aren’t always the right reasons, and the vetting process wasn’t that great,” he said “Some kids had a really shitty experience.”
“That might be physical and sexual abuse and if they take off, they are in another home and lack any kind of stability. Those kids end up on the street and it’s a terrible cycle.”
Last year, the federal government set aside $750 million in a class-action settlement to compensate children apprehended in the Sixties Scoop, along with $50 million for healing services and $75 million for legal fees.
Like the residential school system, the Scoop has been denounced by First Nations leaders as an attempt to blend natives into the Canadian mainstream and as organized “cultural eradication.”
First Nations and Inuit people who were placed in the care of non-Indigenous foster or adoptive parents between 1951 and 1991 may be eligible for compensation between $25,000 and $50,000, depending on how many people register.
An information session for potential registrants will be held Dec. 17 in Vancouver. Check sixtiesscoopsettlement.info for details. You do not need to have documentation to register as the administrators will seek the necessary records.