Separating children from parents: The Sixties Scoop in Canada

between the 1960s in the 1980s tens of thousands of indigenous kids were taken from their families and put into the child welfare system it's known as the 60 scoop and its effects are still being felt today the practice of taking kids out of indigenous communities goes back as long as Canada has been a country first there was a residential school system the goal there was to assimilate indigenous kids and as one bureaucrat said solve Canada's Indian problem [Music] then in the 1960s provinces started taking large numbers of indigenous children into care the term sixty scoop

actually came from a BC social worker who reportedly said she felt like she was literally scooping children out of their parents arms those decisions were often made by non indigenous social workers who didn't necessarily understand indigenous culture or family structures like the role of extended family in childcare social workers often saw challenges like poverty as a reason to remove children many parents grew up in residential schools and we're facing their own trauma some of them even asked Social Services for help but the jump in the number of indigenous kids in the child welfare system around

this time is staggering in BC for example First Nations children made up less than one percent of all kids in foster care in the early 1950s a decade later that number was 34% and a similar spike happened in other provinces some governments developed special programs designed to get indigenous children adopted like Saskatchewan aim program the aim program advertised kids on TV and radio and in newspapers almost all of the kids who were adopted went to white families in Canada the United States and even as far away as New Zealand across the country thousands of indigenous

kids were adopted out but to this day the government says it still doesn't know exactly how many many of these adoptions didn't work out one study found that one-fifth of indigenous adoptions had broken down by the time a child turned 15 half of them by the time there were 17 but it wasn't until the 1980s that the government really started to examine the damage the 60 scoop caused families and communities in an influential 1985 report a Manitoba judge said cultural genocide has taken place in a systematic routine manner more than half a century after the

60 scoop began the trauma and harm are still affecting families many survivors say they were abused while in care they continue to struggle with trauma and loss loss of family and identity loss of language and culture loss of history similar to residential school survivors and they don't always have information about where they came from some survivors are struggling to find their biological families [Music] the government has agreed to compensate survivors but that doesn't include everyone who was affected and while the era of the 60s coupe is long over the removal of indigenous children continues today

more than half of the kids in care in Canada are indigenous