Kuster: How George Floyd pulled a '60s Scoop survivor out of a dark pit

 

Thousands of people gathered at Poppy Plaza in Calgary to protest against racism and police brutality on Wednesday, June 3, 2020. For Paul Kuster, it was a catalyst for putting his life back together. Photo by Azin Ghaffari /Postmedia Archive

The irony was that I am a survivor of the ’60s Scoop. I’d been taken away from my native family at birth (no, my mother didn’t drink or do drugs) and was what I call “The Flavour of the Month,” the feature brown baby in the Regina Leader-Post. (Yes, they actually did that, it was a thing.) I felt like I was in the adopt-a-pet section of the paper: “Here, everybody, you can adopt this pooch or tabby, or even this brown kid!” and was adopted by a lovely white family (That’s why I’m an Indian named Kuster — place punchlines here) and at that particular time, I’d just found my true biological family (no thanks to Saskatchewan Social Services, the Department of Indigenous and Northern Affairs in Ottawa, but THAT’S a whole other tale). I was lucky, I have two amazing families; one white, the other Aboriginal, and I fit in both worlds. 

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