Going Home

Sudbury chef bids farewell to find peace with her Indigenous family in Saskatchewan

Tammy Maki will close her downtown chocolate boutique at the end of the summer

 Nishat Chowdhury · CBC News : July 10

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/downtown-sudbury-tammy-maki-sixties-scoop-1.7259456

 

Tammy Maki and her dog Frankie sit for a moment in her shop surrounded by pictures of her late daughter and her grandchildren. (Kate Rutherford/CBC)

A well-known Sudbury business woman is packing her bags and leaving the downtown to explore and connect with her Indigenous heritage in rural Saskatchewan.

Adoptee Tammy Maki, 59, owner of Raven Rising-Global Indigenous Chocolates on Cedar Street, says she'll close the doors to her shopfront at the end of the summer and someone else will take over the lease.

A child of the Sixties Scoop and member of White Bear First Nations, a community located about 210 kilometres southeast of Regina, Maki says she wants to reconnect with her Indigenous relatives after spending most of her life in Sudbury.

"I've never had a chance to experience my culture, my relatives, my people, ceremonies," she said. "I feel like an interloper in my own heritage."

The sudden loss of her only daughter last year and her grief became a catalyst for her to explore where she belongs, and is the final push for her departure. 

"This shop, we came to look at it together when I was looking for a place to lease. She worked here, she sat in the chair. It's always her, her, her in my mind," said Maki.

The chocolate shop won't be closing forever. Instead, the e-commerce business will be running out of White Bear First Nations.

Reconnecting with biological family

Maki was taken from her birth mother in the 1960s and a Sudbury family adopted her at a young age.

In the last five years, Maki found out she had three brothers and she was 56 when she saw a picture of her biological mother for the first time. 

"It's so weird, you go through life and you wonder, 'oh, do I look like anybody?" she said.

The Department of Indigenous Affairs indicates that the number of Indigenous children adopted between 1960 and 1990 was more than 11,000. However, more recent research suggests upwards of more than 20,000 First Nation, Métis and Inuit children were removed from their homes.

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the number of children taken away from their birth families varied by province, but the practice was most common in the Prairies.

In Saskatchewan, there were specific programs designed to facilitate adoptions.

"I'm going back with the attitude of not what my First Nation can do for me, but what I can do for them, and hopefully I find some peace there as well," said Maki. 

Looking forward to the move

While personal soul searching is the prime reason for the move, Maki says it's also been challenging to operate a business in Sudbury's core.

She says major changes need to be made to address the issues of homelessness connected to the toxic drug crisis.

"To tell me that I need to have a storefront downtown Sudbury in order to create foot traffic is fine, but when people are worried about coming here, then what does that do for me?"

Maki says she's looking forward to living in rural Saskatchewan where she says she feels like she can finally breathe, and where she has scattered some of her daughter's ashes.

"As sad as it's going to be, it's also very exhilarating and I'm really looking forward to experiencing that Indigenous side of myself, that side that's been just crying for years," she said.

 

Charla Huber: It’s taken 41 years to learn where I am from

In the last two weeks, I have become very close to finally learning who my birth father was. Like my biological mother, he was 50 per cent Indigenous

Charla Huber  Aug 6, 2023

Sixties Scoop survivors and supporters gather for a demonstration at a Toronto courthouse in August 2016. Charla Huber was one of ­thousands of ­Indigenous ­children from the 1960s to the 1980s who were either adopted or fostered by ­non-Indigenous families. MICHELLE SIU, THE CANADIAN PRESS

Listen to this article

The term “Pretendian” is becoming a regular word in our society.

It’s a term used to describe someone who is claiming Indigenous ancestry, rights and recognition, and who is being called out for false claims or unprovable claims.

I know there have been many people “outed” as ­“pretendians” and it has caused outrage in Indigenous communities, both on- and off-reserve.

I’ve written about this before and the impact the issue has on me. I am fully aware that people are falsely claiming Indigenous identity for professional, academic or personal benefit, which is appalling, unjust and ignorant.

It also affects the dignity and credibility of ­Indigenous people who have lost their identity through colonial impacts.

It’s common knowledge among readers of my ­column that I was adopted as part of the Sixties Scoop, where thousands of Indigenous children from the 1960s to the 1980s were either adopted or fostered by ­non-­Indigenous families.

In my case, my adoptive family was asked if they would take in an “Indian baby.” They were called on my birthday and picked me up four days later.

My adoptive family was never told what Indigenous community I was from. I grew up not knowing, a ­struggle I have lived with my entire life.

Even in years when I would not publicly share I was Indigenous, in my heart it was something that I always felt deeply about. It was the only thing I ever really knew about myself and my lineage.

I took a DNA test a few years ago. Weeks later, when I received an email notifying me of the results, I was terrified of the thought that the only truth I’ve ever ­carried might not actually be true.

I opened the email and learned I was 50 per cent Indigenous. I shared this in a column about a year ago and a couple of readers wrote me saying that if I was “only 50 per cent,” I shouldn’t be identifying as ­Indigenous and I was deceiving the public. These ­letters were not sent by Indigenous people.

In the years since the DNA test, I have learned more about where I am from. My birth mother was also part of the Sixties Scoop, born in Fort Chipewyan in ­northern Alberta and about 50 per cent Indigenous, according to the maternal DNA info I received.

In the past two weeks, I have become very close to finally learning who my birth father was.

I am fairly certain he was never even told of my existence. According to paternal DNA info, he is also 50 per cent Indigenous.

I have spent the past couple of weeks immersed in learning about his community and lineage, language, history and family tree. I don’t have full confirmation, but it’s been narrowed down to a set of brothers.

This has been a momentous moment in my life.

Even if I am never able to meet either of my birth parents, I have been able to answer the question: “Where do I come from?”

In my heart, my Indigeneity is the one thing that has always been there for me and something I am immensely proud of.

I firmly believe my ancestors are walking with me.

I have been able to take that pride in my ­heritage and incorporate the experience of being raised in a ­non-Indigenous home and create a career in ­communications building bridges.

In this column, I often share Indigenous experiences and values for a non-Indigenous audience. It’s something that has helped me find healing and meaning.

I have never been called a “pretendian” and I know I am not one.

Each time a story comes to light of someone falsifying their ancestry, it makes me worry that one day, people will try to discredit me because finding “pretendians” has become a trendy mission.

Again, there are people who falsely claim Indigenous identify, there is no denying that.

I share this deeply personal story to highlight that there are also many Indigenous people who, like me, because of colonization and assimilation, were never provided information about where they are from and where they belong.

The Journey Home: Wayne William Snellgrove

(reblog from 2013)

Wayne (center) with his brother and a-mom Ann Snellgrove

Torn Apart 32 Years Ago By Canadian Policy Toward Aboriginals, A Mother And Son Meet For The First Time.

September 21, 2003| BY MARGO HARAKAS

He called himself Lost Cub, and for years he tried futilely to find his way home.

Then in 2002, feeling that at last he was closing in, Wayne Snellgrove hired a private investigator to follow up on the final four names on his list. He needed a shield, a buffer from the searing pain of renewed rejection. When the Canadian investigator finally telephoned her news, Snellgrove took the phone to the bedroom, closed the door, and, lying down on the bed, braced himself.

"I found your mother," she said. Then it all tumbled out.

Nora Smoke, a Saulteaux Indian living on a reserve in Saskatchewan, told the investigator, she loved Wayne, always had, that it was the happiest day in her life that he had found her. She had never forgotten the child she'd never seen.

"Please tell my son," Smoke pleaded with the investigator, "I've always thought of him."

And the 6-foot-3-inch, 225-pound athlete sobbed, sobbed like a baby, sobbed with 32 years of repressed emotion, sobbed like a kidnapped child returned to his bereft mother.

The search had ended; however, the story of a newborn's disappearance three decades ago was yet to be told.

Snellgrove, like many Canadians, calls it kidnapping. Others call it cultural annihilation or cultural genocide. Officially, it's been dubbed the Sixties Scoop.

Throughout the 60s, 70s and into the mid 80s, thousands of native children were separated from their mothers and adopted out to middle-class, non-native families in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

"Some communities lost an entire generation," says Darrell Racine, professor of native studies at Brandon University, in Manitoba, Canada.

At best, say the critics, the action of the Children's Aid Societies, authorized at the time to administer Canada's child welfare services, was misguided. At worst, it was racism.

"It goes back to the usual manifest destiny complex white people have over red people and the idea they are more civilized than aboriginal people. They thought they were doing the aboriginals a favor," says Emma LaRocque, professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba.

The problem was those removing the children were usually white and, because of bias or ignorance of aboriginal culture, they were, say critics, unqualified to determine what was in the best interest of the native child.

That the Sixties Scoop followed on the heels of the horrific residential school program was not coincidence. The thinking there, says Racine, "was the only way to civilize the Indians was to get the child away from the parents." So the children were forced into church-run boarding schools to be purged of their language, customs and culture. (Similar boarding schools were operational throughout most of the 20th century in the United States, as well.)

In the 1960s, with the closing of Canada's residential schools, aboriginal children continued to be removed, this time on the grounds of parental ambivalence, poverty, illness, or drug or alcohol addiction.

"Entire reserves would be assessed as dysfunctional and every child in the community would be removed," says Kenn Richard, director of Native Child and Family Services of Toronto.

And then "because of racism," says Richard, who is half native, "few white Canadians were willing to adopt aboriginal children, so placements were made through agencies in the U.S."

'I really don't belong'

Wayne Snellgrove came through an agency in Northampton, Mass. Six months before getting the 2 1/2-year-old Wayne, Richard and Ann Snellgrove, his adoptive parents, had taken home another boy, a white boy. They wanted to find for him a companion.

Despite loving and caring parents, Wayne says, "I've always had this feeling of being lost and misplaced, feeling I don't really belong here. Every time I looked in the mirror, I knew it. I had only to look at my brother to know I was different."

He describes his adoptive family as "wonderful." But his situation was far different from those that have made headlines in Canada and suggest there was little screening of prospective parents. Several stunning cases are recounted by the Native Child and Family Services of Toronto in its report titled "Research Project: Repatriation of Aboriginal Families -- Issues, Models and A Workplan." One Native child, placed with a bachelor in Kansas, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing his adoptive father with a baseball bat. The trial revealed that for years the youth had been sexually abused by his adoptive father.

Likewise, a native girl placed with a family who subsequently moved to Holland wound up a drug addict and prostitute after being impregnated twice by her adoptive father. After years of living abroad, she returned to Canada where, with the help of birth siblings, she established a new life.

 Please leave a comment! Wayne, an amazing artist and Olympic swimmer, is on Facebook.  He lives in Florida. This is his painting of a red hand.

A Place Between – The Story of an Adoption #60sScoop

By Trace Hentz (blog editor)

I run across comments by adoptive parents and PAPS (potential adoptive parents) all the time on why is it wrong for non-Natives to adopt Native kids? Volumes have been written about this, on this blog, and in medical studies and published reports but we STILL have people who don't understand.

Here is an example on Adoption.com:

SupaModel

April 15, 2011

I'm watching this documentary right now on demand. Its about these two Native American boys (now adults) who were adopted from foster (care) in Canada to an American (CC) family in Redding, PA. They were adopted as young boys so they remembered being with the bmom and now one of the boys is making a film about being between both families. I thing that bothers me is the younger brother has basically at 18 yrs old left his adoptive family and went back to Canada to bio family and he hasn't talked to his AP's in 8 years. His issues are growing up without his NA identity and racism he dealt with being NA in a all CC environment. Actually both boys are living in Canada now. The older brother still has a relationship with his AP's. As an AP I would take it as a slap in the face if my kid just left and wouldn't talking to me for 8 yrs. Its like these boys bio mom was an alcoholic who had her kids taken away because she was neglecting them. She said herself she would be drunk for 6 weeks straight and have no idea what day or month it is. Also leaving these babies at home by themselves while she's out partying and they have to change each diapers etc... So you have this family come in and give you a stable home and love and yet because they are CC you just leave?? Im wondering if this something that happens more often with older kids adoption from foster care? Like I said earlier it really annoys me but a great watch anyways. LINK

A Place Between - The Story of an Adoption, Curtis Kaltenbaugh, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

 WATCH   

A Place Between – The Story of an Adoption is a 2007 documentary film dealing with cross-cultural adoption and aboriginal life in Canada. It was directed by First Nations adoptee Curtis Kaltenbaugh and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Curtis and Ashok Kaltenbaugh were born in Manitoba and are of First Nations ancestry. After the 1980 death of their younger brother, at ages of 7 and 4 respectively, they were removed from the custody of their birth mother and placed for adoption with a middle-class white family living in Pennsylvania.

The film chronicles their search for identity and the meeting of their adoptive and birth families.
The film won Best Public Service Award at the Annual American Indian Film Festival, held in San Francisco during November 2007.^[wiki]

'She died coming to try to find me' #60sScoop

'She died coming to try to find me:' Sixties Scoop adoptee pieces together tragic story of separation

Robert Kalkman was adopted at age 2, and his life shattered at 9 after discovering his true heritage

Jorge Barrera · CBC News | December 23, 2017 SOURCE

Robert Kalkman, aged about 3, in Fort Frances, Ont., after his adoption. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

Robert Kalkman's memory of the woman standing outside the window is like the frame from a negative burned too hot by light.
Among the shapes of things in this memory is his adoptive father leaving the house in Fort Frances, Ont., to speak with this woman who kept coming back to stand outside the window.
"I remember as a child looking out the window and seeing this lady standing on the street and the commotion of my dad going out and begging her to leave," said Kalkman, 53.
"I was like three years old; it's the last thing I can remember."
Later in life, he would come to know the woman in the window was his biological mother, Kathleen McGinnis.
There is only one photograph of McGinnis that remains. It's from the 1952 edition of the magazine Northern Sportsman and published above an article headlined, I Write About Indians. The photograph is of an Anishinaabe family having a picnic. The caption does not identify anyone in the photograph, but Kalkman's biological family told him that it is her, as a baby, swaddled and fastened to a cradleboard.

This is the only surviving photograph of Kathleen McGinnis. She is the baby attached to the cradleboard in the upper right-hand side of the photograph. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

There are other documents about Kalkman's biological mother — coroner and police reports from April 1978. There are witness statements about the accident, how she seemed dazed waving cars down on a highway near Calgary when she was suddenly struck and killed on April 3. The impact severed one of her legs and the circumstances that led to her death remain shrouded in mystery.
Kalkman was out in northern British Columbia a few years ago in a work camp when he came across a website listing missing and murdered Indigenous women. He first noticed the name of a woman he once went to school with and then he noticed his mother's name, along with that of her two sisters, Edith Quagon and Sarah Mason, who were both separately murdered by men plunging a knife through their hearts.
"I was like, 'wow.' I was just overwhelmed," he said.
"I wish whoever the police was, or whatever, spent a little more time investigating and looking into it. If it was a white person, they would be all over it."

Kalkman would later learn that his biological mother was hitchhiking to British Columbia from Thunder Bay, Ont. McGinnis had heard one of her two children — seized in 1966 from her father's house on the Manitou reserve portion of Rainy River First Nation while she shopped in Fort Frances, Ont. — had been adopted by a family that had moved from Fort Frances to B.C.
"She died coming to try to find me," said Kalkman.
"It's an identity you lose, the moment she is gone."

Aftershocks 

McGinnis's family, along with Kalkman's sister Diane Geissler, testified in Thunder Bay in early December during three days of hearings held by the national inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. Kalkman didn't make the hearing.
Kalkman's story is also one among thousands of aftershocks still reverberating from the Sixties Scoop when child welfare agencies across the country would seize Indigenous children and quickly adopt them out into the care of non-Indigenous families.

• 'A lot of mixed emotions': MMIWG inquiry to begin hearings in Thunder Bay

His story also connects the Scoop with residential schools, which McGinnis attended, and reveals the systemic discrimination that led state agencies to repeatedly seize Indigenous children.

Robert Kalkman, aged 2, is held by the caretaker of the foster home where he was placed after he was taken by child welfare agents. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

Ontario's child welfare agents determined the teenage mother — who had Geissler at 14 and Kalkman at 15 — didn't have the financial means to raise her children despite the fact she lived with her parents.
"It was because she was Native and lived a traditional lifestyle. She couldn't prove that she had an apartment or a house. It wasn't in her name, it was in her parents' name," said Geissler, who lives in Thunder Bay a few blocks away from where McGinnis lived before she left hitchhiking, looking for one of her children.
"She couldn't prove income because they hunted, trapped — they had a trapline — and fished for food. They grew their own vegetables, they picked berries, they picked herbs. They didn't have a nine-to-five job. They lived on the reserve."

Seized by child welfare

Kalkman and Geissler don't know the exact date or the details about the circumstances leading to the moment when they were seized. There is a story about a snowstorm stranding their mother in Fort Frances on the day they were taken. There is another about an uncle who hid them in a closet until a child's cry gave them away. Kalkman said one of his aunts confessed to him in 1991 that she had called child welfare because she was worried about the care the children were receiving.

• Opinion
  Sixties Scoop survivors victimized twice, columnist says

Geissler was immediately adopted by a family that remained in the Fort Frances area. Kalkman remained in foster care for about a year until he was adopted at age two by a Fort Frances doctor who had treated him for various ailments.
"I think as a family we thought we were ... helping out someone who has a need," said Peter Kalkman, Robert Kalkman's adoptive brother.
"I think we did it for the right reason."

From left to right: Robert Kalkman with his adoptive family Klari Kalkman, Johannes Wilhelmus Kalkman and Peter Kalkman. (Submitted by Peter Kalkman)

Peter Kalkman remembers as an eight-year-old going to the courthouse with his parents to finalize the adoption on Feb. 24, 1967.
"It was very serious circumstances where the judge is saying you are taking on this person to be part of your family," said Kalkman, a radiologist who now lives in Abbotsford, B.C.
"It's a very large responsibility and commitment and we all felt that way."
Robert Gary Shebageget became Robert William Kalkman that day.
The family then moved to Vancouver.

'You're an Indian'

Throughout his early years, Robert Kalkman said he didn't contemplate differences with his adoptive home's older brother and sister, who were the biological children of his adoptive parents. He never noticed his darker skin or wondered where he came from. He liked to dress up like a cowboy.
Then, at the age of nine, he noticed one of his friends in the Vancouver neighbourhood where he lived had stopped playing with him. When he asked him why, the answer shattered his world.
"He said, 'Because you're an Indian. My dad said you are an Indian,'" said Kalkman.

Robert, aged 12, and his adoptive father Johannes Kalkman, when they lived in Vancouver. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

When he got home, his adoptive mother Janet Kalkman was cooking.
"I asked her, 'Mom, am I an Indian?' She said, 'Don't talk to me right now, I'm cooking,'" said Robert Kalkman.
"I went to my room and looked in the mirror."

• Woman cancels public MMIWG testimony in Thunder Bay over fears for her safety

A little while later she came into his room and put down a book. Kalkman said the book had about 40 pages of black and white photographs depicting Ojibway people from Minnesota and Ontario.
"That is when I started rebelling," he said.

Robert Kalkman, around age 17, in Vancouver. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

"I had an identity crisis."

His life became a series of conflicts with his family, with his school and with the law. Eventually his adoptive parents turned him over into the custody of the courts at age 13. He became a ward of the state, again, and bounced between foster homes and juvenile detention centres.
"I was so angry at the world because I didn't know who I was, where I came from or what was going on," he said.
"I despised the fact I was Native. I would fight every Indian I could fight."

The girl at the bus stop

The anger may have totally consumed and eventually destroyed Kalkman except for a girl he saw from a city bus window standing at a downtown Vancouver bus stop in 1987. He wouldn't see her again for several months. In that time he would end up serving 80 days in jail for failing to pay a $548 fine for drinking and driving in a car stolen from his adoptive parents.

Robert and Kathleen Kalkman on their wedding day, Aug. 3, 1991. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

When he got out, he decided to try and make a go of it and enrolled in a college where the girl from the bus stop also attended. They fell in love and married on Aug. 3, 1991.
Robert and Kathleen Kalkman, who is from the Tahltan Nation, now live in Chetwynd, B.C., and they have four sons, aged 27, 25, 17 and 15, along with two grandchildren aged three and five.
Kalkman, a journeyman carpenter, made a career working in gold mines and oil fields throughout northern B.C..

Robert and Kathleen Kalkman, centre, with their children, from the left: Dakota Kalkman, Kross Kalkman, Trey Kalkman and Jeremy Kalkman. (Submitted by Robert Kalkman)

Still there was a piece that remained lost.
His adoptive father, Johannes Wilhelmus Kalkman, who died from cancer about two years ago, "harboured quite a bit of anger for many years" over the adoption, said Peter Kalkman, 59.
And Janet Kalkman, who is 85 and living in an assisted care home, remains "a little bit ambivalent about the whole thing," said Peter.

"My wife, she has brothers and sisters, a mother and a father. My kids look at me and say where is your mom? Where is your dad? You got to look at them and say, 'All you got is me,'" said Robert Kalkman.
"Every time I wake up in the morning I tell them, 'I love you.' I tell them in their face, 'I love you.' That is the connection I have to have because this is all I have. I won't let anybody try to take what I have now."

Am I Indian?

Tale of Discovery  ‘Am I Indian?’: A young man’s journey to reclaim identity
Growing up, Matthew Shorting knew that he was Indigenous — but didn’t know much more than that. Join Matthew on his journey of discovery as he seeks to find out more about his Indian heritage.
For the entire NewFire article visit here.

more stories from this episode

• WATCH | I Am Indigenous
• 'Am I Indian?': A young man's journey to reclaim identity
• BLOG | Lisa Charleyboy: my journey to Indigenous nationhood
• 
  NEWS
  Tribes Call For  Testimony on Children Who Went Missing at Boarding Schools 
  July 24, 2017. The Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) is working with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) to file a submission with the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID) to call on the United States to provide a full accounting of American Indian and Alaska Native children who were taken into government custody under the U.S. Boarding School Policy and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
   





#60sScoop Letters to First Nations leaders and Canadian Ministers

Letter to AFN request to meet 60s Scoop adoptees by Indigenous Adoptees

 

February 19 2017

 

National Chief Perry Bellegarde

Assembly of First Nations

55 Metcalfe Street

Suite 1600

Ottawa, ON K1P 6L5

 

Dear National Chief,

 

Thank you for your recent statement “Children of the Sixties Scoop deserve justice, healing and reconciliation” on February 14, 2017.  The National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network (NISCWN) formerly known as BiGiwen Indigenous Adoptee Gathering, began our work in earnest in 2014 in Ottawa, ON.  Led by a few local Sixties Scoop adoptees, our goal was to bring adoptees together to share our stories, validate each other’s experiences, and work towards healing grounded in our Indigenous traditions.  Our first gathering was a resounding success as 65 adoptees came together in Ottawa from all over Turtle Island to build capacity, share stories, and begin the long process of healing inter-generational wounds and trauma.  In August 2015 we held our 2nd gathering for Sixties Scoop adoptees, foster care survivors, and their families.  With the help of trusted Elders and community facilitators, we utilized land-based ceremonies to lead the healing work.  At that time we reached out to AFN for support but your office could not accommodate us but thank you for offering.  Our 3rd gathering is planned for fall 2017.

The National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network (“the Network”) is writing this letter to request a meeting with you in light of the recent judicial decision on the Ontario class-action lawsuit on behalf of Sixties Scoop adoptees. Also, given Minister Bennett’s statement on her willingness to engage in negotiations with adoptees, a meeting would be especially timely. During the meeting we would like to discuss and brief you on our work, how the Sixties Scoop has impacted our lives, the work that needs to be done across Turtle Island for healing and reconciliation, and ways that NGO's Chiefs, and advisors can provided necessary support and expertise.

The Network is unique, as it's the only community-based adoptee-led organization working with Sixties Scoop adoptees & foster care survivors. We're intimately connected to hundreds of adoptees across Canada, the US, and overseas. Urban and rural First Nations, Metis and Inuit adoptees & foster care survivors who have reached out to us over the years for support, advocacy, resources and friendship. One common heartbreak and concern we hear from adoptees who've been taken away from their communities is that our Chiefs and First Nation communities have not supported our repatriations nor welcomed us back into the circle. 

Our central concern in working towards a national resolution to ongoing litigation is that all impacted adoptees and foster care survivors are not just included, but centred and prioritized, in any discussions about their cultural losses and in strategizing ways forward. It's vital that our voices are heard since it's the survivors who know the impacts of the Sixties Scoop the best because we speak to it from our lived experiences. 

Although the Ontario class-action lawsuit judgement is one small victory, thousands of adoptees and foster care survivors are once again emotionally triggered by these announcements with reverberations being felt across the nation and beyond.  Survivors do not want to be excluded from conversations about us, and together with the Assembly of First Nations the Network wants to ensure that all our voices are represented at the negotiation table, while we continue the critical work of raising awareness about the Sixties Scoop nationally and internationally.

We look forward to hearing from you,

 Colleen Hele- Cardinal, Duane Morrisseau-Beck, Elaine Kicknosway

Directors

Use the search bar on this blog for many more stories about the 60s Scoop survivors.

2017 National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network Gathering #60sScoop

2017 National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network Gathering

Save the dates!! Mark your calendars!!

When: September 28, 29, 30 and Oct 1st, 2017

Where: Waupoos Farm, Ottawa ON

Four days of  ceremony, cultural teachings, learning, sharing, support and friendship in a fun, safe, supportive environment.

For ’60s scoop’ Indigenous adoptees , foster care survivors and their families

 More information to come soon!!!

#60sScoop survivors: birth records 'mysteriously' lost or destroyed

This is amazing series of stories! Stay tuned!

'I was told I don't exist,': survivors search for paper trail to their past

Donna Carreiro · CBC News 

Sixties scoop survivor Lori O'Cheek was told her adoption records were destroyed in a fire. (Donna Carreiro (CBC))

When Lori Ann O'Cheek went to search for her birth records, she was told her files burned in a fire. When Carla Williams asked a different agency for her birth records, she too was told they burned in a fire. Likewise Trevor Bass. Likewise Jessica Sear.

Wayne Snellgrove, on the other hand, was not told his birth records were destroyed. He was told there were none to begin with.

"I got a very nice letter from Vital Statistics telling me I don't exist," Snellgrove said. "I am nowhere to be found."

Different survivors dealing with different agencies from across Canada facing similar barriers to access their past.

Carla Williams (left) leans on her daughter for support as she recalls the abuse in her adoptive home. (Donna Carreiro (CBC))

It is a yet another twist in the evolving legacy of the Sixties Scoop. Survivors, pulled from their Indigenous homes and adopted by white families around the world, now search for their birth and treaty records only to be told they cannot be found.

"There was no record of my adoption, no record of the adoption agency," Lori Ann O'Cheek said. "I just kept getting answers that the agency burned down and that's it."

Carla Williams was told the same thing. She didn't believe it.

"A fire that I don't believe ever happened, that [the child welfare agency] couldn't confirm at all," she said.

Survivors and critics say it is another example of forced assimilation and the federal government's effort to erase their Indigenous identities.

"If we grow up not knowing we're Indigenous and we're entitled to the land and treaties and status, then they don't have to honour those treaties," said Colleen Cardinal, a Sixties Scoop survivor, author and advocate. "They don't have to resource or revenue share."

That's why so many survivors can't find their way home, she said.

"There are so many Indigenous adoptees out there that have no idea what their rights are," Cardinal said. "That they are connected to the land and to status and to treaties."

Lori Ann O'Cheek was a toddler in Camperville, Man, when her mother began to warn her about strangers in the town.

The Sixties Scoop explained 1:12

"She used to warn us if a strange car came onto the reserve, to run as fast as we could," O'Cheek said. "Because kids went missing all the time."

Sure enough, child welfare officials drove up and knocked on their door. Some of her siblings escaped. She did not.

"I tried to run away but I was too young to flee," she said.

She was adopted to a family who moved to Vermont, and she spent the next several years trying to come home.

"I was always running away, just to find somebody I belonged to," she said, adding she was eventually placed in foster care.

Once she found her birth family, she returned to Canada.

To this day, her birth certificate lists her adoptive parents as her parents. Her original birth certificate remains "mysteriously" non-existent.

 

Former MLA calls for national inquiry

Eric Robinson is a former NDP MLA and was Manitoba's former Aboriginal and northern affairs minister. He said he's "disappointed but not surprised" to hear some survivors can't access their birth records.
"I've heard stories like this for years," he told the CBC. "It's a further violation of these people."
Robinson noted that in 2014, the province attempted to improve access to archived adoption records from before 1999.
But that doesn't help survivors born in other provinces.

"That's why I have long been calling for a national inquiry into the Sixties Scoop," he said. "We need a proper investigation and we need answers."

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