Memoir gives voice to #60sScoop experience of being raised outside of Indigenous culture

Brittany Penner. Photo supplied. Credit Michael Maren.

 

By Shari Narine, Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
September 4th, 2025  

Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home is Brittany Penner’s account of being adopted as a baby by a Mennonite family in Manitoba and searching for her birth parents.

Such an adoption practise—having white families raise Indigenous children—continues, points out Penner, who is now 36 years old.

“I really keep thinking about…how many children and teenagers are still facing realities like this where…they have been cut off from their first families, where they're being raised outside of their culture, and how it's not something that's in the past. It is something that is still very present across our country today,” said Penner, who has Anishinaabe, Cree and European settler lineage.

When Penner started writing her memoir, it was under a different title. But when she explained it to people, the phrase “children like us” kept coming up. 

“It was always in reference to…children who were Indigenous, who were placed for adoption or relinquished or apprehended or in foster care. And that was just how I think, and my siblings and my cousins, collectively, thought of ourselves,” she said.

Penner and the other Indigenous children who were fostered or adopted by her extended Mennonite family were part of the Sixties Scoop, a common practise by the Canadian government to place Métis, First Nations and Inuit children with non-Indigenous families in other provinces and sometimes in other countries.  The Sixties Scoop began in the 1950s, ramped up in the 1960s, and carried through until mid-1980. It’s estimated 20,000 children were taken.

Penner was the only child her parents adopted.  She had numerous foster siblings (21 before her seventh birthday), who she connected with as brothers and sisters only to have them torn away from her over the years.  Due to these losses, as a youngster she became obsessed with when she would be taken away, and it was a fear she lived with despite her mother’s attempted reassurances that that that would not happen to her. Her father’s Mennonite family, including his parents, adopted and fostered numerous Indigenous children. These were the Native aunts and uncles and cousins that Penner grew up with.

In offering her story, Penner cautions the reader in the book’s foreword that this is “not a memoir wherein I ask you to choose a side.” She says that mattered to her because, when she was growing up, she was told she “should be grateful” that her adoptive parents had chosen her.

As she writes in her memoir, “I’m adopted. I’m reminded of this again and again and again—until I begin to believe there is something inherently wrong with me for not feeling unendingly lucky.”

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“The side that was praised as a child was the nurture…and that was very, very emphasized,” said Penner. “As a reaction to having so much taken from me at birth in terms of where I came from and my identity and who my family was, I put a lot of emphasis on the nature in terms of where I came from. I think I've come to land at a place where I have really come to see the value in both. I think that it's human nature to sometimes want to place more value on one side or another depending on where we're at in terms of reckoning with our own stories.”

Penner recounts her painful journey of discovering Crystal, her birth mother. But once contact was made, it wasn’t smooth building a relationship. She also reached out to her birth father. 

Penner notes in her book that she doesn’t expect her adoptive father to read her memoir and doesn’t know if either her adoptive mother or birth mother will read it.

For her adoptive parents, she said, “There might be some fear around what the book might contain and fear of the unknown and maybe fear of knowing…my personal and internal experiences.”

As for Crystal, Penner said, “I can see her picking it up. I can certainly see her supporting me and finding a copy. I don't know if she'll read it or not.”

Children Like Us is not the first time Penner has shared her story publicly. Since 2021 she has written personal essays that have been published. The response she received included “racist rhetoric…similar to some of the things I’ve been hearing my whole life. And the fact that I had heard them before as a child or a teenager didn't necessarily make it any easier when I heard it with those pieces.”

But telling her story in Children Like Us is “hugely important,” said Penner. “I don't think I would have put myself out there in what feels like such a vulnerable and emotionally honest way if I didn't really believe in the importance of it.”

Penner says when she was growing up, and even now, the only narratives she sees about fostering and adopting are written from the points of view of the parents.

Penner, now a physician, blends modern medicine and holistic approaches along with personal therapeutic work in her practice. A number of her patients have similar stories to hers.

“When I was writing this book, (I was) just thinking, ‘I'm writing this for you. I have hope for you. I'm holding hope for you.’ So I hope that patients can see this and think, ‘Wow, my potential to hope for a life that is filled with whatever I want it to be filled with is actually so much higher than I might have been told and there is still a chance for me to find my culture again’,” said Penner.

As for foster or adopted families, many of whom are also part of Penner’s practice, she said she wants parents to look at their children “in a slightly new light. (That) seems like a really beautiful idea to me. Or parents having newfound compassion for their children because of what they've read seems very beautiful to me.”

Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home is published by Doubleday Canada and will be available Sept. 5. It can be ordered online at amazon.ca.