What Sixties Scoop survivors built — and are teaching forward to their children and grandchildren
Nobody handed Sixties Scoop survivors a language for loving themselves as Indigenous people. Separated as children from family, culture, community, land and their own languages, many of them built one anyway.
Dr. Marlyn Bennett, PhD, wants that understood as a gain. Not what was left over after everything else was taken, but something survivors made and added to their own lives. And now, she says, they are passing it on.
"I wanted to look at it from a strengths perspective," says Bennett, herself a Sixties Scoop survivor, a member of Sandy Bay Ojibway Nation, and a researcher at the University of Calgary who is researching this dark period in Canadian history through this very novel lens.
Most research and public conversation about the Sixties Scoop begins and ends with what was taken and the harms perpetrated. Families separated. Cultures disrupted. Identities fractured. Those accounts are essential, Bennett says, and they must continue to be told. But when absence becomes the whole story, survivors appear in it only as people that things were done to.
Instead, Bennett wants to know what sustained survivors of that period — beginning in the 1950s and into the 1980s — when child-welfare authorities removed more than 24,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children from their families and placed them in non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes. The extension of provincial child-welfare jurisdiction onto reserves in 1951 saw removals of children climb sharply in the decades that followed, overlapping with residential schools, Indian hospitals and forced displacement from homelands. Children were placed in homes across Canada and, in many cases, in the United States and overseas.
According to Bennett, her research project, Exploring the Language of Love Across Generations: The Lived Experiences of Sixties Scoop Survivors and Their Families, doesn’t diminish any of that record. Instead, Bennett asks how, despite everything, did survivors learn to love themselves as Indigenous people? What did they teach themselves that no one was there to teach them? And what happens to that knowledge when it reaches the next generation?
KEEP READING: https://ucalgary.ca/news/what-sixties-scoop-survivors-built-and-are-teaching-forward-their-children-and-grandchildren
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