CT man taken from First Nation family as child finds purpose in sharing story: ‘I’m not the only one’
WILTON, CONNECTICUT
— Ripped from his sister’s arms and taken to a new country over a
half-century ago, Canada native Taber Gregory said he’s still
reconciling with how and why he wound up in Wilton.
About 20 years ago, the longtime Wiltonian and owner of Gregory’s Sawmill on Pimpewaug Road said he learned he was one of thousands of survivors of what’s known as the Sixties Scoop.
The
Sixties Scoop refers to a decades-long period in Canadian history, from
about 1951 and until as late as the 1990s, marked by the mass removal
of Aboriginal children from their homes — in most cases without the
consent of their families — into the child welfare system.
Many
of the children were placed in non-Indigenous households in Canada,
while others — including Taber Gregory, who was born Henry Desjarlais in
the Canadian province of Alberta in 1968 — were relocated and adopted
out to families outside the country.
Gregory,
now 55, said he always knew he was adopted but didn’t know about the
early years of his life until connecting with biological family members
in his early- to mid-30s.
“I
started getting some random calls saying somebody wanted to talk to me,
and the person claimed he was my father,” Gregory said. “I was a little
confused and didn’t accept the phone call because I didn’t know what to
think about it.”
The calls kept coming, and Gregory said he kept refusing.
Then
one day, he finally accepted and learned that the person calling was,
in fact, his biological father, Louis Desjarlais. Gregory said his
biological father has since died, but he has stayed in touch with one of
his biological siblings in Canada.
Through
telephone conversations, Gregory said he learned he was the youngest of
seven children and had been taken from his family’s home in Canada when
he was about one-and-a-half years old. He said his adopted parents had
been unaware that he had been forcibly removed from his biological
family.
“My sister walked me through everything, and it kind of snowballed from there,” he said.
Gregory showed Hearst Connecticut Media an August 2001 letter from the Cold Lake First Nations,
verifying his Cold Lake First Nation Registry List membership and
identifying his biological parents, as well as their own membership. The
letter said that since his biological parents were “of 100% North
American Indian Blood Quantum,” Gregory “has at least a 100% North
American Indian Blood Quantum” himself.
One
of Gregory’s four biological sisters, Alicia Minoose, claimed to have
been holding him when social service workers came into the house, took
him out of her arms, put him in a vehicle and left.
“She
told me she ran out the door, chasing after me, and that was the last
time she ever saw me,” Gregory said. “She was the last one to hold me.”
According
to Tony Merchant — a Canadian attorney whose law firm was involved in a
Sixties Scoop survivors class-action lawsuit several years ago that
Gregory benefited from — government-funded social services agencies
involved in the removal of Indigenous children from their homes were not
closely supervised and “intensified their search for likely
candidates/victims for adoption” over time.
“Grabbing
children became a need-for-supply phenomenon, and this was particularly
true for boys,” he said, noting that they were “significantly more
popular for adoption than girls.”
According
to Gregory’s sister, two of their siblings were taken as well. She said
they were placed with foster parents and eventually brought home — but
the family couldn’t find Gregory, whom she still refers to by his birth
name of Henry.
“Somehow,
mom found David and Margaret ... but they couldn’t find you,” she said
over the phone during Gregory’s interview. “They didn’t know what
happened to you. We were searching and searching, but there was no
information.”
Gregory
said he was told that his biological mother, Bella Desjarlais, “cried
and cried” after he was taken and he believes stress and heartbreak from
what happened may have contributed to her death — which he said
occurred before he reconnected with his biological family.
Later learning what he and his family in Canada went through, Gregory said he “went into survival mode.”
“I
went through some depression, but I was able to get help and kind of
turn that around and stay motivated and positive,” he said. “I did have
to take a step back and kind of digest everything.”
Adoption and life in Wilton
Wilton has been the only home he knows — or at least remembers.
Gregory
said he has no recollection of his time in the Canadian foster care
system, traveling to the U.S. or when his name was changed from Henry
to Taber — but he knows he ended up at an adoption agency in
Pennsylvania.
From
there, Gregory said he was adopted by Steve and Judy Meier when he was
around 3 years old, moved to Wilton and had two brothers — both of whom
were also adopted, but from different places. One was born in Vietnam,
and the other was born in Bridgeport, he said.
Gregory said his adoptive parents didn’t know he had been forcibly taken from his home.
“The
Welcome House in Pennsylvania was like the first stop, and they just
adopted me from there,” he said. “They had no idea how I got there, so I
can’t blame them for anything like that. They had no idea what
happened.”
According to the website of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation
— the parent organization of Welcome House — the adoption program
“matched more than 7,000 orphans and children from around the globe with
adoptive families in the United States,” and was phased out in June
2014 “because of changes in international adoption regulations.”
Samantha
Freis, a curator with the foundation, said the organization does not
know what the adoption process was like during that period.
After
his adoptive parents divorced, Gregory said his mother Judy Meier ended
up working at Gregory’s Sawmill and meeting John Gregory.
“They
made a connection, and we ended up here with Mr. Gregory and kind of
became a family,” he said. “We grew up on the Gregory farm (where) we
had draft horses, oxen, pigs and chickens.”
After
their adoptive mother died in 1985, Taber Gregory said he and his
brothers stayed with John Gregory, whom he considered a father figure
and legally changed his last name from Meier to Gregory at his request.
When
John Gregory retired in the mid- to late-1990s and moved to Ohio, where
he later died in 2006, Taber Gregory said he took over the sawmill
business — which has been in the Gregory family since the 1850s — and has been keeping the family legacy alive ever since.
“I became a Gregory and have been continuing the family business,” he said.
Gregory
said he never knew, nor suspected, that his separation from his
biological family and subsequent adoption were forced — but he’s
grateful to have learned the truth about his past, “survived the ordeal”
and reconnect with his family in Canada, who he said he has not yet
visited in person but hopes to see in the near future.
In
the meantime, he said his sister keeps him informed about what’s going
on with family members in Canada — many of whom Gregory said still
reside on a First Nations reservation and speak Chipewyan.
Class-action settlement
Several
years ago, the Canadian government reached an $800 million class-action
agreement with Sixties Scoop survivors — $750 million of which was set
aside for individual compensation — the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported in 2017.
The
settlement, through which all First Nations and Inuit children who
“were removed from their homes — and lost their cultural identities as a
result — between 1951 and 1991 (were) entitled to compensation,” was
less than the $1.3 billion sought on behalf of about 16,000 Indigenous
children in Canada’s Ontario province, according to the CBC article.
The
settlement agreement followed an Ontario Superior Court judge’s
February 2017 ruling that the Canadian government not only “breached its
‘duty of care’ to the children and ignored the damaging effect” of the
child welfare program, but also “breached part of the agreement that
required consultation with First Nations” about it, the CBC reported.
The judge approved the distribution of $25,000 to $50,000 in payouts to about 22,000 Sixties Scoop survivors the following year as part of the settlement agreement, through which the Canadian government also agreed to establish a foundation designed to “enable change and reconciliation.”
According to a class-action claims process website set up for the settlement, 21,208 of the 34,816 claims received by the December 2019 late claim deadline had been approved as of January 2024.
Gregory
— who showed Hearst a questionnaire he filled out for Merchant Law
Group LLP, one of the law firms involved in the class action — said his
claim was among the ones approved. He wouldn’t disclose the exact payout
amount he received — saying only that it was over $10,000.
“Everything I know is consistent with him being a (Sixties) Scoop survivor who received compensation,” Merchant said.
He
said Gregory did not become a client “because obtaining compensation
was something done directly with the claims service providers,” but said
his firm did provide assistance to Gregory.
Gregory,
who feels the Sixties Scoop settlement payout isn’t enough to
compensate for the harm caused to those taken from their biological
families, said he shares his story not for pity, but for purpose — to
raise awareness about what he and thousands of other Indigenous children
went through and help prevent something like it from ever happening
again.
“I know I’m not the only one, and I don’t want anybody going through what I did,” he said.
SOURCE: https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/taber-gregory-wilton-sixties-scoop-canada-18672082.php
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