The Sixties Scoop and Child Welfare
The Sixties Scoop and Child Welfare
A note before you begin: This lesson covers the Sixties Scoop, including the removal of Indigenous children from their families by provincial child welfare authorities and their placement in non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes. If you or someone in your family has a connection to the child welfare system or to adoption, some of this content may be difficult. You do not have to share personal experiences to complete this lesson. If you need to talk to someone, you can reach out to your teacher at your daily check-in, or contact the Hope for Wellness Help Line anytime at 1-855-242-3310 (also available by chat at hopeforwellness.ca) or the National Indian Residential School Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419.
Learning Goal: explain what the Sixties Scoop was, approximately when it occurred, and how many Indigenous children were removed from their families across Canada. I can describe at least two lasting impacts of the Sixties Scoop on Indigenous identity, family connections, and community well-being.
Between 1951 and 1991, child welfare authorities across Canada removed thousands of Indigenous children from their families and placed them in foster care or adoption, most often with non-Indigenous families. Researchers call this practice the Sixties Scoop, a term coined in 1983 by researcher Patrick Johnston. Removals peaked through the 1960s and 1970s. Government records document 11,132 adoptions of Indigenous children between 1960 and 1990, but historians believe the true number, including long-term foster placements, was closer to 20,000. The gap between the two figures says something on its own: even the paperwork of the Sixties Scoop failed to track the children it took.
Saskatchewan ran one of the only provincial programs built specifically to advertise Indigenous children for adoption. The Department of Social Welfare piloted the Adopt Indian and Métis (AIM) Program from 1967 to 1969, then broadened it to all children needing placement in 1970. AIM placed photographs of Indigenous children in newspapers and ran ads on radio and television across southeastern Saskatchewan, promising interested families a fast, simple process. Social workers behind the program believed they were solving a problem. They saw First Nations and Métis children stuck in foster care with little chance of returning home, and they treated a screened, "normal" white household as the solution, rather than asking why so many Indigenous families were losing their children in the first place.
The campaign worked as intended. By 1969, Indigenous people made up 7.5 percent of Saskatchewan's population, but Indigenous children made up 41.9 percent of all children living in the province's foster homes.
In 1962, social workers removed seven-month-old Robert Doucette from his home in Buffalo Narrows, a Métis community in northern Saskatchewan. A priest had reported that his sixteen-year-old mother was unfit to raise him. Doucette's grandfather, his mushum, threw rocks at the car that took him and spent the rest of his life asking his daughters to find "his little man." Doucette grew up without knowing his grandfather existed. Decades later, searching through the Saskatchewan Archives, he found a photograph captioned "happy Métis grandfather with his 13 grandchildren." He counted twelve faces. He was the missing child.
Doucette later became President of the Métis Nation–Saskatchewan. He was not alone in his loss. In 1971, Métis families in Saskatoon organized the Métis Foster Home Committee, led by Howard Adams, Phyllis Trochie, Nora Thibodeau, and Vicki Racette. The committee called the AIM advertising racist propaganda that portrayed Métis children as unwanted and their parents as unfit. They asked the province to hand foster care over to Métis-controlled organizations instead. The department refused.
Children separated from their families through the Sixties Scoop often lost their first languages, their knowledge of their Nation and community, and their relationships with parents, grandparents, and siblings. Many grew up with no record of who they were before adoption, the way Doucette grew up not knowing his grandfather had spent a lifetime searching for him. Some survivors were placed with families who never told them they were Indigenous at all. Others were placed with families outside Saskatchewan, and even outside Canada, cutting off any realistic path back to their communities.
These losses did not end when a child turned eighteen. They shaped identity, mental health, and family relationships for life, and they continue to affect the children and grandchildren of Sixties Scoop survivors today, the same way the residential school system you studied in Lesson 16 reaches into the present.
In 2017, an Ontario court ruled that Canada had failed the Indigenous children it removed. Marcia Brown Martel, Chief of Beaverhouse First Nation and the lead plaintiff, had been taken from her family at age four. The federal government signed a settlement on November 30, 2017, worth up to $750 million, along with $50 million for an Indigenous-led healing foundation. Status First Nations and Inuit survivors qualified for compensation. Métis and non-status survivors, including Doucette, did not, an exclusion that echoed the one his community had fought against in 1971.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe apologized for the province's role on January 7, 2019, after members of the Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society of Saskatchewan led sharing circles across the province. Some survivors welcomed the apology. Others called it incomplete, pointing to a child welfare system that still removes Indigenous children from their homes at high rates today.
The Sixties Scoop did not remove children because their families had failed them. It removed children because a system had already decided that Indigenous families were the problem. The same pattern of exclusion that shaped the AIM program's advertising in 1967 shaped the 2017 settlement that left Métis and non-status survivors like Robert Doucette without compensation.
Sixties Scoop: The widespread removal of Indigenous children from their families by Canadian child welfare authorities, roughly 1951 to 1991, and their placement in foster care or adoption, usually with non-Indigenous families.
Adopt Indian and Métis (AIM) Program: A Saskatchewan government program, active from 1967 to 1970, that advertised Indigenous children for adoption through newspapers, radio, and television.
Class action: A single lawsuit filed on behalf of a large group of people who share a similar claim, allowing them to seek a resolution together rather than filing separate cases.
Stevenson, Allyson. "Selling the Sixties Scoop: Saskatchewan's Adopt Indian and Métis Project." Active History, October 19, 2017. https://activehistory.ca/blog/2017/10/19/selling-the-sixties-scoop-saskatchewans-adopt-indian-and-metis-project/
"Adopt Indian and Métis Project (AIM)." Gladue Rights Research Database, University of Saskatchewan and Legal Aid Saskatchewan. https://gladue.drc.usask.ca/node/6626
"Sixties Scoop Agreement in Principle." Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Government of Canada, October 6, 2017. https://www.canada.ca/en/indigenous-northern-affairs/news/2017/10/sixties_scoop_agreementinprinciple.html
Hunter, Adam. "Saskatchewan premier apologizes to Sixties Scoop survivors." CBC News, January 7, 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-premier-sixties-scoop-apology-1.4965238
Dart, Christopher. "The Sixties Scoop Explained." CBC Docs POV. https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-sixties-scoop-explained