Manitoba’s premier, Greg Selinger, officially apologized today, to the people in that province affected by what’s come to be known as ‘the Sixties Scoop’. It was another misguided attempt to help, but the practice of forced adoptions and relocations led to countless years of suffering and abuse for many aboriginal children.
‘robbed a generation of aboriginal children of their identity’
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1980s, indigenous children were taken from their parents and placed in mostly white families by child-welfare services. Thousands of children were affected and as a result lost contact with their language and culture.
Chrisitne Merasty was taken from her aboriginal family when she was four months old. Adopted by a farming couple in rural Manitoba, with whom she has a good relationship, she says taking her from her biological family was wrong.
“As you are a child growing up, you have all these questions in your mind and you are thinking, ‘Why didn’t they want me? Why didn’t they love me? … Why did I end up over here?'” she said.
“My questions now are, ‘Who gave you the right? Who made that decision for me?'” Merasty said, “I endured a lot of racist remarks. It hurt me,”
‘an apology without action is meaningless’
The head of the recently concluded ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission‘, Justice Murray Sinclair, says he is pleased by Manitoba’s gesture, but he says an apology without action in meaningless.
“To acknowledge that the wrong has been done and that things will be better in the future. The real question though is how are they going to change?” Sinclair told CBC News.
“Everybody needs to accept the fact that they have been responsible for the perpetuation of the cultural genocide that we identified the residential schools initiated,” he said.
“Lots of children have been told that they are something other than what they are, so they’ve been denied access to their culture, which I think is a human right,” Sinclair said.
“We have the right to know who we are, we have the right to be what we were given to be at the beginning of life, and so to take that away from them was a breach of their rights,” he said.
There are now two class-action lawsuits before the courts. And adoptees are demanding a federal apology as well as compensation for what they suffered, every bit as traumatic as what other aboriginal children suffered in residential schools, they say.
National Aboriginal Day will be celebrated across Canada on Sunday June 21st.
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