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The Sixties Scoop is the term used to refer to a period of time during the 1960s into the mid-1970s when provincial child welfare agencies removed children from Indigenous families and communities and placed them for adoption into white homes. The prevailing practice at that time was to deny adopted children any access to information about or contact with our birth families, robbing Indigenous people like me of our identity and culture, a profound loss that was dismissed as inconsequential. After all, we were being given the opportunity to become white; what could we possibly have to complain about?

In June of 2015 I heard the news that the premier of Manitoba, the province that is on the traditional territory of my people, the Red River Métis, had publicly apologized for the forced adoption and relocation of Indigenous children in the Sixties Scoop. The feelings that flooded me like the Red River breaching its banks were unexpected.

Along with the Mi'kmaw residential school survivors of We'koqma'q First Nation in Unama'ki (Cape Breton), whom I’ve had the honour of accompanying on their healing journey for the past twenty years, I am cynical about these public and performative statements of apology made by politicians who are just as likely to be thinking about how Indigenous Peoples are the fastest-growing demographic in this country (read: lots of voters) as they are to be having genuine, soul-searching moments of remorse. And yet, when we hear the words I am sorry, many of us are overcome with intense emotions that surprise us. 

Having our suffering acknowledged can be a powerful experience. Especially after years of living in the shadowy half-light of colonial erasure.

For the first 38 years of my life, I had no idea who I was. Taken from my Métis family and community at birth in 1960, I was placed for adoption with the Curries, a white suburban family in Winnipeg. The material privileges that came with that placement were no match for the acute insecurity I experienced for the following 17 years, a period of my life that was, hands down, the most difficult I have lived through. However benevolent the intentions of the assimilationist policy–driven social workers who put me there may have been, it turns out that infants and children are not tabulae rasae, blank slates upon which parents can project the image of the children they want to have and mould the little human beings in their care into those people. We now know that adopted children sustain a deep psychic wound from the separation from our birth mothers and experience profound, usually unacknowledged grief and loss, which is made worse when we are placed in cultures other than our own.

When an Indigenous person receives their Spirit Name, the power of that ceremony comes from our ancestors, strengthening our connection to All Our Relations and guides in the Spirit World, who gave us that name before we were born. It is a name that teaches us about our unique spirit and the gifts, also known as medicine, that we will carry and offer in the world during our lifetime. It is the name by which we are known in the Spirit World we came from and to which we will someday return. Being adopted doesn’t change that, but being removed from our culture makes it harder for us to find our way as the people we were born to be.

Throughout the years that I lived in that adoptive home, the white middle-class family life of home, school, church, piano lessons, and camping trips that looked benign to outsiders was, in truth, spiked with physical and emotional abuse. I grew up thinking that I was a “bad kid” or “problem child” when in fact, I just couldn’t hold the shape of the mould, couldn’t be the daughter my mother was trying to make me into. It was clear to me from a young age that she had designs on who I should be. Despite my best efforts to adhere to the plan, I somehow always ended up being myself. In that world, not only was that not a good thing, it was a punishable offence of which I was constantly guilty. 

Add to that the total lack of anything that could serve as context or reference point to help me understand why I was going through this, and the result is a childhood laced with guilt, shame, confusion, and loneliness. With the help of wise Elders and skilled therapists encountered later in my life, I have worked through a lot of this. The loneliness is still with me.

As the Sixties Scoop surfaces in the public consciousness, I sense a space opening up for a long-overdue conversation.

Excerpted with permission from the book Finding Otipemisiwak: The People Who Own Themselves, by Andrea Currie, published by Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024.

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Learn more about Finding Otipemisiwak:

A Sixties Scoop survivor's journey back to her Nation and the truth of who she is

Otipemisiwak is a Plains Cree word describing the Metis, meaning "the people who own themselves."

Andrea Currie was born into a Metis family with a strong lineage of warriors, land protectors, writers, artists, and musicians—all of which was lost to her when she was adopted as an infant into a white family with no connection to her people. It was 1960, and the Sixties Scoop was in full swing. Together with her younger adopted brother, also Metis, she struggled through her childhood, never feeling like she belonged in that world. When their adoptions fell apart during their teen years, the two siblings found themselves on different paths, yet they stayed connected. Currie takes us through her journey, from the harrowing time of bone-deep disconnection, to the years of searching and self-discovery, into the joys and sorrows of reuniting with her birth family.

Finding Otipemisiwak weaves lyrical prose, poetry, and essays into an incisive commentary on the vulnerability of Indigenous children in a white supremacist child welfare system, the devastation of cultural loss, and the rocky road some people must walk to get to the truth of who they are. Her triumph over the state's attempts to erase her as an Indigenous person is tempered by the often painful complexities of re-entering her cultural community while bearing the mark of the white world in which she was raised. In Finding Otipemisiwak, one woman's stories about surviving, then thriving as a fully present member of her Nation and the human family are a portal. Readers who walk through will better understand the impact of the Sixties Scoop in the country now called Canada.