‘Little Bird’ and the ’60s Scoop

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/07/2023 (827 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you have not yet watched Little Bird, the six-part series streaming on Crave, I would highly recommend that you do, though much of it is heart-wrenching. Conceived by Ontario-based writers Jennifer Podemski and Hannah Moscovitch, the series tells the story of how the lives of one Indigenous family named Little Bird — a mother and father, Patti and Morris, and their four children— were devastated by the “’60s Scoop,” when two social workers, backed by a callous justice system, arbitrarily determined that the children were not being properly cared for.

The social workers’ detrimental judgment is predicated by the fact that this family lives in poverty on the Long Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan under the jurisdiction of the federal government. It is federal government officials who are truly guilty of neglect, yet that crucial point is ignored. The children are loved and provided for, yet that is beside the point.

The social workers, largely ignorant of Indigenous customs and culture, arrive at the family’s home with two burly RCMP officers, and the three youngest children, including five-year-old Bezhig (superbly acted as an adult by Darla Contois), are forcibly removed from the family’s home.

Like other Indigenous children, Bezhig is advertised for adoption in the newspaper and is soon adopted by a caring Montreal Jewish couple who are Holocaust survivors. In an instant, she is transformed into Esther Rosenblum. She is loved and thrives, yet as she becomes older, she innately knows that something is missing in her life. The experiences of her twin brother and younger sister are completely opposite and tragic; both are abused by foster families and suffer for years. In a classic case of white Canadian paternalism, the court in Regina permits Patti and Morris to keep their oldest son. But the loss of the three children is too much for them to bear.

As Bezhig/Esther is completing law school and is engaged to be married, she embarks on an emotional search to discover what happened to her family members. At every turn, her quest for the truth is thwarted by dubious bureaucratic rules and social workers and provincial authorities whose racism is apparent.

The term “’60s Scoop” was first used by Patrick Johnson in his 1983 book Native Children and the Child Welfare System that had been commissioned by the Canadian Council on Social Development for which he then served as the program director. As Johnson recalled a few years ago, while researching the study, he interviewed a retired B.C. social worker, who told him “that during the ’60s, she and her colleagues ‘scooped’ children from reserves almost as a matter of course.’” The phrase, he adds “was so evocative” that he used it as the title for one his chapters. It has been referenced ever since to describe how children were cruelly taken from First Nations and Metis families from the mid-’50s to the early ’80s.

In some cases, the removal of children from their families may have been justified for the children’s safety, no different than the removal of children from non-Indigenous families. Except that by 1977, among the Canadian children living in care of provincial welfare authorities, 20 per cent were Indigenous children at a time when they accounted for approximately five per cent of the total number of children in the country.

This process began in 1951. As residential schools were being phased out, the federal government transferred responsibility of the welfare of Indigenous children to the provinces. Officials in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and elsewhere shared the basic premise underlying the residential schools: that in order to integrate and assimilate Indigenous children into the larger white Canadian society, it was necessary to remove them from their parents, families, and communities.

Over several decades, nearly 80 per cent of these children were adopted by non-Indigenous families and many ended up in foster homes located in the United States. American adoption agencies paid provincial governments fees — upwards of $5,000, according to a 2006 study — for each child. Worse, once the children were placed in new homes, social workers in Canada rarely checked up on them or followed their progress. This was another example of government neglect, which, as depicted in Little Bird, led to the physical and sexual abuse of the children.

In March 1982, the Manitoba NDP government led by Howard Pawley appointed senior family court Judge Edwin Kimelman to review the practices of “exporting” Indigenous children to live outside of Manitoba, a practice that was only halted that year. Kimelman released his report two years later. It was, as the Free Press then called it, an “appalling indictment” of child-care agencies. Kimelman concluded “unequivocally that cultural genocide has been taking place in a systematic and routine manner.” Added the judge: “One gets an image of children stacked in foster homes as used cars are stacked on corner lots just waiting for the right ‘buyer’ to stroll by.”

When faced with harsh criticism, most governments, no matter the political party, tend to be defensive. Thus, Muriel Smith, the community services minister in the Pawley government, disagreed that social workers and child agencies were culpable of “cultural genocide.” “I think they were acting in good faith according to the wisdom of the day,” she commented. “I think it’s using hindsight to make judgments on the past.” Inherent prejudice and bias were weak excuses then and still are.

In one of many powerful scenes in Little Bird, Bezhig — with tears in her eyes — tells her adopted mother that, “You can’t just stick a new name on a person and pretend that nothing happened and you can’t take a five-year-old child away from their family and think that they are going to forget… It was wrong. It was criminal.”

And it was.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.