These topics can be distressing for students, especially for Indigenous students who may have a personal or familial history with them. The following resources are available for students who need support.
Birth of a Family follows three sisters and a brother in their first steps to forming their family, after being adopted as infants into separate families in North America. Login or create an NFB account to access study guides and other teacher materials.
Sixties Scoop by
"Discusses the removal of Indigenous children from their families, the reasons behind their removal, their lives in foster care, and the feeling of loss felt by many adoptees as a result of being raised in non-Indigenous families." - Provided by publisher
Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by
"Privileging Indigenous voices and experiences, Intimate Integration documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and Métis Project and the Indian Adoption Project. The author argues that the integration of adopted Indigenous and Métis children mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. She illustrates how the removal of Indigenous children from Indigenous families and communities took on increasing political and social urgency, contributing to what we now call the 'Sixties Scoop.' Intimate Integration utilizes an Indigenous gender analysis to identify the gendered operation of the Indian Act and its contribution to Indigenous child removal, over-representation in provincial child welfare systems, and transracial adoption. Specifically, women and children's involuntary enfranchisement through marriage, as laid out in the Indian Act, undermined Indigenous gender and kinship relationships. Making profound contributions to the history of settler-colonialism in Canada, Intimate Integration sheds light on the complex reasons behind persistent social inequalities in child welfare." - Provided by publisher
The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by
Confronting the truths of Canada's Indian Residential School system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In this book, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada's past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples. Starting with a discussion of how genocide is defined in domestic and international law, the book applies the concept to the forced transfer of Indigenous children to residential schools and the "Sixties Scoop," in which Indigenous children were taken from their communities and placed in foster homes or adopted. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with residential school survivors, officials at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and others, The Sleeping Giant Awakens offers a unique and timely perspective on the prospects for conciliation after genocide, exploring how moving forward together is difficult in a context where many settlers know little of the residential schools and the ongoing legacies of colonization, and need to have a better conception of Indigenous rights. It offers a detailed analysis of how the TRC approached genocide in its deliberations and in the Final Report. Crucially, MacDonald engages critics who argue that the term genocide impedes understanding of the IRS system and imperils prospects for conciliation. By contrast, this book sees genocide recognition as an important basis for meaningful discussions of how to engage Indigenous-settler relations in respectful and proactive ways.
The following resources follow Debbie Paul, a Sixties Scoop survivor from Nova Scotia, as she tries to find proof of her 1967 abduction.