#60s Scoop seek formal apology

Sixties Scoop: Aboriginals Adopted Into White Families Seek Apology

  By Chinta Puxley, The Canadian Press 

WINNIPEG - Some aboriginal people who were adopted into white families during the so-called Sixties Scoop say it's their turn for reconciliation and are calling for a formal apology from the federal government.
Dozens of adoptees gathered in Winnipeg on Monday to tell their stories — many for the first time — and figure out how to get justice.
Coleen Rajotte was taken from her Cree community in Saskatchewan when she was three months old and raised by a Manitoba family. Adoptees were robbed of their real families and feel someone has to be held accountable, she said.
"If someone came into your home today, took your children and shipped them to the United States and around the world, we would want answers," she said. "That's what we as adoptees are asking for. Someone has to take responsibility for this."
From the 1960s to the 1980s, thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their homes by child welfare services and placed with non-aboriginal families. Many consider the adoptions as an extension of the residential school system, which aimed to "take the Indian out of the child."
Rajotte said she was lucky enough to be placed into a loving home, but she lost her language, her culture and her connection to her ancestral home. When she recently went to the home she would have grown up in had she not been adopted, Rajotte said it was overwhelming.
"I was physically ill for days just trying to process all of that," she said.
But while residential school survivors have had a formal apology and are the subjects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, adoptees haven't been formally recognized.
"Personally, I would like to see some kind of formal apology to all adoptees that were taken from their homes," Rajotte said. "That's a lot of children — 20,000 children across Canada."
A spokeswoman for federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt said there would be no comment.
"As this case is currently before the courts it would be inappropriate to comment further," she said in an email.
A class-action lawsuit launched by some survivors in Ontario in 2009 is slowly making its way through the courts. The lawsuit was certified, but Canada recently won leave to appeal that decision.
Manitoba Aboriginal Affairs Minister Eric Robinson said it's time adoptees were given the same opportunity for reconciliation as residential school survivors. Some adoptees were put with families where they were treated as farm hands or subjected to horrific abuse, he said.
"It's not an easy thing to talk about the hurts that many of them endured as children, not knowing who they were, being a brown face in an all-white school as an example," said Robinson, a residential school survivor who organized the two-day gathering.
"Those things are very difficult to talk about in this current day but they have to be addressed."
Those adoptees at the gathering hope to emerge with a strategy for recognition and a sense of what supports they need to heal, he said.
"Compensation no doubt will come up," Robinson said. "There's got to be a certain degree of accountability by governments."
SOURCE

Resonating Reconciliation Project #60sScoop #Adoption

By Trace A. DeMeyer

From their website: http://www.ncra.ca/resonating/documentaries

Resonating Reconciliation Project are the radio documentaries. As part of this project, forty campus and community radio stations across the country are working with local Indigenous producers to create a documentary about the legacy of Indian Residential Schools in their communities in Canada. They are the result of the culminating hard work of the Indigenous producers to write, record, and produce the documentaries, and from the stations to train, provide assistance, equipment, and technical support for the producers.

Two Worlds

The documentaries share the stories of survivors, people who work for child and family services, family members, friends, and many more people whose lives have been impacted and shaped by the legacy of Indian Residential Schools.

The 60s Scoop included America, too, and perhaps longer since adoptions effected Native children until 1978 and even continues today with American judges who do not abide by or understand the Indian Child Welfare Act.    Much more work needs to be done to document America's Indian Adoption Projects and ARENA - which is why I am now working on a new anthology CALLED HOME. The first anthology TWO WORLDS collected narratives of adoptees from the US and Canada.

The only way we can change this history of assimilation and cultural genocide is to tell it ourselves...


The following documentary speaks about Adoption and the 60s Scoop in Canada
Click to LISTEN:  (MP3 of part 1) (MP3 of part 2)

Produced by: Dana Wesley
Featured Speakers/Guests (part 1): Beth and "Kayla"
Featured Speakers/Guests (part 2): Laura Maracle and Janice Hill

Music (part 1): "Greetings Sunrise" by the Four Winds Women's Singers from Honoring Our Ancestors; "Wildflower (remix)" by the Women of Wabano from Voices; "Universal Healing" by David R. Maracle from Sacred Healing

Music (part 2): "Universal Healing" by David R. Maracle from Sacred Healing; "Tomorrow" by Nick Sherman from Drag Your Words Through; "Her Dance" by Joanne Shenandoah from Covenant

Summary: This documentary follows the life of its producer and includes interviews with others on how the 60s scoop continues to impact families, communities, and individuals.

Adoption Language and Propaganda: Code Switch

AN EXCERPT by Joy Lieberthal (aka Song Eun Hee)
FROM Adoption Echoes(how the adoption story continues long after you figured it out)

...As more adoptees demand a change in the way adoption is conducted, talked about and discussed, there is another side code switching to make adoption sound urgent, necessary and in peril of going extinct. I should clarify….international adoption.  Frankly, it’s driving me crazy. 

Imminently, our legislators are seeking ways to pass the CHIFF legislation and their code is amazingly effective.   It makes me wonder what is wrong with my brain that I seem to read their words in a completely different way than what I see.  Right now, there are groups in the US who are in near hysterics about the “orphan crisis” in the world, mobilizing people to believe they must adopt, adoption is the only solution.

Every time this happens, I call upon my friends and colleagues who are adopted and it does feel like we are reading another language.  We don’t agree universally on every issue, but I appreciate the passionate civility we dialogue.  Our code has always been with the intention to have the adopted as the center of our focus.  It is clear and trusted.  I asked for help and I got it.

Melanie Chung-Sherman, my co-author, lives in a place that I swear speaks a different English at times.  Her “Blessings” sign-off at the end of every email causes me to chuckle and I look to her to help me better understand the language religion plays in the adoption world.  Living in a more secular, rather less evangelical, area has be me blind to the codeswitch.  She agreed to write with me and help clarify from her perspective the code switching that happens in the world of “saving the orphan” movement that I struggle with. 

So, here is our list of how the code is switching in our heads.  I am hoping it drives you equally mad!  I am hoping when you read the CHIFF legislation and future media pieces on adoption that you may begin to see the code for yourself.

• child advocates- code for those in support of perpetuating and increasing the number of foreign born children being adopted to White American couples.  If you read the list of supporters of the CHIFF legislation, the list of adoptee organizations and organizations internationally recognized as working for preserving children in their country/family of origin is glaringly light.
• children in families first – code for children from Third World countries into the homes of privileged, American couples
• growing up in a family is a child’s basic human right – code switch for “growing up in an adoptive family in America”; perpetuation of international adoption
• international adoption as a solution – code for international adoption is THE solution
• best practices – code for ways to primarily advance the process and promotion of international adoption
• orphan - a complex code word steeped in biblical meaning that has been simplified that has categorized  and subsequently emotionally petitioned the adoption community into action on behalf of children in need who may or may not be legally available for adoption. It does not diminish the fact that there are children without direct care, but is overly referenced for all children who appear in need and lacking a road to Christian salvation by Western standards. At one time this terminology was antiquated, but was revived at the height of the evangelical adoption movement.
• rescue –to save a child in need by means of international adoption in a Westernized home (“being called to adopt”) and many times not critically considering the long-term implications for that child and first family, alternatives to permanency in-country or the possible reasons and/or methods in which a child was referred for international adoption originally. Taking on the theological salvation narrative and attempting to vertically apply to the child while overlooking the fact that adoption is about permanently building a family, not rescuing someone.
• resources can be reallocated to achieve more timely, effective, nurturing, and permanent familial solutions for children living without families– code for taking existing federal funds already benchmarked to promote family permanency in-country and reallocating them to ensure international adoption policy, practice, and placement is securely funded.
• shall lead the development and implementation of policies that will ensure the timely provision of appropriate, protective, and permanent family care for children living without families – policy codeswitch that will engender the least restrictive, fastest, and Western-centric measures to ensure international adoptive placement while deconstructing and maneuvering around current international and federal accountability standards in an effort to boost numbers of adoptions.

And for the ultimate codeswitch, when we read that a piece of legislation is in keeping with the core American belief that families are the best protection for children, this really means, regardless of global cultural considerations, which include the impact of poverty, gender and social class bias, diverse social norms, as well as a country’s sovereignty, Americans still know what is best. Thus, it is only in an American family that a child can truly flourish.

[And we find ourselves as American Indian Adoptees with this same situation in regards to the

Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare (CAICW) who wish to open the floodgates AGAIN and end ICWA protections so more white people can adopt from Indian reservations...Trace].

Native American Leaders Call for DOJ Investigation of ICWA Violations

Published: February 3, 2014
 

PORTLAND, OR—Today, National Indian Child Welfare Association Executive Director Terry Cross formally requested the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division launch an investigation into the unlawful treatment of American Indian and Alaska Native children in private adoptions and public child welfare systems.
Cross presented a letter on behalf of four leading national Native American organizations—the National Indian Child Welfare Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the Native American Rights Fund, and the Association on American Indian Affairs—during a meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Portland hosted by Department of Justice Acting Attorney General for Civil Rights Jocelyn Samuels.
 

PDF: http://www.nicwa.org

NOTE: This letter gives me the idea that WE adoptees can also draft a letter to the DOJ asking for an investigation into this case, mentioning our own adoptions pre-ICWA.... Use the addresses on this letter to write your own letter TODAY....one solution is public outcry - that is needed now... Trace