“Gradually, as education ceased to function as the institutional agent of colonization,” Patrick Johnston wrote in 1983, “The child welfare system took its place” (24). Johnston’s study Native Children and the Child Welfare System documented the disproportionate removal of Indian children by the child welfare system in Canada following 1951 revisions to the Indian Act. Indian child welfare services were poorly funded and unevenly administered, leading H.B. Hawthorn and colleagues to conclude, in an early influential study in 1966, that “the situation caries from unsatisfactory to appalling” (327). From 1955 to 1964, the number of Native children in British Columbia’s system rose from 29 to 1,446, or from less than 1% to 34.2% of all children in care. That phenomenon, repeated across Canada, has become known as the “Sixties Scoop,” wherein social workers would “quite literally scoop children from reserves on the slightest pretext” – poverty, sanitation, housing standards, nutrition –without regard for the effects on the child, family, or reserve. Some reserves, according to Johnston, “lost almost a generation” (23).
The US counterpart to Canada’s Sixties Scoop was, in Bertram Hirsch’s phrase, the “gray market” for Indian children, which developed under the pressure on local welfare agencies to provide Indian children for adoption (United States, Indian Child Welfare Act Program, 70). Such pressure grew from the demand for adoptive children in the prosperous post-World War II era, and from the agenda of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 1958, even as renewed tribal self-determination brought education under greater Indian control, the BIA began its Indian Adoption Project with the Child Welfare League of America, to promote the adoption of Indian children by non-Indian families. In 1961 the BIA funded care for 2,300 children during the process of removal, foster placement, and eventual adoption (Prucha 1153).
As state welfare agencies joined the activity, the rate of separation of Indian children from their families grew rapidly. Since removals were routinely carried out without consultation with tribal authorities or Indian communities, many groups felt powerless to resist them. The Devils Lake Sioux Tribe of North Dakota in 1968 asked for the assistance of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), whose 1969 widespread removal of Indian children. The Oglala Sioux, Standing Rock Sioux, Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux, and the affiliated tribes of the Fort Berthold reservation passed resolutions demanding that removals and trans-racial placements end (Unger, cited in Mannes). The AAIA surveyed the situation in 1969 and reported the results of is monitoring in the Indian Family Defense newsletter.
Native protest and AAIA activity led to a 1974 hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, where many Native mothers, children, and officials testified that removal of children from birth families had become epidemic. “For decades Indian parents and their children have been at the mercy of arbitrary or abusive action of local, State, Federal, and private agency officials,” said Sen. James Abourezk in his opening remarks, adding that “Unwarranted removal of children from their homes is common in Indian communities” (United States, Indian Child Welfare Program 1). In data presented at that hearing, up to thirty-five percent of all Indian children were living in non-Indian settings. Indian parents could expect their children to be removed from heir homes at rates up to twenty-five times higher than for all children. In foster homes at a rate twenty-two times higher than for all children. In South Dakota, Indian children comprised seven percent of the population, but were involved in forty percent of adoptions made by the Department of Public Welfare from 1968 to 1974. In Wisconsin, the risk of Indian children being separated from their parents was nearly sixteen hundred times greater than for non-Indian children (United States, Indian Child Welfare Program 4).
In 1976, the AAIA conducted a study for the American Indian Policy Review Committee on the increasingly disproportionate rate of foster care increasing rate of placement in non-Indian homes. After the 1977 hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs on proposed legislation, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA) was passed into law. Major provisions of the ICWA established procedures for placements and adoptions, assure tribal jurisdiction in custody proceedings, and assure tribal and parental authority in state court proceedings. The ICWA protects the rights of adoptive children to tribal enrollment. It also authorizes the interior secretary to fund tribal efforts to establish programs and services to prevent the breakup of Indian families (Prucha 1153-56). Moreover, the law provides an “effective underpinning” to tribes solving their own societal and familial problems according to B.J. Johns, who writes that the ICWA “gives Indian tribes and families some breathing space while they go about the process of cultural rebirth.”
The ICWA has been both abhorred and envied in Canada. Bradford Morse noted in 1984 that the reduced flow of American Indian children to non-Indian families “has led to an increasing demand for Canadian children of Indian ancestry to be adopted south of the border” (275). Yet the ICWA has been envied because of impediments to creating similar national legislation. With far less sovereignty than US tribes have, Canadian bands have no tribal court system, and the responsibility for Indian child welfare is a federal-provincial “jurisdictional nightmare” (Morse 274). While provinces administer child care and welfare services, the federal government has authority over Indians and their reserve lands, which lets “both levels of government absolve themselves and argue that the responsibility rests with the other” (Johnston 4). Further, under the complex system of registration created by the Indian Act (1876), federal and provincial authorities each hold the other responsible for off-reservation Indian and Métis populations (Johnston 4-7).
But because of these difficulties, Canada has taken longer, more conceptual approach to analyzing child education and welfare in the whole pattern of relations between aboriginal people and the government. Canada has also studied the effects on children, families and communities more extensively than has the United States, which having made a law, has preferred to study the law, its language, and its operation, rather than the situation that made the law necessary.
In 1984, Bradford Morse listed five results of colonialism as probable causes of the Sixties Scoop: the destruction of traditional economies, the disregard of traditional values by the social service system, the resulting surrender of their values by Indian people, the conflict between federal and provincial jurisdictions, and finally the “continuing manifestations of colonialism” in the apparent “connection between the decline of residential schools […] and the rise of Indian child apprehensions” (259, 265-70). The results he calls “devastating”: parents despair and give up their children, “lost between two cultures […] endure foster and group homes until they end up in jail or as victims of suicide” (270).
Several parliamentary, provincial, and First Nations interests groups studied the problem. Justice Edwin C. Kimelman’s 1985 inquiry found hat the Manitoba system of adoption and placement had “gone awry,” creating estrangement and violence in child care (qtd. in Canada, Report 3.2.1). Separate reports by the House of Commons Special Committee on Child Care (1987); the National Indian Brotherhood, Assembly of First Nations (1989); and the Native Council of Canada (1990) directed attention to the need for programs and standards that would provide holistic care, encourage strong identities in children, and preserve families, all in accord with Native cultural values and practices. In 1991, Helen McKenzie prepared a background paper for Parliament on daycare as an aspect of broader child welfare practices. She concurred with the needs identified in earlier studies for Native designed and implemented policies and programs, adding that early childhood support is essential for remedying the economic situation and ensuring the cultural survival of the First Nations (25-26).
In 1996 and 1998, Canada took major steps in redirecting its relations with aboriginal peoples, first with the publication of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), and then by responding to the report by instituting Gathering Strength –Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan –and by issuing a Statement of Reconciliation. Based on extensive hearings and studies, the RCAP report is an encyclopedic five-volume study of past injustices and the current situation. It makes recommendations intended to lead to the reparation, healing, and renewal of aboriginal people and communities. The report studies education and child welfare separately, but both are placed in the context of the whole history of federal, provincial, and aboriginal relations, with particular attention to intergenerational effects, community healing, and cultural differences in family structure, childhood concepts, and values (3.2.5). Gathering Strength, in response, “is a sustainable, long-term plan that is leading to stronger and more self-sufficient Aboriginal communities,” and that is designed to benefit particularly Aboriginal youth and children” (Canada, Backgroudner). The RCAP report and the government’s 1998 language and actions on behalf of reconciliation have no counterpart in the United States.
As heartening as these documents are, and as ultimately successful as they may be, subsequent cases reveal the persistence of jurisdictional conflict, ingrained colonial attitudes in child welfare practice, and the narrow limits of self-governance. Yet Canada has, and the United States has not, recognized that education and child welfare were instruments of colonial policy that contributed to the breakdown in social, family, and individual identity.
62458
