All events · The War's Long Shadow
Canada's Sixties Scoop: Removal and Adoption of Indigenous Children
1951–1991 · Americas
Displacement
Abduction (Children)
Displaced
20,000
Federal adoption records count 11,132 Status Indian children adopted between 1960 and 1990; researchers, noting that the records exclude Metis, non-status and many provincially handled placements, estimate upwards of 20,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children removed. Provincial data show the shift: in British Columbia the number of Indigenous children in care rose from 29 in 1951 to 1,466 in 1964, and in Manitoba about 3,400 Indigenous children were adopted between 1971 and 1981, up to 80 per cent of them into non-Indigenous homes.
Share of the population affected
6.4%
of the Indigenous (First Nations, Metis and Inuit) population of Canada around the height of the removals, 1971
Open on the interactive map →
What happened
A 1951 amendment to the Indian Act extended provincial child-welfare jurisdiction onto reserves, and over the following four decades provincial agencies apprehended Indigenous children in large numbers, placing them with non-Indigenous families in Canada, the United States and overseas; the practice overlapped with, and outlasted, the residential school system recorded separately in this atlas. Saskatchewan ran an explicit adoption-promotion programme advertising Indigenous children to prospective parents. Adoptees have described losing language, family and status, and researchers have documented poor outcomes and high rates of placement breakdown. In February 2017 the Ontario Superior Court held in Brown v. Canada that the federal government had breached a duty of care by failing to protect the Indigenous identity of children placed in provincial care, and in October 2017 Canada announced an 800 million dollar settlement covering Status Indian and Inuit survivors; Metis and non-status survivors were excluded and have continued to litigate. Manitoba apologised in June 2015; several other provinces have since done so.
Parties
Provincial child-welfare authorities in Canada removed First Nations, Metis and Inuit children from their families and placed them with non-Indigenous adoptive and foster families
Disputed
The total number of children removed is not established, since provincial records are incomplete and inconsistently defined; there is also continuing dispute over whether the removals should be characterised as genocide, over the exclusion of Metis and non-status adoptees from the 2017 settlement, and over how far the practice was driven by policy as opposed to social-work assumptions of the period.
The denominator
The 1971 Canadian census counted 312,760 people of Indigenous ancestry. The count is understood to undercount Metis and non-status people badly, and today's self-identified Indigenous population is over five times larger, partly through changed identification rules.
The numerator counts children removed across four decades while the denominator is a single-year, all-ages snapshot; set against the Indigenous child population of any one year the share would be several times higher.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
There was no mass killing and no death toll is associated with the removals as such. Survivor testimony and subsequent research document abuse in placements and elevated later mortality among adoptees, but no systematic count exists.
Documented forms of violence
Abduction of Children
The removal and transfer of Indigenous children to non-Indigenous families is documented in federal adoption records, in the Ontario Superior Court's 2017 judgment in Brown v. Canada and in the research literature on which the Canadian Encyclopedia account is based.
Formal findings
- Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Brown v. Canada) (2017) — Held that Canada breached a common-law duty of care by failing to take reasonable steps to prevent on-reserve children placed in provincial care from losing their Indigenous identity — source
Movements mapped
- Manitoba children placed for adoption in the United States
- British Columbia children removed to urban non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Canada, United States of America
Related entries
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.