Skip to content

Sixties Scoop settlement met with mixed feelings

1110sixS1
Yellowknife resident Roy Dahl was removed from his family during the Sixties Scoop and adopted by a white family in Red Lake, Ont. He is now the editor and publisher of Native Press. photo courtesy of Roy Dahl

Roy Dahl grew up with a foot in two different worlds, and didn't feel at home in either.

Yellowknife resident Roy Dahl was removed from his family during the Sixties Scoop and adopted by a white family in Red Lake, Ont. He is now the editor and publisher of Native Press.
photo courtesy of Roy Dahl

A member of Pikangikum First Nation in northern Ontario, Dahl was a toddler when he was taken from his family and community in the early 1960s and adopted by a white couple in Red Lake, Ont.

“I was taken out of the community and I was Westernized, I was Christianized, and I was ostracized,” Dahl, who lives in Yellowknife, said Monday.

Dahl is among the tens of thousands children apprehended during the “Sixties Scoop,” a decades-long period during which provincial child-welfare officials removed Indigenous children from their communities and placed them in the care of non-Indigenous families.

On Friday, the federal government announced a settlement with Sixties Scoop survivors of up to $750 million, as well $50 million for a foundation to support healing and protect Indigenous languages and cultures. An additional $75 million will go toward plaintiffs' legal fees.

Under the agreement-in-principle, individual survivors will be compensated between $25,000 and $50,000, depending on how many people make a claim. (At a minimum of $25,000 each, 30,000 claims could be paid out through the agreement.)

People with status under the Indian Act and Inuit who were apprehended between 1951 and 1991 are eligible to claim compensation.

Dahl met the news with mixed emotions.

He said he feels “disappointment I guess, a bit of anger and a bit of shock,” about the long-awaited settlement, “but also a sense of relief” that negotiations are finally over.

Those who lost families and Indigenous identities as a result of Canada's assimilationist policies expected more, he said.

Dahl's brother, nine years his senior, told him their mother moved the family between the trapline, the town of Red Lake and the reserve. It was during one of the family's stays on the reserve that child welfare agents came and scooped up a number children, including three-year-old Dahl and his brother.

Dahl spent time in foster care in Kenora, Ont. before being moved back to Red Lake where he was placed in a Mennonite group home.

He was almost five years old when the Dahl family adopted him in June, 1965.

With his biological mother and siblings living nearby and visiting occasionally, Dahl was unclear as to why he was adopted out. He was told that his birth mom couldn't take care of him.

Like any kid, Dahl just wanted to fit in.

“When I first came from the (Mennonite) children's home, I immediately went to the bathroom and started scrubbing my skin,” he said.

Dahl told his new, adoptive parents, “I want to be white like you.”

At school, students insulted him for the colour of his skin and hurled racial slurs his way.

The First Nations kids didn't accept him either. They called him an apple or a potato: white on the inside, red or brown on the outside.

His adoptive mother told him, “Roy, you're never going to fit in with the Native kids, and you're never going to fit in with the white kids. All you can ever do is what you love doing, and whatever it is, just be excellent at it,” Dahl recalls.

When he was 30 years old, Dahl learned of his biological mother's death.

As members of her family reached out, he began to sense the breadth and depth of his roots in northwestern Ontario.

“I sometimes wonder what sort of person I would have ended up becoming had I not been adopted,” said Dahl

He would have spoken his language, sung at pow wows, joined in drumming, and danced, he said.

National Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations said in a statement Friday that no amount of money can make up for the harm to families and communities caused by the Sixties Scoop.

“True justice means creating hope and opportunity for the Survivors,” he said.

The Sixties Scoop settlement comes after a Superior Court of Ontario decision in February found Canada breached its “common law duty of care” to take reasonable steps to prevent on-reserve Indigenous children placed in non-Indigenous homes from losing their identity.

The class action lawsuit focused on 16,000 Indigenous children who were apprehended in Ontario between 1965 and 1984.

Chief Marcia Brown Martel of Beaverhouse First Nation was the representative plaintiff.

She fought the case for eight years and sought $1.3 billion in damages for survivors.

For Dahl, the battle to reclaim what was lost is ongoing.

“It will never be over. We're always going to be looking for a group to welcome us,” he said.

“We're always outsiders, no matter what.”