Braadliiah

What are the sixties scoop survivors? Well, they were the generations of first nations people in Canada AFTER residential schools and they continue to bleed into modern-day, They are the native kids taken from their homes for various reasons and put into a family that has no correlation with their culture.

The people who survived residential schools came out with mental illness and an inability to raise their children, they fought with depression and PTSD, suicidal tendencies, and addictions. They were not given the tools necessary to raise children. Children were taken from their parents or family by child services and put into the foster system or adopted by a white family. They suffered from emotional, physical, cultural, spiritual, and sexual abuse.

Imagine that one day when you were a child that some people came and took you from your home. You didn’t know why and you didn’t understand how. You could no longer see your family and were moved from home to home in the foster system. Either you would be adopted by a family of people who didn’t share any of the cultures you grew up with, or you continued to be put into the foster system till you grew into an adult.

This happened to a lot of first nations/metis children. This happened to my family. My mother was fostered by her aunt, our grandmother. But her youngest sister, my aunt/Ma, wasn’t. The same for her husband, my uncle/pa.

After my mother passed away child services gave my family the options to put me and my sisters in care, but they decided not to.

Some kids aren’t lucky, some kids don’t have families to take them in, sometimes they are taken in by horrible people.

What happened then and what is happening now is CULTURAL GENOCIDE.

And it needs to be known and heard, the sixties scoop generations are referred as the “Lost” or “Forgotten” generation.