Vol. 81/No. 9 March 6, 2017
Natives in Canada win victory over gov’t seizure
of children
Between 1965 and 1984 the federal government, in collaboration with a number of provincial governments, forcibly took as many as 200,000 Native children from their homes and placed them in foster care with non-Native families across the country. The massive resettlement was an effort to erase Native youth’s cultural heritage under a grotesquely mislabeled child protection program.
“Great harm was done,” Belobaba ruled. “The ‘scooped’ children lost contact with their families. They lost their aboriginal language, culture and identity.
“The removed children vanished ‘with scarcely a trace,’” he said.
Marcia Brown Martel, chief of the Beaverhouse First Nation, was “scooped” from her Objibwa community in North Bay in 1967 at the age of 4. In 2009, 42 years later, she launched a class-action suit on behalf of 16,000 other Native people.
“What a day this is,” Martel told a Toronto news conference after the ruling.
The suit demands 85,000 Canadian dollars ($65,000) for each of the 16,000 victims, a total of CA$1.3 billion. The damages have not yet been awarded. A number of separate Sixties Scoop cases are pending in other provinces.
Carolyn Bennett, federal Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, said Ottawa does not intend to appeal the ruling. Previously two different governments in Ottawa tried eight times to get the case thrown out of court.
The propertied rulers in other former British colonies also ran assimilation policies. Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 10 to 33 percent of children of native Aborigines in Australia were forcibly taken from their families for “assimilation.” Today these youth are known as the Stolen Generations.
Nine years ago, Ottawa was forced to issue a formal apology for its racist residential school system that operated from 1870 to 1996, run in collaboration with the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches. Over this period more than 150,000 Native children were forcibly taken from their homes and imprisoned in these institutions, which were openly designed to “kill the Indian in the child.” Conservative estimates say 6,000 died as a result of unhealthy conditions, neglect, and physical and sexual abuse.
In addition to the apology, the Canadian government was forced to pay a CA$2 billion class-action settlement to survivors and set up an Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which traveled through the country for five years to record testimony from survivors. The commission heard 6,750 submissions and its report blasted the residential school system as “an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide.”
Native people — North American Indian, Métis (mixed French and Native ancestry) and the Inuit in the far north — are 4 percent of the 36.5 million population of Canada. Twenty-three percent live on poverty-stricken reservations administered by the Department of Indian Affairs under the hated 1876 Indian Act. More than 50 percent live in urban areas.
The employment rate for Native people is about 13 percent less than for non-Native and their average annual income is about three-quarters that of non-Natives.
Increased resistance by Native people to the conditions imposed on them by Canada’s capitalist rulers and the solidarity they have won from working people across the country have increased pressure on the Canadian rulers, as has the long-term trend toward increased integration of Native people into the working class.
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