National Blanket Ceremony Day Bill

Moved second reading of Bill S-245, An Act respecting a National Blanket Ceremony Day.

She said: Honourable senators, the topic I am going to talk about is very heavy — as a lot of the topics I discuss are — but it is something that needs to be entered as evidence. Part of the reason I do this is to educate and make the Senate aware of the impact of history on First Nation lives and also to do justice to the children who underwent the Sixties Scoop.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as individuals.

That came from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and was quoted in Brown Boy, a memoir by Omer Aziz.

Honourable senators, before I get into the history of the Sixties Scoop and the request for a blanketing ceremony day, I want to provide context regarding the lives of First Nations on reserves in the 1950s. I do this because the abduction of children through the Sixties Scoop was largely justified through stereotyping. That made it easier to justify taking children into custody through various means.

The 1991 report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba states that the effects upon First Nations societies “. . . of the federal government’s residential school system, and its policy of assimilation, have been astounding. Residential schools denigrated . . .” First Nations “. . . cultures, customs and religions, and disrupted the traditional practices of Aboriginal child-rearing and education.”

This is where the Sixties Scoop comes in. The report continues:

They tore apart families and extended families, leaving the children straddling two worlds, the European one and that of their own . . .

 — First Nations —

. . . societies, but belonging to neither. . . .

The report continues:

The loss of successive generations of children to residential schools, the destruction of . . .

— First Nations —

. . . economic bases, the decimation of their populations through diseases and the increasing dependence on government welfare have led to social chaos. This manifests itself in . . .

 — First Nations —

. . . communities through staggering poverty rates, high unemployment rates, high suicide rates, lower education levels, high rates of alcoholism and high rates of crime.

When you live a life of chaos — when you have been forced to — you understand why this happens in First Nations. It is not that we want to be this way; that is what comes with the coping skills that you force yourself to adopt.

The report continues, “In individuals, the legacy of the residential schools has been lowered self-esteem, confusion —” and stripping “— of self-identity and cultural identity . . . . The residential school experience also resulted in a breakdown in traditional . . .” First Nations “. . . methods of teaching child-rearing and parenting. Entire families once took part in the raising of children.”

That’s how I was raised before I went to residential school. Young parents, like young parents everywhere, learned how to raise their children from their own parents— by example. Traditionally, First Nations also drew upon the examples and advice of their extended families, grandparents, uncles, aunts and siblings. Residential schools made this impossible, and I know. I am a parent. First Nations worry because they know their young children make up a significant proportion of their populations today, and they fear for the survival of their languages, cultures and societies.

The fear is that yet another generation will be swept into institutions and away from their communities. There is an added fear that, with the removal of status, Indigenous children will also be forced to move from the community.

The report goes on to say that the experience of residential schools is one shared by many First Nations across Canada. That experience was marked by emotional, physical and sexual abuse, as well as social, emotional and spiritual deprivation. Even as assimilation was stated as the goal for the education of First Nations, one researcher wrote:

The assimilation was to take place under conditions which would cause no threat to the surrounding business and farming community.

In the same report, it states that when legislative changes were made, Indigenous communities — especially on reserves — were dealing with the repercussions of a century of discriminatory laws that put First Nations people in a position of extreme socioeconomic disparity.

Instead of providing community support, the government’s response was to take the children away and put them into non‑Indigenous homes.

Colleagues, significant research has been done regarding the apprehension of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children in Canada. The Canadian government implemented different policies for the removal of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children: residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, day schools, ongoing removal through children in care today as well as ongoing extinguishment policies removing First Nations status today.

When looking at the overwhelming Canadian power in relation to First Nations, it has shown that these policies of removal, which so flagrantly disregarded the fundamental rights of First Nations, could be repeated even after residential school.

Indeed, the policies did.

Today, I speak specifically to the Sixties Scoop experience.

Honourable senators, I rise to speak to Bill S-245, an Act respecting a National Blanket Ceremony Day. I want to thank Troy MacBeth Abromaitis, a Sixties Scoop survivor, for approaching First Nations, Inuit and Métis senators for support in bringing forward a private member’s bill on behalf of himself and other survivors.

Bill S-245 was co-developed by Mr. Abromaitis with our office. Mr. Abromaitis has worked extensively and tirelessly to have the Sixties Scoop history recognized and understood throughout Turtle Island. A proclamation was signed by the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General of B.C. on behalf of the B.C. provincial government to recognize June 30, 2024, as Indigenous Survivors Day. A proclamation by the Honourable Tim Houston, the Premier of Nova Scotia, on behalf of the Province of Nova Scotia, proclaimed June 30, 2025, as National Blanket Ceremony Day for Indigenous survivors throughout the province of Nova Scotia.

A declaration by Susan Holt, the Premier of New Brunswick, proclaimed June 30, 2025, as Indigenous Survivors Day and National Blanket Ceremony Day in the Province of New Brunswick.

A reference letter written by Chief Janet Webster from the Lytton First Nation for Mr. Abromaitis spoke of his 35-year journey to reconnect with his family, people, culture and community as a descendent of the Thom, Oats, Dreaney and Drynock families of the Nlaka’pamux Nation. The Special Chiefs Assembly 2025, through the Assembly of First Nations Resolution 36, which carried by consensus in December 2025, supported a national day for Indigenous child removal survivors by the Government of Canada.

The Nlaka’pamux community at Nicomen Indian Band in British Columbia welcomed Troy MacBeth Abromaitis home after his lifelong journey. It was a lifelong journey that began from the moment Troy was born, as he was destined to be apprehended into the childcare system known as the Sixties Scoop because he was Indigenous. He was welcomed home through a blanket ceremony and received his ancestral name in recognition of his role as one of the helping hands in the rebuilding and recovery of Lytton following the devastating 2021 wildfire.

I want to thank Troy for the extensive research he provided for me, and which I believe he sent to all of you this morning.

What is the Sixties Scoop?

The Sixties Scoop developed into a much longer attempt to assimilate the children of First Nations, Metis, Inuit and non-status people. By the 1880s, Canada was funding residential schools expressly intended to separate children from family and culture, including “killing the Indian in the child.” Schooling in residential schools intentionally targeted, then disrupted, the transmission of language, purpose and meaning of life, knowledge and parenting relationships. Residential schools and child welfare histories overlap. Removals into foster and adoptive homes were expanding while residential schools were still operating.

However, the institutional arrangements differed. Residential schooling centred on institutions funded by the federal government and was frequently operated by churches. Child welfare relied on provincial or territorial legislation, social service departments, Children’s Aid Societies and courts. Foster families, adoptive families and group homes became places of custody and upbringing.

A child could experience more than one of these institutions, and a parent’s residential school experience could shape the circumstances in which an agency could later intervene and remove their children.

Confederation divided legislative powers in a way that became central to this history. Parliament held authority under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, while provinces administered their general child welfare systems.

Governments disputed who should provide and pay for services on reserves. The 1951 revision of the Indian Act added a provision, originally section 87 and later section 88, applying provincial laws of general application to Indians. This helped extend provincial child welfare laws onto reserves; it did not remove Parliament’s legislative authority or itself order children to be adopted.

Legal applicability did not automatically produce a range of services. Funding and administrative agreements determined what services the agencies actually delivered.

Families could encounter strong powers that gave themselves authority and power to apprehend their children without first providing the adequate assistance/resources required so families would be able to keep their children at home. This combination matters. The expansion of government intervention was not followed by an equivalent expansion of housing, practical support or community-controlled care.

Ontario’s agreement of December 1, 1965, illustrates the machinery. Canada financed the extension of 18 provincial welfare programs, including child protection and adoption services, to people with reserve status. Section 2(2) required consultation with each affected band and its concurrence before extending a program. In Brown v. Canada, the court found that this consultation had never occurred.

The historical significance is larger than a dispute over which government paid an invoice. Governments expanded services according to outside standards while failing to give affected First Nations the promised influence over those services. A measure presented as equal access could thus increase state control over family life without respecting Indigenous inherent authority over their children. Responsibility has to be traced through the actual law, agreement, agency practice and decisions involved. Attributing the entire history of child abduction exclusively to either Ottawa or the provinces obscures how the system worked.

The route into care was not identical for every child. Apprehension meant an agency unilaterally taking a child into custody. In one instance, the parents went to the store to get food, and when they came back, the children were gone. Temporary wardship placed the child under agency authority for a period, while permanent or Crown wardship could give the state continuing guardianship. Foster care was a living arrangement, not adoption. Adoption created a new legal parent-child relationship. Some children moved through several of these stages, while others remained in long-term care without being adopted.

At the point of assessment, social workers could interpret Indigenous homes through the expectations of a White, middle-class nuclear family. Poverty, unfamiliar food storage, shared caregiving and overcrowded housing could be treated as evidence of parental failure. Workers often lacked local knowledge, and parents could lose their children with little warning and without consent. Judgments about neglect could confuse a lack of material possessions and cultural difference with an inability to love and protect a child. However, this did not mean that every child was safe or that no intervention was warranted.

According to the report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry:

This expansion of child welfare services to [First Nations] communities, which took place across Canada at this time —

— in the 1950s —

— left a profound and negative impact on these communities. As the Canadian Council on Social Development documented:

In 1955, there were 3,433 children in the care of B.C.’s child welfare branch. Of that number it was estimated that 29 children, or less than 1 percent of the total, were of Indian ancestry. By 1964, however, 1,446 children in care in B.C. were of Indian extraction. That number represented 34.2 percent of all children in care. Within ten years, in other words, the representation of Native children in B.C.’s child welfare system had jumped from almost nil to a third. It was a pattern being repeated in other parts of Canada as well.

The authors went on to state:

The child welfare system was doing essentially the same thing with Aboriginal children that the residential schools had done. It removed Aboriginal children from their families, communities and cultures, and placed them in mainstream society. . . . As a result, between 1971 and 1981 alone, over 3,400 Aboriginal children were shipped away to adoptive parents in other societies, and sometimes in other countries.

This shocked me when I found out where children were sent. They were sent to the United States, to Germany, England and Scotland, and that is not a complete list of countries.

The final report of the Indian Child Welfare Sub-Committee in Manitoba, which completed its work in 1980, quoted the statement of Provincial Court Judge Garson, who became the Manitoba Deputy Minister of Justice, as typifying the disorganized state of services:

The stark reality of the present situation . . . is that the Treaty Indian is caught in a political, financial and legal limbo with both senior governments attempting to disclaim responsibility for the delivery of social and child welfare services, with the not unsurprising result that the Treaty Indian fails to get the services except in life threatening situations. . . . Such a denial of services, for whatever reasons, can only be termed discriminatory to the Treaty Indian.

Saskatchewan provides an unusually clear example of government promotion of transracial adoption. Its Adopt Indian and Métis Project, commonly called AIM, operated as a pilot from 1967 to 1969, initially supported by the federal Department of National Health and Welfare. It tested television, radio and newspaper advertising to recruit adoptive parents in southeastern Saskatchewan. In 1970, the advertising initiative broadened to include all children awaiting placement. AIM was a particular program within the wider Sixties Scoop, not its national administrative name.

Honourable senators, when I left residential school at 16 in 1968, which was the time that this was running, and went into high school in The Pas, Manitoba, I saw those ads of the little children in newspapers. It would be the child’s face, and it would say, “Do you want to adopt this child?” At that time, I didn’t realize how outrageous and dangerous that was. I saw it as normal. Remember I came out of residential school, which I thought was normal.

Historian Allyson Stevenson’s archival research shows how the campaign presented adoption as an answer to children waiting in care, while giving little public attention to the conditions that had separated them from their families. That framing made prospective adoptive households highly visible, and the Indigenous parents and kin largely absent.

The advertisements also made the racial identification of children part of the recruitment process. Examining the campaign, therefore, reveals how a permanent transfer could be presented publicly as benevolent social progress.

First Nations, Métis and Inuit children went through the same removal processes, but their experiences differed. The Indian Act’s registration system, reserve residence, provincial boundaries and northern administrative arrangements created different routes into care and different documentary records. The legal category used in a file was not a complete description of a child’s identity. For a child who was removed, separation could mean losing the knowledge needed to even name their own family, community or nation. That really became a problem when the Sixties Scoop came to an end and they started to try to find their families.

Métis children experienced removal through provincial systems, including systems that grouped them with First Nations children under broader labels and failed to identify them accurately. The Manitoba Métis Federation and the Métis Child and Family Services Authority situate this history within Métis dispossession, dispersal and uneven access to public institutions. Their 2013 submission describes the damage caused when authorities overlooked extended family caregiving and treated difficult social conditions principally through removal. The submission also stressed the barriers created by closed adoption to later family searches.

The loss extended beyond the moment of removal. Siblings could be placed and grow up separately, and they did. Children could lose their languages, and information about ancestry could be withheld or distorted. A child might be racially marked as Indigenous in school and public life while lacking the relatives and community relationships through which to understand that identity. Sinclair’s research describes reconnection as an active process of learning and rebuilding rather than the simple recovery of something in childhood.

Survivors’ experiences varied, including the care they received from adoptive or foster parents. I have heard horrendous stories myself. Historical accounts recognize loving relationships as well as abuse and abandonment. It does not require every household to have been abusive to explain the systemic injury of severed family and cultural relationships. Conversely, pointing to an individual’s later achievements cannot establish that removal was necessary or that the losses were inconsequential.

The account of Betty Ann Adam and her siblings makes the work of reunion concrete. In the National Film Board of Canada’s reporting on Birth of a Family, Adam describes reconnecting with Dene relatives and establishing correspondence with her mother in 1985. She met her mother in person in 1990. Finding all her siblings took much longer: Ben was located in 2012, and Esther, in California, in 2014. In 2015, Betty Ann, Rosalie, Esther and Ben first came together as a family group after their mother’s death.

The obstacles were administrative as well as emotional. Adam described becoming the administrator of her mother’s estate and encountering repeated barriers to locating relatives. The reunion did not restore a shared childhood. Adults had to begin building relationships because they had been denied the opportunity to develop these relationships from childhood, as was their inherent right.

The following statements were made by Troy Abromaitis:

The Sixties Scoop describes the large-scale removal of Indigenous children into foster care, adoption and other child-welfare placements, particularly from the late 1950s through the 1980s.

The Sixties Scoop occurred not because the government was genuinely concerned for the well-being of Indigenous children but primarily as an extension of the racist policies against Indigenous communities meant to assimilate Indigenous children into Western society and strip them from their culture and communities.

A national blanket ceremony day would not seek to define every Survivor’s experience through a single ceremony. Rather, it would create space to honour Survivors, remember children and families affected by removal, champion for public education and reconnection and affirm the continuing importance of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and non-status families, cultures and communities in determining the futures of their children.

The proposed recognition of June 30 as national blanket ceremony day would provide a national moment of remembrance centred on Survivors, family, belonging, reconnection and the enduring strength of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and non-status Peoples.

The blanket carries particular meaning in this context. Across many First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities, blanket ceremonies can express a welcome home, honour, protection, belonging and relationship. For Survivors whose childhoods were marked by separation from family, community and culture, the symbolism of being welcomed and wrapped in a blanket offers a powerful counterpoint to the history experienced by Troy and thousands of Survivors. This is a movement from removal toward recognition, from disconnection toward relationship and from imposed identity toward belonging.

June 30 also creates a meaningful place in the national calendar immediately before Canada Day. It offers an opportunity to acknowledge the experiences of Indigenous children and families before the country turns to its national celebration, while recognizing that Canada’s history includes both the actions of governments and institutions and the survival, resistance and rebuilding of First Nations, Métis and Inuit families and nations.

Colleagues, please join me in supporting the people that were “scooped up” in the Sixties Scoop by sending this bill to committee today. The proposed national recognition of June 30 through Bill S-245 will provide an important parliamentary path for Survivor remembrance, family and community recognition, public education and the continuing work of reconciliation.

To the Sixties Scoopers that I know are listening, you matter. Welcome home.

Thank you.