Canadian social work and the Sixties Scoop: reflections on the past, lessons for today

Abstract

This chapter sheds light on social work’s troubled past with Indigenous peoples in Canada. It aims to discuss ‘troubled histories’ of complicity, oppression and assimilation in an ongoing process of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and preservation of social work memory. Social work’s troubled past with Indigenous Peoples in Canada is one of the profession’s darkest moments in the 20th century, starting with the residential schools created to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society, and pursued through the Sixties Scoop, comprising policies and practices to remove Indigenous children from their communities and place them in foster care or adoption by White families. In the early 19th century, when colonial settlement in Canada intensified, Indigenous peoples were subjugated to British colonial rule through the imposition of a policy called the Indian Act that aimed to ‘protect’ Indigenous people from European settlers. Such policy and practices were intended primarily to ‘civilise the Indians’ in the name of Christianisation, and involved imposing assimilation strategies and practices, supported by the ideological biases of politicians, administrators and wider society. Such practices of settler colonialism towards Indigenous peoples used child welfare as an approach to solving the ‘Indian Problem’. By the late 1940s the social work profession was already playing a direct role in the child welfare system concerning Indigenous children. Social workers became directly involved in the removal of Indigenous children from Indigenous families and communities.