Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson Stevenson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson Stevenson Dian Million (Tanana) Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship .By Allyson Stevenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 314 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.95 paper. Allyson Stevenson brings a deeply personal yet thorough historical examination of the ongoing settler-colonial onslaught on First Nations, Métis, and Indigenous families through the destruction of their kinship ties. Stevenson builds her history first through a specific case of adoption, her own. As a Métis adoptee from Saskatchewan and an academically trained historian, Stevenson understands her own role in bringing personal knowledge back to her own lineages, a witnessing that is invaluable to her families, both biological and adoptive, and restorative to her generations, her own and her children’s. Saskatchewan, a Plains bastion of Canadian national imaginary, saw a challenge in the assimilation of Indian and “subnormal” Métis families into its body politic after 1951. The solution was closely aligned with the same reasoning that established residential schooling, that Indigenous children were better off being raised by White Canadians. Soon the province had “the dubious distinction of the highest percentage of [Indigenous] children in the care of social services and the Department of Northern Development,” ranging from 62.8 percent in 1976 to 63.8 percent in 1981. Saskatchewan achieved transracial adoptions with equal veracity. In 1977, 91 percent of Indian children adopted were by non-Indian families (203). This pattern closely followed one that the United States equally perpetrated for years. The evisceration of Aboriginal, Métis, and Indigenous families closely mirrored the same attack going on in the United States [End Page 363] against American Indian, Alaska Native, and Indigenous children. Importantly, the author also details the immense effort of Indigenous activists and supporters to intervene and to return child welfare to Indigenous communities. Stevenson notes the inability of Canada to produce a nationwide policy such as the Indian Child Welfare Act that was achieved in the US. The current ruling against Canada for human rights abuse in the unequal funding of child welfare identifies an ongoing and crucial concern and this history as important context. Stevenson remarks: Indigenous suffering from almost a century of colonial dispossession, residential schooling, poverty, trauma, and dislocation from loss of land was recast as a child welfare matter, leading to interventions and the crisis of over-representation in child welfare systems across Canada. (227) In particular, the author’s focus on little-known Métis resettlement policies is an important chapter in portraying Saskatchewan’s specific role in this Canadian national history. This is a beautifully written and felt history that informs a core context of a continuing struggle. Allyson Stevenson states, “The right to Aboriginal motherhood and to define Aboriginal motherhood and kinship are a very key area where decolonization is taking place” (232). More than key to decolonization, the question of Indigenous children who know their identities and their citizenships are key to any Indigenous future. Dian Million (Tanana) Department of American Indian Studies University of Washington Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln