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

Reviewed by: Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson D. Stevenson Laura Briggs (bio) Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson D. Stevenson University of Toronto Press, 2021 intimate integration is an ambitious book that sets out not just to tell us about Canada’s “Sixties Scoop” of Native children into foster care but also what kinship means for policymakers, Métis, and Indigenous People. It centers on Saskatchewan, a narrow enough focus that we can see the effects of both provincial and federal policy. Saskatchewan is also where Stevenson was born and raised as a Métis adoptee before getting her Ph.D. and becoming a professional scholar. Since the earliest days of the settlement of the interior of Canada by the Hudson Bay Company and those who traded with Cree, Assiniboine, and Dene for furs, there has been a significant Métis population produced through intermarriage and more casual and even violent relationships. However, when Canada reached a settlement agreement with Status Indian and Inuit people over what is often called the “Sixties Scoop,” the massive apprehension of children on reserves into care under the slightest pretext—in what social workers themselves admit was an effort to “save” children from Native poverty by taking them—the federal government did not include Métis children because they were taken under the jurisdiction of provincial (not federal) agents. Further, though the reckoning with residential schools in Canada went through a Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, the settlement agreement with Métis children (and the adults they became) who spent time in foster care and adoptions never offered those who lost kin and cultural connection the opportunity to tell their stories. Hence this book, which among its many contributions includes oral histories of Métis adoptees. Stevenson examines many kinds of disruption of family ties, including the assimilationist Canadian policy of passing Indian status only through the male line, so women who married non-Indigenous People and children fathered by someone who is not Native cannot claim Indian status and had to leave their home communities. Status policy wreaked havoc with kin relationships, disrupting the care of grandparents, aunts, and uncles, even [End Page 138] when children were not taken into residential schools or foster care. As a further consequence, Canada developed large Métis populations around reserves and on unused Crown land. Because these communities did not own their land, they did not pay taxes and thus were not permitted to send their children to school. As a result, Métis people were painted as shiftless, failed farmers with men refusing to act as breadwinners and women failing to be effective housewives (in unheated shacks) or mothers (because children denied schooling were less conventionally “successful.”). These outcomes, in turn, justified taking children into care. We do not encounter the kind of story that most expect from a book like this until the sixth chapter, which focuses on the mid-twentieth-century Adopt Indian and Métis (AIM) Program and the Adoption Resource Exchange of North America (ARENA). There are good reasons to not make this the narrative center of the book. While the spectacle of U.S. and Canadian governments deliberately moving children from Native and Métis families to white ones seems to capture the Indigenous genocide from which white families benefit and that lies at the heart of North American settler colonialism, these were actually quite small programs. Stevenson says that 3.5 to 4.5 percent of Indian and Métis children who were apprehended into foster care were placed in adoptive families. Adoption is not the main story, which is really about the federal government and provinces taking children into care (also true in the U.S.). I am glad to see this book pull the lens back from the adoption question and hope it is a harbinger for the field. As we think in ever-greater numbers about the consequences of reliance on policing to solve social problems, we need more histories of the causes and consequences of family policing through taking children for reasons of so...

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