Canadian social work and the Sixties Scoop: reflections on the past, lessons for today
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.083 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".