The Millennium Scoop: an ongoing crisis for Indigenous families

Some people are aware of the horrors experienced by Indigenous children in the residential school system, and maybe they’ve heard of the Sixties Scoop.

But the injustices that have occurred within the child welfare system in the last 30 or so years have been underreported and under-documented.

I know because my brother, Lakota, was one of these Indigenous victims of the child welfare system.

The Millennium Scoop refers to the mass abduction of Indigenous children from the homes of their families by child welfare authorities across Canada, particularly those removed starting in 1991 amid chronic underfunding for on-reserve child and family welfare services.

My brother was wrongfully taken from our mother at age 14 in 2011, when he lived in our community of Bear River First Nation.

Like many teenagers, he had ideations of self-harm. Instead of getting proper treatment, such as therapy or mental health help and other resources, he was relocated into a group home.

He recalled his painful experiences in a written statement that he agreed to share publicly. His comments have been edited for clarity and length.

“I had a decent childhood,” he said. “I got the new game every kid wanted every Christmas. I had lots of people at my birthdays, pretty good grades, and I was always travelling around with my family.”

He said everything was fine until our parents split up, followed by a custody battle and the death of our dog. Depression hit Lakota hard.

“Being a lonely child, I was weird and not many people wanted to hang out with me,” he said. “A couple years went by, and I was ripped out of my mother’s care.”

He was self-harming, and instead of receiving support from Mik’maq Child and Family Services, members of the RCMP placed him in a holding cell.

After being detained for 96 hours, he was sent to a halfway house for teens in Bridgewater, N.S. and eventually placed in a group home in Dartmouth, three hours away from his family. He was rarely allowed visits on holidays.

“Throughout my time there, I not only witnessed but became a victim of the streets,” he said. “In those homes, you either get picked on, lured outside to get beat up brutally, or join the pack with the rest of the defiant ones. The beat-downs were so bad… My way to survive was to adapt and become one of them, only to protect myself and gain their trust.”

At one point, he escaped a kidnapping attempt after being sexually assaulted. Living in the group home also exposed him to gang activity and drug addiction for the first time.

Over the course of two years, Lakota was sent to various other facilities. “I eventually started skipping school while attending this group home and was sent to a juvenile detention centre named the Wood Street Centre in Truro for 30 days,” he said.

“When I got out of the Wood Street Centre in Truro for misbehaviour, they sent me on a plane all the way to Toronto, and then a seven-hour car ride to Bayfield, Ontario.”

While these kinds of facilities are supposed to be therapeutic, and not punitive, Lakota’s mental health inevitably suffered as he was uprooted and displaced from his family.

“Once I got there, my problems only got worse for me, mentally. I was in a completely different province, I didn’t know who anyone was. I never got to see my family for 14 months and the things they did to children in those places haunt me to this day.… There is no normalcy in those places. How can they ever expect a child to be a ‘good kid’ if you take them out of a place, and put them in a worse situation than what they were already in?”

He said that children as young as 11 or 12 would be restrained “every single day and this happened several times each day.”

When he turned 16, Lakota was sent home, but he was unequipped for this new transition.

“I was sent back home like nothing even happened,” he said. “When I came back home, I felt I had a need to make up for all those years I missed… so I started going to high school parties, which spiralled into a bad 11-year alcohol and drug addiction. I got sober in September 2022, and I have maintained that sobriety even to this day.”

He remains optimistic about his own future, even though he’s aware that many “group home kids” like himself become a statistic, “whether it’s being incarcerated for life, a repeat offender, or getting shot up on the sidewalk… I don’t know how I managed to come this far and remain successful after all these years after those events passed, but I’m here now with the power to shape my future.”

His story represents a much wider trend. By 2011, Indigenous children represented 30 per cent of New Brunswick children in foster care, even though Indigenous people made up only three per cent of the population, according to Statistics Canada.

Major factors that contributed to the Millennium Scoop include the underfunding of child and family services on reserves.

In 2023, the Crown reached a $23-billion settlement agreement in a class action lawsuit that stated, in part, that “Canada knowingly underfunded child and family services for First Nations children,” particularly those living on-reserve. Lakota was part of that settlement.

Plaintiffs from the class action suit traced this systemic underfunding to discriminatory practices dating back to 1991. The federal government hasn’t yet issued an apology to the victims.

In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Ottawa discriminated against Indigenous children by underfunding the child welfare system in First Nations communities.

Other factors that have contributied to the Millennium Scoop include the use of birth alerts, which flag newborns who are considered by child welfare authorities to be “at risk of harm.” This can lead to removal from their families before they get a chance to demonstrate good parenting or to fight for their children.

In B.C., more than 50 per cent of birth alerts issued in 2018 affected Indigenous parents. That province abolished the practice in 2019; all provinces except Quebec had stopped using birth alerts by Dec. 2021, according to a fact sheet published by the Policy Bench.

Instead of being placed on-reserve with Indigenous families, many children end up in white households, causing them to lose connection with their culture. One survivor told the CBC that the system is working as intended, “as a machine to destroy Indigeneity.”

The story of the Millennium Scoop remains little known, in part, because of shame among victims, according to Sue Ann Clair, Vice President of the not-for-profit Indigenous Women of the Wabanaki Territories.

“People don’t share or talk about it as much as Sixties Scoop and residential schools because the victims are still in care,” she said via Messenger.

She expressed hope that things are starting to change, noting that social work graduates are increasingly diverse and that some of them are bringing a “more Native aspect to social work.”

She has personal experience with the system: one of her own children was placed in care at age four, more than a decade ago. “We are missing a big piece of our family,” she said.

Living with another family, that son lost knowledge of the Mi’kmaq language, she said. “My other sons understand Mi’kmaq and speak it when it’s just us, but [he] won’t be able to and that hurts us a lot.”

She called for more resources dedicated to supporting Indigenous families, including through prorgrams such as the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and community action programs.

“It’s up to us to support our families and community not to lose children in care,” she said. “Matriarchs need more support.”

This report is part of a series titled Documenting Discrimination and Inequality. Fae Swinamer is a Mik’maq student at St. Thomas University, from Bear River First Nation.