Documentary of Sixties Scoop reunion shares story of joy, loss

The finishing touches are being done on a documentary showing the reunion of four siblings separated during what's known as the Sixties Scoop.

"The idea was to help other children, other Indigenous people who were taken away from their family, away from their culture and communities and away from those things that give people identity," said Saskatoon's Betty Ann Adam, one of the siblings.

Starting in the 1960s and continuing into the late 1980s, thousands of Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their homes and placed with non-Indigenous families. It was often done without the consent of the children's parents.

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Adam was three when she was placed in a white family's foster home. When she was 16, she met one of her sisters. Adam said she really didn't know much else about her birth family at that point.

"So I was a young adult when I found out we had another sister and a brother," she said.

Eventually, Adam connected with her mother, who was living in B.C. They developed a relationship and met several times before her mother's death in 2005.

The idea was to help other children, other Indigenous people.- Betty Ann Adam

It was after her mother's death that Adam started looking for her other sister and brother.

"But I had no idea where they were or whether they still had the same last name as me," she said.

Thanks to what Adam calls good luck and good work, she eventually tracked them down. In 2012, she connected with her brother, who lived in Edmonton, after he had called their reserve looking for information. Then in 2014, the post-adoption registry was released and led Adam to her sister in California.

A rare opportunity

When it came time for the siblings to finally reunite, Adam contacted filmmaker Tasha Hubbard to document the event.

"It immediately captured my imagination," Hubbard said.

"There's not a lot out there right now, in terms of what the experience has been like for those who have been adopted and fostered, and to be able to come together like that is really a rare opportunity."

Both Adam and Hubbard agreed that while the film documents a joyful reunion, it also tells a story of loss.

"To watch [my siblings] interacting with each other and realizing that this was something that wouldn't have happened by accident," Adam said. "It took a lot of effort to make it happen."

Hubbard is still putting the final touches on the documentary, Birth of a Family. It will be screened as part of Aabiziingwashi (#WideAwake): Indigenous Cinema on Tour, which showcases films by Indigenous directors produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

The tour starts on Jan. 16, 2017 and will travel across the country.