Kenora woman impacted by Sixties Scoop reunites with sisters

A Kenora, Ont. woman says she's crossed an item off her bucket list after successfully tracking down the two sisters she lost contact with as a child.

Sonya Murray and her sister Nakuset were taken from their home as children as part of what is now known as the Sixties Scoop – the government's practice of disproportionately seizing Indigenous children from their homes and placing them up for adoption or in foster homes.

Murray was around five-years-old when she remembers hearing a knock on the door late at night, she said.

Her parents had taken her baby sister to the hospital, and she thought they'd forgotten their keys, so she unlocked the door.

But it wasn't her parents. It was the police, there to apprehend her and Nakuset.

"It was very very scary," she said. "Blinding lights just coming into our room."

'They just kept telling me that she's gone now'

At first, the sisters shared a room in a foster home, but one morning, Murray woke up to find Nakuset gone.

"When I asked where she was, nobody would tell me. They just kept telling me that she's gone now," she said.

"It's almost like a sense of abandonment. First of all we're taken from our parents and then the next thing my sister's taken away from me," she said.

"You don't know, is it me? Why is everybody disappearing like this?"

Murray returned home to her mother after about a year.

But less than three years later, she lost contact with her youngest sister, Rose Mary, when Rose Mary's father separated from her mother.

Murray first began searching for Nakuset when she was around 12, she said.

The two sisters had previously been adopted by their biological mother's first husband, who had left a trust fund for them when he died.

'I thought it was a joke at first'

The administrator knew Nakuset's whereabouts but couldn't reveal them to Murray, she said, so she asked to leave a letter with him to be given to her sister when she turned 21.

Murray isn't sure if Nakuset ever saw that letter, but one day, her sister found her.

A neighbour came over to tell Murray that her sister was on the line, because she didn't have a phone at the time.

"I thought it was a joke at first," Murray said. "It was unreal."

Murray always knew that her baby sister, Rose Mary, was in Vienna, but she had no idea how to reach out to her until the advent of social media.

She finally found her on Facebook last fall, but her messages kept landing in Rose Mary's filtered folder.

It wasn't until earlier this month, that she finally got a message back.

'Every time I have something, I'm always scared somebody's going to take it away'

"I had to put the phone down and walk away. Seriously. I was like, 'Are you serious? This is really happening? Are you serious?  Are you serious?' And I had to like literally walk away from the phone and breath."

Murray and her sisters are now planning an in-person reunion later this year.

But the legacy of the Sixties Scoop is still with her to this day, she said.

"Every time I have something, I'm always scared somebody's going to take it away," she said. "So whenever I have something, I'm always trying to hang on too tight to it so that nobody will take anything away from me again."