60s Scoop survivors say cases of 'pretendians' make reconnecting with community even harder

Savannah Ridley is one of three recipients of the 2024 CJF-CBC Indigenous Journalism Fellowships, established to encourage Indigenous voices and better understanding of Indigenous issues in Canada's major media and community outlets.

As a kid, Raven Reid knew all the tiny places she could squeeze into surrounding her grandparents' home. She could never guess when her kokum would abruptly start a game of hide and seek,  but she was determined to win every time.

It would be many years before Reid understood the weight of the schoolyard game she played at her grandmother's house.

"I didn't realize we were hiding for our lives," said Reid.

She says the impromptu hide and seek sessions began when child welfare staff arrived in their area of Fort Smith, N.W.T. Although she was just a toddler when it happened, she said she still remembers the screams when RCMP came to take her and her siblings. Reid would never see her grandparents again.

Reid was adopted by a white family when she was five. Due to her birthplace, she was told that she was Dene. After reconnecting with her biological family much later in life, Reid learned that she was actually Cree. Over time, Reid's cultural muscles atrophied, leaving a void in her personhood she did not know how to fill.

"It's been a lifetime of not having any kind of roots. A lot of times, I feel like I'm a dead leaf that fell off a tree and is just floating in the wind," she said. 

For Reid and many other Sixties Scoop survivors, the game of hide and seek never stopped. They want to seek out the culture they've been removed from but fear of not approaching the search in the right way results in continued disconnection from their communities.

The threat of being labelled a fraud can be so daunting, some survivors opt to hide from their own people. 

Now, at age 47 with two children of her own, Reid still can't bring herself to visit the nation she's maternally tied to — the Mikisew Cree First Nation. 

"I'm afraid. What if people think that I'm a pretendian? I'm not, but you know what I mean? There's always people out there who are," Reid said. 

The term "pretendian" has come to refer to someone who claims First Nations, Inuit or Métis heritage that doesn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. Due to recent headlines about Indigenous identity fraud, some Sixties Scoop survivors and their descendants feel they have an even higher hoop to jump through to rectify disconnection that they are not responsible for.

Allyson Stevenson, Gabriel Dumont Research Chair of Métis Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, describes this added barrier as the expected embodiment of the "perfect survivor," which is a label with no definition.

Stevenson said the images people have come to associate with "survivorhood" — grandiose performances of Indigeneity in beaded earrings and feathers — have often come from fraudsters.

"They're also sort of like determining what Indigenous is and looks like, what it thinks like and what it acts like and speaks like and sings like and prays like. It becomes this total colonization," Stevenson said. 

For Anij Morton, a member of the Northwest Angle 33 First Nation in northwestern Ontario and another Sixties Scoop survivor, the discomfiting optics of survivorhood are especially potent at powwows.

Morton often wonders how they're supposed to act in spaces populated by Indigenous people who've sustained their cultural connections. 

Morton was taken from their family at just six months old. Though they were taken so young, the rumble of the drum circle awakens something they can feel but can't put a name to. 

"It's really hard to break in when people are watching you, expecting you to know and you don't know," Morton said.

Morton said they long to regenerate lost cultural ties but struggle with how to engage with people in a way that would show their authenticity. Due to this minefield, like Reid, Morton has yet to revisit their community.

"There are so many gatekeepers now because of pretendians," said Morton. 

"You jump through so many hoops in order to get what they have just by grabbing it, and it's really unfair."

Barriers to discovering one's identity also exist outside of Indigenous communities. Ellen Blais, another Sixties Scoop survivor, always knew she was First Nations from her adoptive mother's verbal abuse, often containing the phrase "dirty Indian," but it wasn't until Blais was in her 30s that she learned she was linked to the Oneida Nation of the Thames in southwestern Ontario. 

Shortly after the birth of her son, Blais applied to Ontario's Adoption Disclosure Registry. Using the registry to connect with blood relatives can take years as an applicant waits for kin to register themselves, learn of the applicant's wish to connect with them and actually reach out.

In Blais's case, it was a full decade before she established a relationship with her biological siblings. It was through her sister that she discovered the specificity of her Indigeneity. 

Since this discovery, Blais has taken every opportunity to connect with her people in an effort to make up for lost time, regardless of how awkward or uncomfortable she felt. It's a laborious task she wishes could have happened naturally. 

"Oh man, if I could grow up in the longhouse and I could speak my language — I don't know what it would feel like," said Blais.

"It's kind of a fantasy of mine. Would I feel more grounded?"

A way to guard against frauds while saving Scoop survivors from feeling shame has yet to be established, but for Elaine Kicknosway, a co-founder of the Sixties Scoop Network, the answer can begin to be found in empathetic "community care conversation." 

"Right now it's like, 'expose so and so lied,' but how do we deal with the aftercare and aftershock? What is our responsibility to each other," said Kicknosway.

"It's up to a lot of us to do because we're still waiting for our siblings to come home, too. We're still waiting."