The Manitoba Métis Federation is suing the provincial and federal governments after the Red River Métis were largely excluded from a class action settlement for Sixties Scoop survivors.
The Sixties Scoop refers to when thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were removed from their homes and placed with non-Indigenous foster or adoptive parents between 1951 and 1991, losing their cultural identities as a result.
The MMF’s statement of claim, filed at the Manitoba Court of King’s Bench on Nov. 18, accuses Manitoba and Canada of knowingly allowing, funding, directing and overseeing the Sixties Scoop to promote their own “racist, colonial, Euro-Canadian values.”
The federal government announced an $800-million settlement for survivors in 2017, though some waited years for payments due to various delays. Over 34,000 claims were submitted by the 2019 deadline, with about $25,000 provided to each survivor deemed eligible.
Many Métis and non-status Indigenous survivors were largely excluded from applying for the compensation.
“More than eight years later, no level of government has addressed the harms that were suffered by the Red River Métis as a consequence of the Sixties Scoop,” the MMF’s suit says.
The MMF says, as the national government for the Red River Métis, it’s filing its lawsuit on behalf of its citizenship as a whole in order to address the collective harms they’ve suffered as a result of the Sixties Scoop.
It alleges Canada’s and Manitoba’s breaches of their duties and obligations to the Red River Métis resulted in the deprivation of Métis culture, language and identity, as well as familial relations and the ability to pass Métis culture and identity for survivors and their children.
None of the allegations have been proven in court. Statements of defence have not yet been filed.
A Manitoba provincial spokesperson declined to comment while the lawsuit is before the courts. Indigenous Services Canada did not respond to CBC’s request for comment prior to publication.
The MMF’s lawsuit comes in addition to a separate class action lawsuit for Métis and non-status Sixties Scoop survivors that was certified by a Federal Court judge in 2021.
In May, a Federal Court judge ruled that Canada didn’t owe a duty of care to the majority of Métis or non-status Indigenous children because it didn’t fund provincial child welfare legislation for them.
It is “impossible to know” the true number of Red River Métis children who were impacted by the Sixties Scoop, but it’s estimated to be in the thousands, the suit claims.
The MMF seeks court declarations that the Sixties Scoop breached and continues to breach constitutional, fiduciary, and/or common law duties owed to the Red River Métis, and has caused and continues to cause irreparable cultural, linguistic and social harms.
It also seeks punitive and exemplary damages, as well as damages that would include amounts to restore, protect and preserve the linguistic and cultural rights of the Red River Métis.
Indigenous children in Manitoba who were removed from their communities as part of the Sixties Scoop often ended up in non-Indigenous homes in the United States, the MMF says in its lawsuit.
As an example, the suit says in the 1950s, Manitoba and provincial Children’s Aid Society agencies “directly engaged” with American Catholic welfare agencies in Minnesota to arrange placements in American homes for Indigenous children in care in Manitoba.
Correspondence with the Minnesota agencies from that time shows the provincial supervisor of Manitoba’s child welfare services referring to children that were “part Indian” and of “part Indian origin,” stating that a larger percentage of them were Catholic, according to the suit.
“Given Red River Métis are of mixed ancestry and predominantly Catholic, the children referred to in these letters were almost certainly Red River Métis,” the lawsuit says.
Manitoba and provincial Children’s Aid Society agencies often justified removing Red River Métis children from their communities based on “Euro-Canadian assumptions” about appropriate child-rearing practices, the suit says.
In some cases, social welfare agents assumed Red River Métis children were left unattended, because they “failed to recognize traditional Red River Métis community-based child-rearing in which the extended family would share responsibility for raising children,” the suit claims.
Manitoba knew or should have known that removing Red River Métis children from their families and communities and placing them with non-Red River Métis adoptive or foster families carried the significant risk of a loss of language, culture and identity for the Red River Métis as a whole, the suit claims.
A 1985 report by Manitoba provincial court Associate Chief Judge Edwin Kimelman concluded that the decades-long practice of removing Indigenous children from their communities was “cultural genocide,” the suit says.
The suit also claims that the Sixties Scoop meets the definition of genocide under the UN Genocide Convention, breaching articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
It alleges Manitoba and Canada both participated in the “intentional destruction” of the culture of Red River Métis children and communities, causing “profound, permanent and ongoing cultural injuries” to those communities.
“The Sixties Scoop deliberately inflicted on the Red River Métis conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” the suit claims.
