Winnipeg Project Looks at the Sixties Scoop

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The snapshot show children dressed for Halloween on an Edmonton street in the 1960s. One child wears a cat mask. A blonde girl in a pillbox hat shades her eyes from the sun with one hand. To her right, a little apart from the others, is a boy with dark hair and eyes, dressed in brown. Long feathers ring his head. He holds a mask in one hand. It catches the bright light, washing out to a piercing white. The boy’s expression is hard to read. Confused, perhaps? Or disconnected?

The boy is George Littlechild. And it’s easy to see why this photo, Little Indian Foster Boy #4, with the various identities it posits, elides and erases, is part of his reprise of his seminal 1996 multimedia installation. That work, with its text panels and photos, has a much different tone than the vibrantly coloured expressive paintings Littlechild sells through commercial galleries. But he says all his work deals with social and political issues. Art is his tool for resistance – and transformation.

Littlechild has faced many struggles in his life. He was part of the Sixties Scoop, when thousands of indigenous children were removed from troubled homes and adopted or fostered, mostly by white middle-class families. Officials at the time may have thought they were acting in the children's best interests, but an Ontario judge ruled in February that Canada had failed to protect their cultural identity.

Littlechild was just four when authorities took him away. He lived with five foster families, enduring racism and, at times, beatings. He lost touch with his siblings and parents, as well as his culture and community. But art helped him survive, giving him a way to express his inner turmoil and feelings of alienation. “I’m very fortunate I had my art,” he says.

Littlechild's installation, Displaced Indians: The Sixties Scoop, is on view until April 28 at Urban Shaman, an aboriginal artist-run centre in Winnipeg. It’s part of a group show titled A Place Between, believed to be the first major Canadian exhibition to look at the Sixties Scoop. The groundbreaking project is complex. It includes more than 20 contemporary artists and various activities, including screenings, artist talks, performances and even a billboard, all aimed at promoting dialogue about a troubled chapter in Canada’s history.

Twenty years ago, when Littlechild first created his installation, few understood what had happened to his generation of aboriginal children. Canadians are only now coming to terms with the horrific legacy of residential schools. It’s still early days in the public reckoning for the Sixties Scoop. But there are signs of progress. The Manitoba government issued an apology to families in 2015. Provincial adoption records have been opened to help families reunite. Class action suits are wending their way through the courts.

Urban Shaman thought art might offer another avenue for healing. “It’s one of the last issues around the trickle-down effects of residential schools,” says Daina Warren, the gallery’s director.

National estimates of the number of children removed from their homes during the Sixties Scoop vary, but some place the number at upwards of 20,000. The practice was most common on the Prairies, and continued for more than 20 years, although some say the number of aboriginal kids still put into care is evidence that little has changed.

The issue is so sensitive that Urban Shaman held community discussions in the lead-up to the show to help people deal with their emotions. “A lot of people came out,” says Warren, an adoptee herself. “There was a lot of emotional response. Some people were expressing anger and sadness about the situations they were put into.”

There were discussions about how to move forward, both as individuals and as a community. Even the decision to let people see their adoption records has opened debates. “Some people feel it’s good,” says Warren. “And some people don’t want to be found. So it’s a very complex and tenuous situation.”

Littlechild spent 11 years tracking down his family. His mother, of Plains Cree descent, was from Maskwacis, formerly known as Hobbema, near Edmonton. His four siblings were also taken away. He knows his family was troubled. “Yes, there was dysfunction,” he says. Relatives tried to find him, but were told an American family had adopted him. He still doesn’t know much about his mother, an alcoholic who died on Edmonton’s Skid Row when she was 36. But he has met many relatives dealing with the fallout of their residential school experience. Two of his uncles, he says, died while at school.

Littlechild takes pains to point out that not all aboriginal children were adopted. In one foster home he says he was beaten until his face was black and blue. The next was with a Dutch family where his foster mother encouraged his love of art. “If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be an artist today,” he says. But he also remembers her husband telling him he wouldn’t amount to much. “I have proved him wrong,” says Littlechild, who earned a fine arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1988. He’s had some 35 solo exhibitions and published several books. In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate from B.C.’s Fraser Valley University. Now 59, Littlechild lives in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, where he continues to work. He has a solo exhibition this month at Vancouver’s Kimoto Gallery and another next year at the Strathcona County Art Gallery @ 501 near Edmonton. He’s also represented by the Alcheringa Gallery in Victoria.

Littlechild’s installation about the Sixties Scoop tells not only his story, but also those of other people torn from their families. When he lived in Vancouver, he set up a talking circle and invited survivors to his studio. The conversations, at times heart wrenching and painful, made strangers feel like family. Some of those people contributed stories for his installation, which toured for several years, showing as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Over the years, parts of it got left behind during various moves. But when Urban Shaman contacted him, he went out to his garage and found the text panels.

“We all knew displacement, shame, hurt, abandonment and cultural loss,” Littlechild writes in his artist statement. “We especially lamented the loss of home, our parents and loved ones, some we knew, some we only imagined, and some who peered through a fog as the memories of our past, before we were taken.” He says feelings of shame are common among survivors. “We were taught to be ashamed of our Indian-ness. We craved love and acknowledgement.”

Littlechild is one of six artists showing in the main gallery at Urban Shaman. The others are Mary Longman, Sam Ash, Jennifer Brass, Benjamin Chee Chee and Scott C. Stonechild. The media gallery features Tasha Hubbard, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, who was commissioned to produce a new film, My Fathers. It looks at her relationships with her birth father, stepfather and her late adoptive father.

Urban Shaman hopes the project will promote dialogue. “I really want to hear what other people are going through,” says Warren. “And have time to talk it out and get to a healing point where we can look at how other people have experienced this and what works, or maybe what doesn’t work – advice, or maybe just some helpful words, about how to deal with reconnecting with your family or your community, if you want to.”

Littlechild was surprised to discover his father was white. A Second World War veteran, he was an alcoholic who died in a fall from an upper floor of a hotel on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Littlechild eventually tracked down all his siblings, although they are yet to gather in one place at the same time. His sisters had particularly difficult childhoods. He tells survivors looking for their families not to set their hopes on a happy ending. “If you can’t handle it,” he says, “don’t look for it.”

Littlechild now turns his attention to the future. He has no children himself, but keeps in touch with nieces and nephews. “You try to be a really good example,” he says. Despite his struggles, he’s remarkably positive. He’s had therapy but says he still holds trauma in his body, and isn’t sure if it’s something he’ll ever completely overcome. But he wants to tell his story. He wants people to listen and learn from the stories of others. He wants reconciliation. But more than anything, he wants people to open their hearts.

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Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art

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