For sale

Canada’s history with Aboriginal Peoples is unreal. Once Canada was a shining beacon of human rights throughout the world. But its tarnished past began showing the reality of the relationship between the government and its “wards of the state.”

It’s not only residential schools. It’s the health-related experiments on children who were denied vitamins and nutrition. It’s the sterilization of Aboriginal women without their knowledge or consent. It’s the sales of reserve lands with the proceeds pocketed by the Indian agents charged with taking care of and safeguarding their diminished resources. It’s the racism that saw returning soldiers from World War I receiving free land and material goods as a reward for their service unless they were Aboriginal. It was the extinguishment clause. It was the system that saw Aboriginal people needing passes to travel outside their communities. It was the many unmarked gravesites of children who attended residential schools. It was the killing of dogs so that Aboriginal people had no choice but to starve on reserves. The Cree know this as the hard times when they had to beg for food.

But something else has finally seen the light of day and it is ugly. A CBC investigation found out that Aboriginal children were sold. That’s right: they were sold with the Canadian government’s knowledge, which did nothing to stop it. The infamous Sixties Scoop saw children removed from their families to be adopted by white families in Canada, the US and Europe.

It was simply an aggressive marketing campaign by churches and US adoption agencies under a Canadian federal program. Children were even listed in catalogues with price listings. The executive director of the Children’s Bureau of New Orleans called it a “great deal” for Manitoba taxpayers, who would no longer have to foot the bill for Native children in provincial care.

It is an interesting thought that the sale of Aboriginal children was tied to saving money for Canadian taxpayers. Was this so long ago? Well, it stopped by the end of 1982, we are told. So many might see this as part of the past and not so worthy of being brought up. After all, it happened 34 years ago, but people still look at what was done in Nazi Germany and hold the German people of that era accountable. Can we do any less when it comes to selling children of any colour, race or ethnic origin?

One of the sales saw Marlene Oregon adopted by a family in Louisiana. She remembers when her parents told her they had purchased her for $30,000 and got her two brothers as freebies. “They told me I should be thankful to them, because they paid for me. I felt really guilty,” she said. Other adoptees were valued from $1000 upwards.

The adoptive parents of Willy Fast constantly reminded him that he had been “bought for $10,000.” His sister said her brother told her, “his mother used to say she owned him.”

Another remarked, “[My mother] told me it was like flipping through a magazine to select the one you want.”

So Canada sold Aboriginal children. It wasn’t all that long ago, but it was obscene then and wrong now. In 2011, Statistics Canada reported that half of the children in foster care were Aboriginal, so you have to wonder if the mentality that had children taken from their families and sold has really died out. Perhaps it just changed to suit the new realities people want to think Canada embraces.