Three siblings separated by the Sixties Scoop meet in person for the first time
Three Indigenous siblings torn apart by the Sixties Scoop have reunited in Winnipeg, decades after the Canadian child welfare system removed them from their family — including one sister who flew in from Oregon after only recently learning her family had been searching for her.
Melody Roberts, 66, of Eugene, Oregon, embraced her biological siblings Joe Lambert and Donna Morin, 61, on Sunday evening at Winnipeg’s Richardson Airport, where a welcoming party greeted her with signs, singing, and drumming at the arrivals area.
“It’s good to be back,” Roberts said at the reunion.
A family pieced back together, one name at a time
It was Morin who drove the search. She recalled a story her grandfather had told her years earlier — that he had taken their pregnant mother to the hospital, but that “she’d come out without children.”
“I just thought she left them there, and then I heard about the Sixties Scoop,” Morin said. “I got a list of the children that she had lost. And so I found most of them. I only had [Joe] and Melody to find — and I finally found them.”
The reunion was made possible through the help of Susanna Tasse, social services and outreach co-ordinator with Winnipeg charity Hope Centre Ministries. Tasse said the process began roughly a year and a half ago when she realized Lambert — one of her clients — was also a Sixties Scoop survivor.
The scale of the Sixties Scoop in Manitoba
The Sixties Scoop refers to the widespread practice of removing Indigenous children from their families and communities and placing them with non-Indigenous adoptive or foster families — often with no connection to their culture, language, or identity.
A provincial inquiry in Manitoba, completed in 2015, found that more than 3,400 Indigenous children were “shipped away” to adoptive parents between 1971 and 1981 alone, with some sent to other countries.
Tasse said the lasting damage of that separation runs deep. “Survivors grew up thinking they were not wanted,” she said. “There’s abandonment issues all their lives because they felt they were not wanted.”
Three days together, a lifetime to catch up on
Roberts spent three days in Winnipeg with her siblings, visiting The Forks and looking through family photographs for the first time.
“We just got done looking at a bunch of pictures of my family and my other brothers and sisters and my mom and dad,” Roberts said during a phone interview on Monday. “It’s been really awesome. I’m really enjoying myself here.”
