What Sixties Scoop survivors built — and are teaching forward to their children and grandchildren

Nobody handed Sixties Scoop survivors a language for loving themselves as Indigenous people. Separated as children from family, culture, community, land and their own languages, many of them built one anyway.

Dr. Marlyn Bennett, PhD, wants that understood as a gain. Not what was left over after everything else was taken, but something survivors made and added to their own lives. And now, she says, they are passing it on.

"I wanted to look at it from a strengths perspective," says Bennett, herself a Sixties Scoop survivor, a member of Sandy Bay Ojibway Nation, and a researcher at the University of Calgary who is researching this dark period in Canadian history through this very novel lens. 

Most research and public conversation about the Sixties Scoop begins and ends with what was taken and the harms perpetrated. Families separated. Cultures disrupted. Identities fractured. Those accounts are essential, Bennett says, and they must continue to be told. But when absence becomes the whole story, survivors appear in it only as people that things were done to.

Instead, Bennett wants to know what sustained survivors of that period — beginning in the 1950s and into the 1980s — when child-welfare authorities removed more than 24,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children from their families and placed them in non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes. The extension of provincial child-welfare jurisdiction onto reserves in 1951 saw removals of children climb sharply in the decades that followed, overlapping with residential schools, Indian hospitals and forced displacement from homelands. Children were placed in homes across Canada and, in many cases, in the United States and overseas. 

According to Bennett, her research project, Exploring the Language of Love Across Generations: The Lived Experiences of Sixties Scoop Survivors and Their Families, doesn’t diminish any of that record. Instead, Bennett asks how, despite everything, did survivors learn to love themselves as Indigenous people? What did they teach themselves that no one was there to teach them? And what happens to that knowledge when it reaches the next generation?

Bennett defines "languages of love," drawing partly on familiar typology — words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, touch — but then pairs it with Indigenous expressions those categories miss entirely: kinship responsibility, ceremony, storytelling, land-based reciprocity and humour. Survivors often describe never hearing "I love you" as children, she notes, and then finding love in a feast, a ceremony, in the laughter of relatives.

Research on the Sixties Scoop has long traced what moves down through families as harm — the intergenerational impacts of removal, disrupted attachment, and cultural severance. Far less attention has been paid to what else survivors have handed forward. Bennett argues that descendants are not passive recipients of an inheritance, but active cultural creators, taking what reaches them and making something new and transmitting survivance to future generations. Survivors who had to work out for themselves what it means to be loved as an Indigenous person are now parents and grandparents, and their children and grandchildren are building on that rather than starting from nothing.

With survivors now in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Bennett says that if the only public account of these lives is a record of what was done to them, something essential goes missing — not only for survivors, but for the grandchildren who inherit that account of who their people are.

The project grew from years of conversations with members of the International Sixties Scoop Council of Canada, where Bennett serves on the board and which is the study's community partner. One survivor described growing up believing he was from an entirely different cultural background before discovering later in life that he was Indigenous.  

Bennett will bring together 72 people from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, survivors who will explore their personal experience and share those insights through the creation of a video or digital story. Alongside digital storytelling, the project draws on talking circles, conversational interviews and the visiting way — Indigenous methodologies that treat knowledge as generated through relationship, rather than extracted through questioning.  

Digital storytelling, she says, creates space for survivors to express what cannot always be captured through interviews or academic research. The resulting stories become more than research data. They become acts of reclamation — and, increasingly, records that survivors intend their grandchildren and future generations to watch. The project will also produce a six-episode podcast, three annual Sixties Scoop zines on the languages of love, and a survivor-led digital archive built to outlast the grant.

Bennett is deliberate about who is asking the questions. Several members of her team are Sixties Scoop survivors, and she describes the research as done with survivors rather than about them.  

She hopes the project will broaden public understanding beyond trauma alone and is clear that recognizing strength is not the same as minimizing pain. It is about naming what survivors did: continued caring for their families, rebuilt relationships, and raised generations who know they are loved.

The work has direct policy stakes, says Bennett. 

For Bennett, these questions also hold deep personal significance. She was just 12 years old when her mother died from leukemia, and, although she grew up in care, memories of her mother's care have remained with her. One memory became the foundation of a digital story she created during her doctoral studies. Titled My Mother's Love Was in a Bowl of Porridge, it reflects on seemingly ordinary moments that came to represent extraordinary expressions of love.

Drawing on Anishinaabe teachings, Bennett points to love as one of the Seven Sacred Teachings. Colonial policies attempted to separate children from their families and cultures, she says, but they could not erase Indigenous people's capacity to love and continue loving into the future.

"This is one thing you cannot take away from Sixties Scoop survivors," Bennett says. "You cannot take away our ability to give and receive love."

For Bennett, that points to a different way of understanding healing. Not as the recovery of something lost, but as the love survivors have made — and are now teaching forward for the generations coming after them.