Surviving the Sixties Scoop

As a young child, Marcia Brown Martell was taken from her home in Beaverhouse First Nation, located near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, to be adopted by a non-Native family in southern Ontario.
Knowing her heritage, Brown Martell said it was a struggle to be raised by and live among non-Native people, especially when she moved with her foster mother to Texas.
“Terribly lonely,” she said about her feelings during those years. “To myself, I was isolated. There weren’t any of my people with me and what I learned about my culture I learned from books.”
A week before she was to be taken away, a young lady visited Brown Martell and had her repeat a line over and over.
“I must’ve said it well over 100 times a day for a week,” Brown Martell said. “She said, ‘Say this, say this, say it again and again.’”
The line that continues to stay with her is: “My name is Sally Susan Mathias and I’m from Kirkland Lake, Ontario. I’m from Beaverhouse.”
Sally Susan Mathias, as Brown Martell later learned, is her birth name given to her by her original family. And the young lady who taught her the line is her biological sister, Nancy.
After living in Texas for years, Brown Martell’s foster mother took her to the Houston International Airport about a month before her 18th birthday.
“I didn’t know why I was there,” Brown Martell recalls. “While I was standing around waiting, I was handed a ticket. ‘Your biological sister Nancy is going to see you in North Bay,’ they said.”
Brown Martell did not even know where North Bay was and had not seen her sister for more than 10 years. Brown Martell figured she could find her sister by looking for another “Native lady.”
“To my surprise, there were many other Native people there,” Brown Martell said. “I was baffled, let’s say. It was a surprise to see other First Nations people around.”
After the crowd dissipated, Brown Martell was approached by her sister, who recognized her physical features as being from the Mathias family.
“She looked at me,” Brown Martell said. “She said, ‘I’m Nancy. Are you…’ – I don’t recall if she called me Sally or Marcia.”
Brown Martell was brought back to Beaverhouse, where she found it difficult to re-adapt to her home community.
“It was quite the struggle to bond with people who you never grew up with,” she said. “For years, I just sat back and I listened. I watched what other people did and listened to how they spoke. I had conversations and things, but I didn’t engage with people in depth for years.”
At first, Brown Martel found it strange how people talked to her. She later learned the family was told by officials that Brown Martell was mentally handicapped.
“They looked at me and talked to me as though I had limited speaking ability, limited understanding,” she said. “That in itself was a challenge to adapt to, let alone to adapt to a First Nations community.”
Another challenge was learning her first language. Brown Martel said even today she does not speak it with the fluency she would have had she not been adopted.
“I never had the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with my grandparents or my parents,” she said, adding that only her father could speak English fairly well. “ And it was my grandmother and mother who had their first language. And I had not been able to and have not been able to (speak to them).”
Years later, Brown Martel was learning about the residential school legacy through a local Aboriginal family agency. It was then she first heard of the term, ‘Sixties Scoop.’
“And I said, I think I’m a part of that,” she said. “And I had to deal with that emotionally first and seek out other people about what happened to me.”
Brown Martel then asked whether anybody had done anything about it. The answer was no, so she looked for an acknowledgement and compensation from the government over the Sixties Scoop.
“If it was wrong to me, it must’ve been wrong to the other thousands of people,” she said.
A class action suit was launched in 2008, and Brown Martel was listed as one of the two plaintiffs. The suit was certified as a class action suit but this was overturned by another judge in 2010.
Another class suit was re-launched and certified last month. Brown Martel said an Ontario Superior judge would speak on the suit while the Crown will have the opportunity to appeal the certification of the suit.
“We’ll see how that comes about,” Brown Martel said. “It would also give them (the Canadian government) an opportunity to deal with First Nations in an honourable way instead of the appeal process.”
Brown Martel said she hopes more survivors of the Sixties Scoop will step up and become claimants to the class action suit. But she recognizes it will be hard for some.
“At times I thought I was alone (but) there are so many others,” she said.
“As challenging as these next days, next months are going to be, the care that we need to have for each other and surviving members, this will be a healing journey that can only bring us a greater strength.”
Brown Martel said she is still on her healing journey, but she has come a long way. She is in her third year as chief of Beaverhouse, and served on the council before that.
“To become the chief of this First Nation under the circumstances that I was taken from this community – I am blessed,” she said. “It is a remarkable series of events that brought me to this place.”