Canada didn’t owe a duty of care<\/a> to the majority of M\u00e9tis or non-status Indigenous children because it didn’t fund provincial child welfare legislation for them.<\/p>\nIt is “impossible to know” the true number of Red River M\u00e9tis children who were impacted by the Sixties Scoop, but it’s estimated to be in the thousands, the suit claims.<\/p>\n
The MMF seeks court declarations that the Sixties Scoop breached and continues to breach constitutional, fiduciary, and\/or common law duties owed to the Red River M\u00e9tis, and has caused and continues to cause irreparable cultural, linguistic and social harms.<\/p>\n
It also seeks punitive and exemplary damages, as well as damages that would include amounts to restore, protect and preserve the linguistic and cultural rights of the Red River M\u00e9tis.<\/p>\n
‘Profound, permanent and ongoing cultural injuries’<\/p>\n
Indigenous children in Manitoba who were removed from their communities as part of the Sixties Scoop often ended up in non-Indigenous homes in the United States, the MMF says in its lawsuit.<\/p>\n
As an example, the suit says in the 1950s, Manitoba and provincial Children’s Aid Society agencies “directly engaged” with American Catholic welfare agencies in Minnesota to arrange placements in American homes for Indigenous children in care in Manitoba.<\/p>\n
Correspondence with the Minnesota agencies from that time shows the provincial supervisor of Manitoba’s child welfare services referring to children that were “part Indian” and of “part Indian origin,” stating that a larger percentage of them were Catholic, according to the suit.<\/p>\n
“Given Red River M\u00e9tis are of mixed ancestry and predominantly Catholic, the children referred to in these letters were almost certainly Red River M\u00e9tis,” the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n
Manitoba and provincial Children’s Aid Society agencies often justified removing Red River M\u00e9tis children from their communities based on “Euro-Canadian assumptions” about appropriate child-rearing practices, the suit says.<\/p>\n
In some cases, social welfare agents assumed Red River M\u00e9tis children were left unattended, because they “failed to recognize traditional Red River M\u00e9tis community-based child-rearing in which the extended family would share responsibility for raising children,” the suit claims.<\/p>\n
Manitoba knew or should have known that removing Red River M\u00e9tis children from their families and communities and placing them with non-Red River M\u00e9tis adoptive or foster families carried the significant risk of a loss of language, culture and identity for the Red River M\u00e9tis as a whole, the suit claims.<\/p>\n
A 1985 report by Manitoba provincial court Associate Chief Judge Edwin Kimelman concluded that the decades-long practice of removing Indigenous children from their communities was “cultural genocide,” the suit says.<\/p>\n
The suit also claims that the Sixties Scoop meets the definition of genocide under the UN Genocide Convention, breaching articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.<\/p>\n
It alleges Manitoba and Canada both participated in the “intentional destruction” of the culture of Red River M\u00e9tis children and communities, causing “profound, permanent and ongoing cultural injuries” to those communities.<\/p>\n
“The Sixties Scoop deliberately inflicted on the Red River M\u00e9tis conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” the suit claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Manitoba M\u00e9tis Federation is suing the provincial and federal governments after the Red River M\u00e9tis were largely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,136975,136979,44,136978,136977,136976,62085,136980],"class_list":["post-305548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-manitoba-metis-federation","tag-mmf","tag-news","tag-red-river","tag-red-river-metis","tag-river-metis","tag-sixties-scoop","tag-the-red-river"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}