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“We were told many times that if we ever saw white people to run to the bush as fast as we could,” she recalls.

At only three and a half years old, when Thompson saw a group of cars stopping on the highway she grabbed her two younger sisters and ran, carrying one on her back and guiding the other by the arm.

“It was literally one big scoop — he grabbed all three of us, threw us in the trunk of the car, closed the trunk door and that was the end of what I ever saw of my family,” she says.

Thompson’s parents were fishers working on Lake Winnipeg, so she was living under the care of her grandparents at the time she was scooped. Such arrangements were used as justification for the removal of indigenous children from their homes.

In the 1960s, welfare workers were not required or expected to be educated in indigenous cultures. Instead, their views of what constituted a healthy environment for children were based on the standards of white communities. It was considered neglectful to have children raised by people other than their parents, or provided traditional foods like dried game or berries.

In reality, such practices were not uncommon. Welfare workers may have operated under the belief that the children were not properly cared for, but their participation in the scoop would eventually lead many into actual experiences of neglect.

Photo by Gord Waldner / The StarPhoenix

Raven Sinclair, a scoop survivor and University of Regina social work professor based in Saskatoon, can also vividly remember her apprehension at the age of four and the months she spent moving around the foster system before a new family eventually adopted her on her fifth birthday.