Remembering rightly

Our experience of the Sixties Scoop

Authors

  • Lydia Neufeld Harder
  • Ingrid Bettina Wolfear

Keywords:

Sixties Scoop, indigenous, indigenous peoples, adoption, Residential Schools, family, memory

Abstract

We want to tell the story of how our mother/daughter relationship was affected by the Sixties Scoop of Indigenous children in Canada. We will each speak in our own unique voice, Ingrid’s words written in italics and Lydia’s in roman. Our memories are colored by the present and the past, by what we are learning now and what we knew then. In all of this we are attempting to “remember rightly” what happened then and what is happening now.

Author Biographies

Lydia Neufeld Harder

Lydia Neufeld Harder, PhD (Toronto School of Theology), is retired from her formal work as theologian and pastor, but she continues to reflect on Mennonite theology and practice, particularly on the way power has functioned within the church and scholarly communities. She has taught sessionally, presented at numerous academic conferences, and worked as a pastor in the Mennonite Church. Her most recent book, The Challenge Is in the Naming, chronicles her theological journey by placing earlier published essays into the personal, social, and church contexts in which they were written. Lydia and her husband, Gary, live in Toronto, Ontario, where they attend the Toronto United Mennonite Church. Their three children and their spouses and their nine grandchildren and one great grandchild give them ample reason to travel and to keep in touch with the challenges of the next generations.

Ingrid Bettina Wolfear

Ingrid Bettina Wolfear was born into the Blackfoot Nation, where all of her larger family and community were survivors of Residential School. She was in survivor mode from before the time she was born with blood memory as her backbone. She was a single parent to three children born within twenty-five months, until she met her husband of ten years. She and her husband live with their school-age daughter on Sagamok Anishnawbek Nation in Ojibway territory. Healing continues for all.

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Published

2023-11-28

Issue

Vol. 24 No. 2 (2023): Family

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Copyright by Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Canadian Mennonite University.