The Kimelman Report had a substantial and lasting impact on aboriginal child protection in Canada that was part of a fundamental shift in international child protection paradigms for aboriginal peoples.
In the early 1980s, following the notorious Sixties Scoop, [1] in which many children were removed from aboriginal families for adoption by non-aboriginal parents and in some cases international adoption. The Manitoba government established a Review Committee on Indian and Métis Adoptions and Placements. Judge Edwin C. Kimelman chaired the Committee. In 1984, "After reviewing the file of every Native child who had been adopted by an out-of-province family in 1981, Judge Kimelman stated: 'having now completed the review of the files... the Chairman now states unequivocally that cultural genocide has been taking place in a systematic, routine manner'." [2]
In 1985, the Review Committee issued a final report, entitled "No Quiet Place" and known in child welfare circles as the Kimelman Report, [3] that had profound impact on aboriginal child protection in Canada and perhaps elsewhere. [4] The report had 109 recommendations that address issues in the existing Child Welfare system in Manitoba. The following excerpts are from the report:
The chairman was determined that the structure of the committee not stand in the way of the production of a meaningful report dealing with substantive issues which could and would be implemented. The need to avoid the possibility of the committee being used merely to silence the hue and cry raised by the native organizations was clear. This study is not to be a whitewash of the child welfare system [5]
In 1982, no one, except the Indian and the Metis people, really believed the reality- that native children were routinely being shipped to adoption homes in the United States and other provinces in Canada. Every social worker, every administrator, and every agency of region viewed the situation from a narrow perspective and saw each individual case as an exception, as a case involving extenuating circumstances. No one fully comprehend that 25% of all children placed for adoption were placed outside of Manitoba. No one fully comprehend that virtually all those children were of native descent. [5]
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
The Manitoba Act, 1870 is an act of the Parliament of Canada, and part of the Constitution of Canada, that provided for the admission of Manitoba as the fifth province of Canada.
Rod E. Bruinooge is an Indigenous Canadian politician, businessman, and filmmaker. He was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Winnipeg South in the 2006 federal election, and was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and the Federal Interlocutor for Métis and Non-Status Indians from 2006 until the fall of 2008.
The Métis are an Indigenous people whose historical homelands include Canada's three Prairie Provinces. They have a shared history and culture, deriving from specific mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, which became distinct through ethnogenesis by the mid-18th century, during the early years of the North American fur trade.
Thomas Eugene Flanagan is an American-born Canadian author, conservative political activist, and former political science professor at the University of Calgary. He also served as an advisor to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper until 2004.
Aboriginal Protection Board, also known as Aborigines Protection Board, Board for the Protection of Aborigines, Aborigines Welfare Board, and similar names, refers to a number of historical Australian state-run institutions with the function of regulating the lives of Aboriginal Australians. They were also responsible for administering the various half-caste acts where these existed and had a key role in the Stolen Generations. The boards had nearly ultimate control over Aboriginal people's lives.
Foster children in Canada are known as permanent wards. A ward is someone, in this case a child, placed under protection of a legal guardian and are the legal responsibility of the government. Census data from 2011 counted children in foster care for the first time, counting 47,885 children in care. The majority of foster children – 29,590, or about 62% – were aged 14 and under. The wards remain under the care of the government until they "age out of care." This age is different depending on the province.
The Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (AJI), officially the Public Inquiry into the Administration of Justice and Aboriginal People, was a public inquiry commissioned by the Manitoba government into the administration of justice regarding the 1971 murder of Helen Betty Osborne and 1988 death of J.J. Harper. Commissioned in 1988, with its final report presented in 1991, its stated purpose was "to examine the relationship between the Aboriginal peoples of Manitoba and the justice system."
Child protective services (CPS) is the name of an agency responsible for providing child protection, which includes responding to reports of child abuse or neglect. Some countries and US states use other names, often attempting to reflect more family-centered practices, such as department of children and family services (DCFS). CPS is also sometimes known by the name of department of social services, though these terms more often have a broader meaning.
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 is a United States federal law that governs jurisdiction over the removal of American Indian children from their families in custody, foster care and adoption cases.
Calvin Murray Sinclair is a former member of the Canadian Senate and First Nations lawyer who served as chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015. He previously served as a judge in Manitoba from 1988 to 2009, being the first Indigenous judge appointed in the province. Sinclair was appointed to the Senate of Canada on April 2, 2016. In November 2020, he announced his retirement from the Senate effective January 31, 2021.
Edwin Charles Kimelman served as a judge of the Provincial Court of Manitoba (Canada) and authored a significant public report on child protection for aboriginal peoples.
Aboriginal child protection describes services designed specifically for protection of the children of "aboriginal" or indigenous peoples, particularly where they are a minority within a country. This may differ at international, national, legal, cultural, social, professional and program levels from general or mainstream child protection services. Fundamental human rights are a source of many of the differences. Aboriginal child protection may be an integral or a distinct aspect of mainstream services or it may be exercised formally or informally by an aboriginal people itself. There has been controversy about systemic genocide in child protection systems enforced with aboriginal children in post-colonial societies.
Adoption in Australia deals with the adoption process in the various parts of Australia, whereby a person assumes or acquires the permanent, legal status of parenthood in relation to a child under the age of 18 in place of the child's birth or biological parents. Australia classifies adoptions as local adoptions, and intercountry adoptions. Known child adoptions are a form of local adoptions.
The Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth (MACY) is an independent, non-partisan office of the Manitoba Legislative Assembly. The office represents the rights, interests, and viewpoints of children, youth, and young adults throughout Manitoba who are receiving, or should be receiving, provincial public services. MACY does this by providing direct advocacy support to young people and their families, by reviewing public service delivery after the death or serious injury of a child, and by conducting child-centred research and systemic advocacy.
The Sixties Scoop, also known as The Scoop, was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families. Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 570 U.S. 637 (2013), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which held that several sections of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) do not apply to Native American biological fathers who are not custodians of a Native American child. The court held that the procedures required by the ICWA to end parental rights do not apply when the child has never lived with the father. Additionally, the requirement to make extra efforts to preserve the Native American family also does not apply, nor is the preferred placement of the child in another Native American family required when no other party has formally sought to adopt the child.
Richard Cardinal: Cry from a Diary of a Métis Child is a 1986 National Film Board of Canada documentary film by Alanis Obomsawin, about the suicide of Métis youth Richard Stanley Cardinal, who killed himself in 1984 at the age of 17. Cardinal, who had been placed in 28 different homes during his 14 years in Alberta's child welfare system, hanged himself from a cross bar he had nailed between two trees near his last foster home, northwest of Edmonton.
Robert-Falcon Ouellette is a Canadian politician who represented the riding of Winnipeg Centre in the House of Commons of Canada from 2015 to 2019. He has also been a two-time candidate for Mayor of Winnipeg in the 2014 Winnipeg municipal election and the 2022 Winnipeg municipal election.
Forced adoption is the practice of forcefully taking children from their parents and placing them for adoption.