Woman using research to reconnect families, obtain status
- Andréa Ledding | June 18, 2016
For nearly twenty years, Blanche Cowley-Head has been helping with family history research required to register for status, and to reconnect family.
“I started doing it for one or two people and it spread from there. I just kind of followed the path ahead of me,” she noted. She had long been interested in family history, genealogy, and treaty and Métis people through libraries and archives. “Maybe they’re boring places for everyone else but it’s something I like doing.”
She began to come across people being denied birth information by the registrar: 60’s Scoop adoptees. Manitoba has opened their registrar as of last year, and she is still waiting to hear back, guessing it is backlogged. Saskatchewan is supposed to open theirs a year from now; and Alberta has not yet set a date.
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“So, that's the goal: to have people become aware of this issue and press for the records to be opened to these people,” Blanche noted, adding she has made a video on her website with adoptee Michael Henricks. “Michael and I decided to publicize it through the video.”
Because the records have been sealed at birth, adoptees have not had legal access to them and so can’t prove their status.
”I don't know the specific stats, but over 20 000 First Nations & Métis children were adopted out, so how that would distribute across the three prairie provinces I have no idea,” she noted. “That's a lot of people, how many of them lost their status or don't know they’re entitled to status, we don't know. It's a big question mark.”
Originally from the Manitoba Opaskwayak Cree Nation, she came to Saskatchewan to attend school, becoming interested in research through Indigenous Studies courses at FNUC. She also met her husband there, a fine arts student from Mistawasis who was a “60’s Scoop Veteran” — a term she prefers over “survivor”. The two of them eventually went to law school together, too, and take turns living in each other’s territories. Because of his family experiences through adoption and the foster care system, it brought a lot of first-hand experience to Blanche.
“That's how I came to understand a lot of the areas of being detached and disconnected from your family, community, sense of identity, and it really got my interest going.
“It's really satisfying when I am able to help people reconnect. That's part of their healing process, it’s a healing journey because a lot of the trauma we've been through as colonized people...the form of injury we experience is disconnection. We become detached from that which nourishes us — our original families, communities, and homelands,” noted Blanche. “There's a satisfaction that I get when we can hook people up, and that's what I'm excited about — in Michael's journey we were able to connect with his original father before he passed on.”
Michael is currently searching for information on his mother’s side, and interested in helping other adoptee veterans go through the process.
“And me, I'm one of the support people when you're ready to do your journey for your legal identity.”
For more information see www.bchresearch.ca.