60s Scoop survivors say cases of 'pretendians' make reconnecting with community even harder

Savannah Ridley is one of three recipients of the 2024 CJF-CBC Indigenous Journalism Fellowships, established to encourage Indigenous voices and better understanding of Indigenous issues in Canada's major media and community outlets.

As a kid, Raven Reid knew all the tiny places she could squeeze into surrounding her grandparents' home. She could never guess when her kokum would abruptly start a game of hide and seek,  but she was determined to win every time.

It would be many years before Reid understood the weight of the schoolyard game she played at her grandmother's house.

"I didn't realize we were hiding for our lives," said Reid.

She says the impromptu hide and seek sessions began when child welfare staff arrived in their area of Fort Smith, N.W.T. Although she was just a toddler when it happened, she said she still remembers the screams when RCMP came to take her and her siblings. Reid would never see her grandparents again.

Reid was adopted by a white family when she was five. Due to her birthplace, she was told that she was Dene. After reconnecting with her biological family much later in life, Reid learned that she was actually Cree. Over time, Reid's cultural muscles atrophied, leaving a void in her personhood she did not know how to fill.

"It's been a lifetime of not having any kind of roots. A lot of times, I feel like I'm a dead leaf that fell off a tree and is just floating in the wind," she said. 

For Reid and many other Sixties Scoop survivors, the game of hide and seek never stopped. They want to seek out the culture they've been removed from but fear of not approaching the search in the right way results in continued disconnection from their communities.

The threat of being labelled a fraud can be so daunting, some survivors opt to hide from their own people. 

Now, at age 47 with two children of her own, Reid still can't bring herself to visit the nation she's maternally tied to — the Mikisew Cree First Nation. 

"I'm afraid. What if people think that I'm a pretendian? I'm not, but you know what I mean? There's always people out there who are," Reid said. 

The term "pretendian" has come to refer to someone who claims First Nations, Inuit or Métis heritage that doesn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. Due to recent headlines about Indigenous identity fraud, some Sixties Scoop survivors and their descendants feel they have an even higher hoop to jump through to rectify disconnection that they are not responsible for.

Allyson Stevenson, Gabriel Dumont Research Chair of Métis Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, describes this added barrier as the expected embodiment of the "perfect survivor," which is a label with no definition.

Stevenson said the images people have come to associate with "survivorhood" — grandiose performances of Indigeneity in beaded earrings and feathers — have often come from fraudsters.