I was a "victim" of the Forties Scoop

What a pile of weeping, wailing and teeth gnashing the 'Sixties Scoop' beneficiaries are sending up.  As a beneficiary of the 'Forties Scoop', when so many of us post-WW II illegitimate babies were adopted, I am so grateful I was raised by loving, middle-class parents who gave me advantages my working-class birth family could not have.  Had it not been for them, I would have been working on the line in the Du Pont factory in Maitland.  My birth mother escaped that sentence, moved to Hamilton and secured a very good job at Stelco, where she met her well-to-do husband.  Sadly, she could not have children, so the mold was broken with me. 

Why are the natives, who have benefitted from having been adopted and schooled, so ungrateful?  They can always go back and reunite, or live amongst, their birth families, but in the meantime, they just got handed $800 million.

Trudeau is apologizing, renaming and handing out money like a lunatic to every group he can think of.  It's insane!  History is history and you can neither change it, nor apologize, for what others did.  When the British and French landed here they encountered what they deemed "savages" and tried to educate them in the hopes they would assimilate.  When that didn't work, they allotted parcels of Crown land and billions every year for them to live on.  Frankly, that didn't work out too well either because on most reserves, with little to do, the main activities are drinking and drugging.  But native leaders will not change the Indian Act because that's how the money is handed them.  So the despair will continue. 

But natives are not compelled to stay on the reserve if they wish to move off and I know a couple who did so and have been very successful.  All I can say is, do something with the windfall you have just been given.