Michelle Berg
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Betty Ann Adam says she grew up “not knowing who I was.”
Raised in a white foster home east of Prince Albert, she was told to call her caregivers “mom” and “dad” and accept their relatives as her own family.
Decades later, the award-winning journalist and filmmaker discovered the siblings and community she had lost to the Sixties Scoop.
“I was essentially trained to believe that I was better off because I was in a white context,” she said. “When I found my family and I found community and I found friends… It was my family. It was me.”
Now 66, Adam is a member of Fond du Lac Dene Nation, an intergenerational residential school survivor, and a child of the Sixties Scoop that saw about 20,000 Indigenous children taken from their families between the 1950s and 1980s.
On Sept. 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, she will speak at Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon about her life, her work and the enduring impact of those policies.
Searching for family
As a teenager, Adam knew little about her origins.
That began to change when, at 19, she took a work placement as a dental assistant in Uranium City, where she discovered hospital records that revealed the names and birthdays of her mother and three siblings she had never met.
“The dentist said, well, we have all of these hospitalization records. She looks at this binder… hey, there’s your mother’s name, there’s your name and birthday, and here’s three other kids,” Adam said. “And it’s like, oh my God, I have, like, an actual, real family.”
It took four decades to find all of her siblings. Along the way she was welcomed by cousins who told her, “We’re so glad they found you… You have to come home. You have to come and see your grandfather.”
Meeting her family for the first time was overwhelming.
“I was surrounded by people who looked just like me, and I looked like them,” she said. “It was amazing.”
Adam first met her sister Rosalie as a teenager, when a social worker introduced them.
In the early 1990s she reconnected with her birth mother in Vancouver and spent 15 years building a relationship before her death.
Years later she located her brother Ben in Edmonton, and in 2014 her sister Esther was found in California, where she had been adopted as a baby.
“When I finally found her, it kind of broke me too, because I had almost a belief that she must be dead because we couldn’t find her,” Adam said.
The siblings were able to reunite using funds their mother was eligible for under the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Rather than spend the compensation individually, they saved it to make travel possible.
In 2015, the four siblings gathered for the first time, their reunion filmed by director Tasha Hubbard in the National Film Board documentary Birth of a Family.
That reunion didn’t just reshape her personal life. It also became the foundation of her storytelling work.
From documentary to feature film
Following Birth of a Family, Hubbard and her collaborators developed Meadowlarks, a scripted feature inspired by Adam’s story.
Starring Michael Greyeyes, Michelle Thrush, Carmen Moore and Alex Rice, the 91-minute film follows four Cree siblings, separated since childhood, who reunite for the first time over a holiday weekend in Banff.
Adam served as executive producer and consulted on the script.
“Right from the start, it was understood this was not a story about me and my siblings, but it clearly was inspired by the experience that I had,” she said.
“I was glad they wanted to hear my input as a Sixties Scoop person to help make sure that the way they did it was true.”
The film had its world premiere this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Adam attended with her daughter Lucia and Rosalie’s children.
Meadowlarks was dedicated to Rosalie, who died suddenly in May.
Adam said the fictionalized story allows the experience of Scoop families to reach a much wider audience. With Mongrel Media distributing the film, it is expected to screen across Canada and beyond.
“A documentary can teach people, but a film like this can move their hearts — and that’s how stories reach farther,” Adam said.
A career in journalism
Just as her films preserved family memory, Adam’s journalism gave voice to survivors of systemic injustice across Saskatchewan.
Hired at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 1989 without a degree but with experience writing for Indigenous publications, she became one of the few Indigenous reporters in a mainstream newsroom.
“I started there without a journalism degree, or without a degree at all… but with a passion to write and demonstrated ability,” she said.
She covered general assignments before moving into courts, where she reported for a decade. She covered the Stonechild inquiry into police misconduct, the David Milgaard inquiry and cases that exposed systemic racism in Saskatoon.
“I became acutely aware that what I was seeing was this conveyor belt of human misery,” she said.
“It was tough, and I saw a lot of Indigenous people in there.”
In 2018, her feature article How I Lost My Mother, Found My Family and Recovered My Identity won the Canadian Association of Journalists award for long-form text.
She described the writing as one of the hardest but most rewarding tasks of her career.
“It was cathartic,” she said. “To help people understand what the Sixties Scoop was about, you have to go to some of those dark places… It was a struggle, but one I’m very proud of.”
In 2023, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s — a podcast hosted by Cree journalist Connie Walker — won the Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting, one of journalism’s top honours, as well as a Peabody and a Dupont Columbia award.
The series investigated abuse and cover-ups at St. Michael’s Residential School in Duck Lake, blending survivor testimony with archival records.
Adam conducted on-the-ground interviews in Saskatchewan with St. Michael’s survivors.
“It was so exciting to be part of such an amazing investigative team,” she said.
“But the real work is sitting across the table from people who tell you the devastating stories of the things that happened to them in their childhood. And it gives you a sense of mission.”
Telling hard truths
Adam often hears people suggest she was “lucky” to be raised in a safe foster home, but she rejects that notion and stresses the wider damage caused by government policy.
“There was so much that I lost that I would never be able to regain,” she said.
“It’s not about (foster parents); it’s about us… little plants plucked from our environment, placed in some totally different environment, and trained to think that this is the best place.
“The Sixties Scoop was definitely an act of genocide on the part of governments in Canada. And we’re still here.”
The loss, she added, went beyond language and culture. Many children moved repeatedly between homes, leaving them without photos or lasting bonds.
“It’s not uncommon for Sixties Scoop people to find it hard to make lasting human connections because they’ve had so much loss in their lives,” Adam said. “A lot of lives went off the rails.”
Responsibility and reconciliation
Her work has been widely recognized in Indigenous communities, where educators frequently invite her to speak. Adam sees that as both privilege and duty.
“I’m a word person. I communicate with words,” she said. “If someone asks me to come and speak, I have a responsibility to do it.”
Adam welcomes the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as an opportunity for Canadians to reflect, educate themselves and act on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action.
They can be found online through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
“I would urge all Canadians to take the time to read the Calls to Action,” she said. “There has been a lot of improvement, but we still have a long way to go.”
She pointed to the continued overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prisons and the child-welfare system, calling it a waste of human potential that stems from generations of harmful policies.
Looking ahead
Today, Adam says her focus is on family and living in the present.
“I really don’t know what I’m going to do next,” she said. “I’ll say yes to the things that spark me… and I’ll carry on with that.”
For Adam, the journey from disconnection to belonging continues to ripple outward — through journalism, film and the lives of younger relatives forging their own bonds.
“I grew up not knowing who I was,” she said. “Now, when I see my daughter spending time with her cousins… that is one of my great joys.”
