Until she was in college, Colleen Cardinal thought she and her sisters were the only Indigenous people taken from their families at birth and adopted by a white family. Since learning she isn’t alone, Cardinal wants to make sure her story, and the stories of thousands of others, are heard. “I wanted to find all these adoptees, I wanted to know where they are, I wanted to hear what they went through,” Cardinal said. But then, Cardinal said, that information wasn’t available. Cardinal first decided to create a map after visiting a conference for grassroots human rights organizations in 2014. There, Cardinal said she came across a world map drawn on a large, white bedsheet on which visitors could map their stories out with colourful yarn. Since then, Cardinal said she’s been organizing funding to launch a geographic information system (GIS) map to illustrate the stories of ’60s Scoop survivors. Cardinal garnered the support of University of Regina ’60s Scoop researcher Raven Sinclair and digital mapping researchers at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. In 2019, Cardinal launched the online mapping tool. Now, it includes the stories of more than 100 survivors who were displaced from across Canada to places as far as the U.K. and Botswana. The map illustrates where people were born and where they were moved. It logs birthdates, when people moved and if survivors met their biological families, the date that happened. Each entry includes space for people to share words and videos telling their own stories and contact information for survivors to connect with others. Genetic Detective, a genetic genealogy service near Ottawa, has offered to subsidize DNA test kits for some survivors, create a database of survivors' genetic information and connect survivors to their biological families.
