 Welcome to everyone who is here with us in person. It is great to have so many folks here and over 130 of you at the moment. And it is great to know that some will be watching later. Quite a few people asked me for this recording. So thank you for allowing that Colleen and to everyone here. And I did a land acknowledgement at the beginning, and I thank you to all of those who put their land acknowledgements in the chat as well. I'm going to turn to an introduction of our guest speaker and and then when that is complete, we will turn off the chat for the duration of her speaking and turn it back on at the end so that you can input. Questions. So I'm going to be brief with this. You've come to hear about the 60 scoop network and the in our own words mapping the 60 scoop diaspora project. I'll only give a very short introduction. Colleen Haley Cardinal is co-founder and executive director. Of the National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network. And Colleen, I flagged this, but I in our 15 minutes didn't get it asked whether that name has officially changed or just colloquially changed to the 60 scoop network. So I'll let you refer to that and Colleen is an author and award-winning trailblazer in community building and advocacy work and says in a written bio, most importantly, she's the proud mother of four grown children and love spending time with her grandchildren. Colleen, we are so glad to have you here. Thank you for agreeing to speak with us and we look forward to your stories and your sharing. Well, thank you for the wonderful introduction. I am absolutely blown away. I love reading all the land acknowledges. I am very touched that people have really put thought into acknowledging the territory that they're joining tonight from. I am also from Treaty Six territory, but I lived and thrive in Anishinaabe territory here on unceded and surrendered Al-Qaqwan territory in Ottawa and in the West here. So, jeez, I have quite a bit to tell you tonight. I usually speak for about an hour and a half. But let's see if we can get through this without going over an hour and have some time left for questions. If you have questions throughout the presentation tonight, just write them down and then at the end we can try and answer them as best as I can. I speak from lived experience and then the collaborative work, my colleague, Eileen Knossway, and I have done in working with 60-scoop survivors over the past. Rush, it's been since 2014 that we really started doing this work across the country with survivors and I've probably met thousands now of folks like myself. So I'm going to share my screen so you can see the presentations that I have. And I just wanted to let you know that, you know, what I speak about is mainly from lived experience from working with survivors and listening to their stories and their experiences, and I want to, to let you know that you may hear things that make you uncomfortable. And I really encourage you to sit with that and really examine what is it that makes you uncomfortable. That you're hearing was it because you've never heard that before or it challenges everything that you know about Canada. So let's see if I can do this. Oh, I just want to thank you for all joining you. This is amazing. I really enjoy doing presentations. It's something that I do full time. I deliver training across Canada, anti-racism training and a lot of 60s training on how to work with survivors, what you need to know about survivors and so on. So I'm going to switch to my presentation, hopefully it works. No, this one. Okay, does it work? It does work. Okay. Alright, so Welcome. Thank you for joining tonight. I am the co-founder of the 60s Scoop Network. It was formally, it legally is known as the National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network. That's our legal name for our corporation, but we are known as the 60s Scoop Network and we are a non-profit. We started as grassroots in 2014, just really working with the skills we had collectively and hosting gatherings for 60s Scoop survivors who were looking to meet other survivors, but also learning how to heal, reclaim our culture and build community with each other. So we've had a couple of logos, but this is our official logo and for us, it's the strawberries, they're healing, they're a very important berry that we use in our ceremonies, and then of course the star quotes in the back is part of our star teachings. So that's our official logo. Now, this is a, if you haven't read my book and you're wanting to learn a little bit more about my story, I have a book on Firmwood Press that you can order. You know, I started writing this book and I actually didn't intend to publish it. I had to get everything out of my head and I was working at KFN, the Southern First Nations, as a receptionist. And I was, I had been burnt out a little bit from working in addictions and mental health, so I took a job that was non-stressful. Basically, I would just answer the phone and say hello, Assembly of First Nations, and while I was doing this, I was writing every day the experiences I had of growing up in my adopted household. And sooner or later, I had over 200 pages and one day I printed it all out and I put it away for a couple of years. I was going to burn it in like a ceremony and just get rid of everything, but I shared it with a colleague of mine and a friend, Raven Sinclair, and she said, you need to publish this. This can be published as a standalone book. So I, you know, it wasn't done. I had only written about the bad stuff that happened in my life, so people wanted to know, how did you get to where you are now? Like what you're doing now, like you went from doing all this really hard stuff of abuse and trauma and living with that to, you know, doing the work that I'm doing now. So I had to write about that. It was harder actually than writing about the bad stuff. Anyways, you can find this book out for me would press if you're interested. I need to pay homage to the people that I started this work with. My colleague, I'm sorry, my colleague in Lincoln, Northway is on the end of the blue sweater and she's still my colleague. We do this work together on a friend of ours, Beverly Kiver. She's a 60 scoop survivor and our late friend, Lassie Parley, who passed away in 2018. We began this work together. We sat at a Tim Horton's restaurant and said, hey, how come there's nobody doing 60 scoop gatherings? How come there's nothing for us? Why aren't people talking about us? Why don't people care? And we said, well, we have no money, so we have to raise our own money. And that's what we did. We started fundraising through grassroots initiatives and asking unions for help, asking non-indigenous folks to support the work we did. And lo and behold, we started through gatherings. So the other driving force and what led me to do this work was my sister, my late sister. I have an older sister that was adopted along with my other sister. All three of us were adopted together. And sadly, she was murdered in 1990. And we had just reunited with our birth family in Edmonton. And, you know, she was like a mother to me. And I really greatly admired her. She was a mother herself. And I figured that because she wasn't here to do this work that she should have been doing, I have to do this work, because nobody else is going to do this work for us. So every day I do this another of my sister and the survivors who didn't make it. So we are their voice. You know, the chorus of the residential school and my mother and my mother's family went through residential school. You know, I didn't learn about residential school until I was in my late 20s. And I didn't learn that my own mother went to residential school until 2015. And it was only because I did the research myself. Even though I had met my birth family and had spent time with them, they never talked about residential school, ever. I didn't know that they went to residential school. And it's a very common thing for them not to talk about what's happened to them. It's like a silence that they keep. And it's only because I did the research for a 60-scoop documentary I was working on. I wanted to confirm or find out if any of my family went to residential school. And I reached out to Blue Quills. It's a university now. I reached out to them and I said, you know, do you have records for Dolly Esther Cryer? I don't really know her birth date. But she's from Saddle Lake. And within a day, they wrote me back and sent me photocopies of her yearbook photo, her attendance. And she went there for four years of her life. And I was just, I was like, oh my God, like I didn't know my whole family went to that residential school. All my relatives went to that residential school. Like it just blew me away that nobody told me and nobody talked about it. So when we look at the numbers, 150,000 plus, we know that there's more numbers. And then we have the day scholars and the day school folks. And then we have the 60-scoop. And they estimate 40,000 plus. But that doesn't include all the people that weren't documented or weren't acknowledged because it wasn't recorded officially that they were indigenous. Even though like our records can be manipulated, we believe that the numbers are higher for the 60-scoop survivors. And then, of course, now we have the money scooping current child welfare crisis. So those are very high numbers. And you can see how, you know, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and how that cycle of child welfare and intergenerational trauma just continues to go. So we want to stop that. We have 60-scoop survivors. You know, some of us are still really struggling. But for me, the goal is to stop that continuation of our children being in foster care and then be adopted. The difference is between residential school, day schools, and the 60-scoop, the residential schools are very visible, right? So you can see on the diagram, there's little red dots, and those are all the residential schools in Canada. And in Alberta, there's tremendous amount. You can see them. And the children, they all went to them collectively, so they were brought there by force to these schools. And they kind of, even though the girls and the boys are separated, they still kind of got to see each other. They got to see other brown children like themselves. It was visible. It was, you know, something tangible, right? Whereas the 60-scoop is not like that at all. A lot of the children were taken from their homes or communities from hospitals and whatever, and they were taken and plucked and dropped in non-indigenous environments, sometimes thousands and thousands of miles away. A lot of the taking was done behind closed doors. Child welfare would take them, put them in receiving homes or foster homes, and then they were aggressively, aggressively, what do you call that, solicited through, sorry about that, somebody's been back, I hope you didn't hear that. They were aggressively solicited through newspaper ads, and I'll get into that after, and raised in isolation from other Indigenous folks. So it was very difficult for a lot of people like myself, a lot of children to see visible brown people like us. We actually grew up immersed and submersed into non-indigenous households where everybody around us was non-indigenous, our classmates, our family, the whole community. And it was rare to actually see brown people, unless it was on TV or there was somebody who had brown speed in your class. We were islands to ourselves, so we were raised to be individualists and not to have a community mind to be successful, to do things, just a real island to ourselves, and a lot of us are still like that today if we don't unlearn that behaviour. And to be assimilates, to assimilate and to be individuals, instead of to grow together as a community. So you can see the difficulties already, and the differences in the residential school survivors experience, and the survivors who were taken away through adoption and foster care, and in some cases like two different countries. We created a mapping project and I'm sure that maybe you've explored it. And when I first started doing this work, I thought as an adopted person that I was quite unique. I used to brag and tell people I was adopted and was raised by white people, and I was really proud of it. Because I grew up in a household where I was told that I wasn't like the other Indians, or I was better than everybody else, or just very racist and derogatory, discriminatory language. And what I learned afterwards and what drove me to create a mapping project was the fact that the Canadian state literally deliberately trafficked us to child welfare policies. And we talk about human trafficking. We don't think of it as like it used for sexual exploitation, or I consider human trafficking even the fact that we bring labour in to pick all our vegetables. I consider that human trafficking too. But human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud and coercion for the purpose of exploitation and profit. In Canada, child welfare policies similarly involved organizing recruitment, transportation, transferring and holding of Indigenous children and youth under forcefulness, deceptionist and coercive ambitions in order to generate profit and consolidate power for the state. So that's pretty heavy stuff, right? And I remember telling somebody, you know, like the child welfare policies literally trafficked us across provinces and across countries. And why do you think they did that? I really want you to like maybe write down why you think they did that or think about that for a minute. Why would they do that? Who do you think is responsible for this? Well, I can tell you, I had to do a lot of exploring because you don't learn this knowledge. It's not something that's taught in school. This knowledge only comes to you if you go looking for it. You have to either be in higher education or have access to research and papers. Like you have to want to know what happened and why it happened. And unfortunately, that's not something that society really does. The Canadian state is not making curriculum that includes information like this. So you have to want to find this information. And what I found out was the provinces were acting at the best of the federal government. So the federal government gave them money and told them to change their child welfare acts for each province. Each province has a different mandate for how they deal with their children. And so it made some amendments to the Child Welfare Act and the Indian Act in 1951. And because the First Nation communities and Métis settlements and Inuit communities were in deep grips of like poverty, unresolved childhood trauma from the residential schools, there was tremendous amount of addiction at that time. So, you know, you can see already why there was a mass taking of children at that time. You know, the social workers are told you were going to save these children's lives if you go in there and take those children. Instead of investing in the betterment of these communities and providing mental health and supports and so on, they chose to just take the children and adopt them out. So the transfer of responsibility from the federal to the provincial governments. What they did was they transferred money to the Child Protection Services in each province and called it the Canada Assistance Fund. So they designated funds to the provinces under the guise of the well-being of indigenous children and automobile guarantee payment for each child apprehended. Children were taken to the United States with private American agencies giving five to $10,000 per children. To folks who couldn't afford children because there was minimal screening and there was also minimal screening and monitoring the foster care and adopted parents. Many of these children were trans-racially adopted within Canada and others were sold to the United States and overseas. At the height of the 60 scoop, one in four status Indians were separated from his or her parent for all or part of their childhood. And for non-status and Métis children, one of three spent part of their childhood as a legal board of the state. Residential school and day schools failed at assimilation. Most former students did not embrace Euro Canadian identity and the child welfare policies that followed after residential school were closing. Many social workers believed they were actually saving indigenous children. Indigenous culture and spirituality were not taken into consideration for foster care and adoption. It was assumed that the children would take on the heritage and culture of the foster adopted parents. So, you know, typically when I do this kind of presentations that it's a little bit more interactive where I ask the audience like what you think was going on internationally and nationally at this time in the media and for Canadians. Were you aware that this was happening? Did you know? I would love to know if somebody wants to ask, answer after my presentation, did you know about this? Did you know this was happening? So, you're going to see some articles here. Maybe some of you remember these. These are the ways that they solicited indigenous children through the media. And at the time they were using today's child, which were, what do you call it, a newspaper ad that Helen Allen took. Helen Allen was the person who started the today's child column in the Toronto Star and was the other one, the Toronto something. It was a column newspaper anyways, there was two of them. She won the Order of Canada for adopting out over 10,000 hard to place children and these included indigenous children and hard to place children. So people, children with physical disabilities or intellectual disability and she won the Order of Canada twice. Anyways, so these ads would run in the newspapers across Canada and people could adopt the children. Like you would see like a puppy or a cat up for adoption instead it was indigenous children or children with disabilities. There was also catalogs of children, kind of like photo albums of children who were up for adoption. And that's how my sisters and I were adopted. We had a photo of us standing together and that's how my sisters and I were adopted. I don't know the process of exactly how that happened. I've never seen the photo album, but I know they exist because researchers have seen them and they're very, they're kept in secrecy. It's almost like they don't want to give them up. There are, there are a lot of people who have adopted children and have talked about the experience of how they pick that child out from these catalogs. So one thing that maybe folks here don't know that there used to be. Lane, I'm not hearing you anymore. I wonder if it's because we're hearing, but I'm also not hearing the video. Okay, let me see something here. Okay, can you hear me now? I can hear you just fine. That's weird. Did you want to show us the video? I would like to. Yes. Can you hear it? I'm not hearing it well. I'm not sure if it's the lag just in mind. It is lagging though quite a bit so much that it's hard to understand. Okay, let's go back to the presentation. Can you hear me now? I can hear you fine. Great. So what I would encourage you to do in your spare time is to look up the moral family on everybody recognizes Bob Barker. So Bob Barker and Helen Allen had, well, he invited her on the show and they had a show where they featured indigenous, an indigenous family called the morale family. And they adopted some children from who were a jibway from under may I believe, but they also had children that they adopted down in the States as well. I know one of the children they adopted his name is Leland. He's an actor down in California. I met with him and he talked about his experiences growing up in this family and it wasn't a good family. But I mean, the other thing that happened was I my sisters and I were featured on the 700 Club I believe is the Canadian version of the hundred Huntley Street. So it was kind of like a thing where they brought us on to the show and said, you know, we adopted this family. It was kind of like a show and tell kind of like look at the children we're doing and we're good, we're good Catholics and whatever. So I remember that experience and I'm sure those children remember that too. And, you know, but I didn't know what market was part of this. So if you want to explore this video on your own time and kind of watch it and just know the history of how, you know, we were solicited through media and through television and papers. There was adoption agencies like the adopted Indian mate team, which was a finding agency to place children into into adoptive homes. So they actually didn't do the taking of they were the ones that were they would find they saw the children. So my my girlfriend, my colleague, Elaine Keknalsway who I do this work with she's featured in this adopted Indian matey ad. And you can look up the sixties scoop and look up like ads and you'll find them the words that you'll find in the ad. And you can also find the words that you'll find in the ad. So that's how they solicited us. So let's see. Now what happened was the Kimmelman report came out in 1985. So when we talk about the sixties scoop, it started, they've extended it from the sixties to the 1950s. From 1951 to 1985 is when the height of the taking and the trafficking of children. So what happened was just this Kiliman of the time ordered a moratorium on other province adoptions because he believed that that time system was going to stop. Well, basically communities were complaining and saying like they're taking our kids and they're bringing them to the States and we never get to see them again and why is this being allowed to happen. It's considered genocidal. So, just as Kimmelman ordered a moratorium and a report called in no quiet place, and he found that these removals were a continuation of the residential school policies. And he found that, well, basically communities were complaining and saying like they're taking our kids and they're bringing them to the States and we never get to see them again and why is this being allowed to happen. It's considered genocide. So he ordered a moratorium and a report called in no quiet place, and he found that these removals were a continuation of the residential school policies, and instead of funding for more economic and parenting support resources in first nation communities. They chose to remove the child and fill the demand for children in eastern Canada and the United States. In many cases, subsidies to prospective adopted parents who couldn't typically afford to the cost of adopting two or three children, they were given incentives, like I said, 5000 to $10,000 for each child. So at that time, Justice Kimmelman ordered a moratorium to stop the practice of taking children outside of the province. So no more children were brought from, like my sisters and I were taken from Alberta and brought to Ontario, or lots of kids were taken from Manitoba down to the United States. And there's many children that are still living in the States who are adults like myself and have not found their way back home. So that's an important document to read and you can find it at the First Nation Carrying Society. They have a copy of the document in no quiet place. So long term impacts of adoption and inter and trans racial adoption and the trauma of being taken as children as young babies. Of that attachment that we would typically get from our families and our kin and these uncles and so on or community that's gone and that's taken away and that's considered trauma for us. And that has long term impacts, you know, even if there's a good home, even if they were raised in a good home with lots of support and focus on identity. The reality was that these homes were not equipped to raise indigenous children to know their identity and to know that, you know, where they come from, because they themselves knew very little of it. So that had long term impacts on our spirituality. We're disconnected from culture and no knowledge or insight or historical context and what happened to us and what happened to our community. So I grew up, of course, in a non indigenous household and upper middle class household, not knowing anything about indigenous First Nations or that I was indigenous myself, that I was Plains Cree. And then when I did find out I learned this discrimination and the stereotypes of what indigenous people were because I learned it from Canadian culture. I wouldn't have any other place to learn it from because my parents didn't have it my my extended family didn't have it. My schooling didn't have it. There was nobody in my life at that time that could offer that to me and that was very much across the board for many adoptive families and 60s group survivors. So if you had knowledge or insight into what's happened in Canada to indigenous people who would tell you that identity issues so you grew up not knowing who you are and why you have grown skin and you know like it just really it really messes with your mentality and your sense of salvage. And you're you're a security as a person, like you're always wondering, am I good enough, do I fit in like, it's just really really deep identity issues, even with loving and supportive parents you still have identity issues. Disconnection from land is huge, you know, you know when I began to learn my language and where I came from, the grief that I experienced and the tremendous loss of not knowing the land that I come from the language that I come from, like all that oral history is gone. And for me to get it back would take a lifetime adoption breakdown so adoption breakdown sometimes they break down. For whatever reasons you know it could be internal stuff happening within the family, or it could be you know the survivor just doesn't want to be there they're always running away because they want to find the parents or whatever. Feeling isolated. So if you don't have anybody in your environment that looks like you. Wouldn't you feel alone. I know I felt alone, even with my sisters in my home. I grew up in a community where I was visibly brown. And I didn't know a reason why we found except I thought maybe I tend really well in the summertime. So, growing up being teased because of your skin and not feeling like you fit in and it's very isolating identity issues again, of course. And the one thing that we don't talk about is when we're repatriated back to our family when we go home there's closer shock, especially if you're raised in a non indigenous environment where everything is kind of like one way. And you go home to your non indigenous family and everything's completely different. There's poverty, there's addictions, there's, you know, there's, there's, there's a violence, there's things that you don't know that nobody will talk about, and it can make you feel really in shock. You know, I know I remember when I went home I didn't know anything about the indigenous are being cleansed. We, I, you know, I didn't know that there was nothing and, and then there's the resentment sometimes. This is not all the times this is in some cases there is resentment from the family that was left behind. You know, if you had siblings that stayed on in the reserve or the First Nation, and you got adopted out. There's resentment that there's a belief that we had a better life than them. Or that we owe them something, or they're mad at us because they feel like we had a better life than them. Sometimes we're not accepted by our community, or by our biological family. And then of course we ourselves have abandoned an attachment issue so I might I have attachment I have a detachment style that doesn't allow me to get close to people. I've never been able to develop that because I was raised in a home where there was no love, no support, no, no affection, no encouragement, but it was just really like, it wasn't there. And that's a common thing for us. We don't get attached to people. At least I don't. And that's my attachment style. So because I never got it as a baby, I never developed it. It's fixable. But like at 51 years old, fixing attachment styles is quite different than, you know, learning it as a child. So physical we're more prone to infectious diseases and the reason why is because if you've grown up in a home where you've experienced trauma and you're always in fight or flight. You have tremendous amounts of cortisol buildup and your body and your system has been worked out. So you're more prone to infectious diseases. Diabetes you name it heart disease. And like I said chronic ailments. Diabetes high blood pressure are common PTSD and complex PTSD. And sometimes that's undiagnosed. So there's a lot of us who are not aware that we're being triggered. Our bodies are in states of being triggered. And we're responding with aggression with rage with these, these fight or flight reactions. And are unaware of it. And what's happening is we're being met with consequences of course. Right. But when you think about somebody who's been triggered, like for me, loud noises. I have, I have complex PTSD. So for years and years, I was living with being triggered. So if somebody set down a cut really, really hard back, it would startle me. And my body doesn't know the difference of if I'm in danger or not. It just responds. So that there's a danger. So then I'm in my fight mode and I get rushes of cortisol and adrenaline, and I'm ready to fight, or I'm ready to run. Imagine living like that every day all day without knowing why you just are seen as somebody who's angry and somebody who's rage and it was violent and aggressive. This is us. I finally was able to go to a doctor and get help, but it was my kids that told me, mom, you're you when you're going off and you're raging, you're scared. And I really had to like think about it like I am pretty feeling pretty out of control. So these are some things that I talk about with folks about like what it's like to live with unresolved trauma. Mental health, you know, not being able to like understand like internalized racism. So I grew up internalizing racism. Once I learned I was First Nation, I learned all the stereotypes. I internalized that. And I actually did not like being indigenous. I did not want to be indigenous. I used to dye my hair blonde. It never came on blonde. It was only just like kind of really yucky orange, but I wanted so bad to have blonde hair and blue eyes. Because I wanted to fit in and I internalized racism that I believe that I was bad too because my skin was brown and that, you know, everything I learned about and like being native at that time was bad. That we were drunks that were bombs that we were homeless like just all the bad stuff. And, you know, what sucks is that when I retreated with my family at 16. That's what I seen was my whole family were living on the streets and self medicating with alcohol and insolvent so it just reinforced that internalized racism for me. It took a lot of work to undo that. Right. You have to want to undo that same with like examining since then with racism and so to suffice racism for for indigenous folks like it's everywhere for us. It's at every level on, you know, like, some people take for granted that they can just shop without being followed or have good experiences in the hospital. But these are things I won't take for granted anymore it actually until I experience it I forget that I'm brown. That's how that's how assimilation works. Right. It actually changes your brain, and you forget who you are. Mental health and resolve trauma from childhood trauma and then caught between two worlds, not feeling like we fit in. So we don't feel like we fit in with our doctor family. You don't feel like we fit in with our biological families. Where do we fit in? And that's all in your mind. Right. And we call it another thing we call it it's imposter syndrome. So sometimes when I'm around indigenous folks, I don't feel like I fit in. I feel like everybody knows that I was raised in a white family and that I'm not really a dude, which sounds ridiculous. Right. But this is how it was for me when I was younger. I was scared to go to powwows. I was scared to be around indigenous people because I thought they would see right through me. And no, oh, she's not really indigenous. Which sounds ridiculous because I obviously look very indigenous right, but they can tell when you're not raised in a community. And, you know, when I go home to my community, people ask who are you, who's your parents, who's your program. And I have to say, I know who they are, but they're like, oh, okay, I didn't know they had a kid or where you've been, like how come you've been around. You know, so it's a lot of me explaining where I've been and what happened to me. So growing up in a non-indigenous household. Here's some pictures I put in Elaine and myself. So Elaine is on the left hand side right here. This is her adopted parents. This is her adoption photo. This is mine. And Elaine was actually taken to Africa, Botswana, Africa. She was her parents were missionaries. So she was raised and she traveled all over the place and they spent time in Botswana. I'm going to turn on the ostrich. Thank you. But, you know, so we were, we were raised in a lot of us were raised in upper middle class households. We had a lot of opportunities as children, which sounds wonderful, you know, I participated in every single sport and we excelled in every single sport that you can think of. We were very strong. We were very fast. As you can see in my kindergarten photo here, you can see me in the bottom there in the big chubby one. What's the real address of all my classmates are pretty much white, right? And I didn't know it was any different. I just knew I was chubby, that's all. But, you know, we had, some of our households were good. But like, you didn't realize that we were First Nations all human was that you were a child. And as a young person, an adult, I believed my experiences were very unique for somebody to grow up in a non-indigenous. I grew up in a Catholic household. I grew up with knowing all my sacraments and not understanding them at all. And fast forward to current day, you know, we work with survivors and have listened and learned from thousands of survivors and their experiences and they spoke a range of experiences from these households. Everything from outright physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse in each child's life in every, in some form or another. So the good homes, I do have some adoptive friends who are raising good homes and are still very much connected to their adoptive parents. And that's something that I am happy for them. You know, I'm glad that they had a good relationship and they grew safe and secure. But for a lot of us, and based on like Dr. Raven Sinclair's research, 75% of us did not have that experience. Many adoptees felt like they didn't fit in and didn't belong to that family or were made to feel like second class citizens treated like slaves and made to do all the hard work. Feeling like we're left out or not being able to identify with the adoptive family is isolating, but also going to schools and community events where you're visibly different was hard. I didn't know it was different until it was probably like 11, 12, I just thought I had my safest and I had had very dark skin in the summertime. We played outside in the water. We were always outside. So I just thought I tanned really well. Now my family had their own biological son who had light skin and he never went outside. So I figured that's why he was lighter than me. But I think it was allergic to the sun or something, but I didn't know, right? So I just assumed that that was why it was like that. Nobody said to me, you know, you're Indigenous, you're Cree, and this is why you have beautiful brown skin. Nobody said that to me. So some adoptees spoke of their adoptive family's biological children didn't experience that same abuse or their mistreatment that they did. Or there was two different sets of rules for the biological children of the adoptive family or and the adoptive children were treated differently. Like they got different set of food or they had to think, I've heard stories where they've slept in the barn. Like that's how different it was. So in my household, I'll share a little bit like, so my sisters and I, even though we had a lot of, you know, great experiences and stuff like that. We had foods and great experiences, but like we did sports. My parents took us home traveling across the country. Like we had a lake in our backyard. But inside of our home, there was a lot of physical and sexual abuse. And even some racism directed towards us that we didn't know was racism, where we were called like squas and these awful terms that I didn't know was a racial term. There were different sets of food that my sisters and I could eat that we weren't allowed to touch certain foods that they had, like, just really ridiculous stuff. And, you know, you didn't know that it's different because you think everybody's house like that. You know, we got brown bread as just me and my sister got brown bread and the rest of the family ate white bread and I remember going to school and the kids telling me that I had brown skin because I ate brown bread. I was really upset and I went home and said like I want white bread like the kids at school. And my mom just laughed at me but I was serious like I really wanted white bread. So, when you're a kid, right, you don't know any different. So, the other thing that adoptees talk about is the lies that are told to adoptees that their parents didn't want them, or that they were given up. In many instances, the stories that adopted parents were told were either not accurate, or a reflection of the social worker at the time. And sometimes in some cases, you know, parents were manipulated into surrendering their children and told them that this was the best thing for them. So, what happens is when we reconnect with our families and we say, hey, what happened how come like, you gave me a for adoption whatever and they tell us like, well, you know, I was told that you'd have a better life and this and that. So, there's even stories where they told that they weren't wanted. And sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. But this is what we hear from survivors, you know, and they carry that with them their whole life believing that they weren't wanted. And then being raised in a household where you're treated mistreated. Imagine what that does is somebody's spirit. So, these are things that you would not get, you would not hear from anywhere else except from a 60s group survivor. This is not taught in schools this is not taught in universities or anything this is only from lived experience of 60s group survivors, you will not hear this from the adoptive families, their side, you will only hear it from the survivors. You know, I think a lot of adopted parents at the time will be that they were doing the right thing and maybe they were at that time. But, you know, the parents that, you know, weren't able to give their child or their children their indigenous child, their identity and help them reconnect with their biological family. It only hurts them later in their life. Now, when you look at your, I think this is the wrong side. Yes, hold on. This is the right explain. So, when you look at your birth certificate, like, how many here have a birth certificate, everybody right, we need it for documentation to show people that we're alive and that we exist. That's my birth certificate. So, on my birth certificate shows Colleen and he body blah, and underneath my, my doctor father's name, it shows that he came from England. He actually emigrated with his parents when he was four I think. And so, at face value, you would think that I came from England that I was a direct descendant of an English person right. It completely manipulates my identity as a First Nation person and it raises my connection to my ancestors, to my land that my people have been on since time immemorial, and my family, my kinship, right. They've manipulated my person to be a heel. I'm a heel. I'm originally a Cardinal and a prior. I'm going to be changing my name to Cardinal, but I can't change this. I cannot put my birth parents back on my birth certificate. And I even asked the former Minister of Indian Affairs, Caroline Bennett, if she would help us to change our birth certificate since she said, Well, why can't your birth parents adopt you. Well, first of all, my mom's dead. Second of all, my father doesn't have the means to do this. Like, why should they have to adopt me back. So she clearly didn't get it right. But, you know, until I really started healing and learning about my connection to my biological family and the traditional lands and the nations of treaty six. I didn't really understand the loss. And if anybody lives on Alberta in treaty six, you know the land, right. And I grew up with blood memory of the land I come from. And as a child, I would get homesick around 435 o'clock every single day, I would look out towards the west and we playing outside whatever, and I would almost like to feel sick to my stomach as a child. And it wasn't until I went back home to my community, and I seen the land for the first time that I, I felt that connection. And I knew at that time, that's the homesick that I was feeling is that memory for the land. And that stays with us. We're born with it. And also the drum and the language. Those are things that when I hear them. I know I've heard them before. And it's a part of our life memory so the loss and the grief of not being able to have that for my life to my life as a child as a young adult was immense and like wow I really lost more than just my connection to my family I've lost my connection to my language and to the land. So that was used for me. So, like I said, like the, the, the identity stuff is huge, but like folks like yourself who are maybe learning about this for the first time, there's a lot of survivors like myself who are learning about this too for the first time. Because nobody's told you this. If you're adopted family doesn't have this this dialogue and doesn't know the history. Where would you learn it from, unless you went to college or university and even then you have to take specialized courses to get this kind of knowledge. There's a lot of work that needs to be done. And there's many 60 scoop survivors that don't know that they're entitled to the treaty or status, or that they might have an oil trust fund or they that that they belong to treaties, and that they can enforce those treaties, and they might have land or membership. So, there's many things that are missing from 60 scoop survivors lives, and, and then their children and then the next generation. Not this wonderful picture of my, my colleague Elaine and her son Dylan who has been brought up to he's immersed in culture. He doesn't know any other life. He's never had to wonder about language or songs or anything because he, his mother has immersed him in it. She's a survivor herself but she reclaimed ceremony at a younger age than I did. So, our language teaches us how to interact with animate and inanimate objects so everything has spirit, or it doesn't. So, when we think about trees, and all living things they all have a spirit. And our language comes from the landing teaches us how to take care of those things and how to interact with those things, even with each other. And when you lose that, you lose that connection to how to live with each other and take care of each other all living things on the land. That's a huge loss for us. Everything about who we are as indigenous people is taught through language and taught through songs and ceremonies. We've lost our right of passage. We have belly button ceremonies for when our babies are born and their belly button falls off, and we do a ceremony for that belly button. We do a ceremony for the sack that they're born in, we bury it. Our walking out ceremony, you know, we've lost all those ceremonies, sunbans and sweat lodges and building our bundle from when we're a child, hair cutting for grief and loss, feasting and namesakes, and our connection to kin and to, and our relationships to our community. I love going back to my community. I love going back to Edmonton. I'm going there tomorrow actually. And I love that when I am acknowledged by another indigenous person in my community, they nod or they shake your hand. And I love that it's like, it's, it's like they see your spirit. And I don't get that here in Ottawa, because the way that we do things is different at West. So those things, you know, the language teaches us how to live on the land and do no harm in respecting all living things and we've lost that through residential school and colonization. Great thing until a lot of us are learning now. We're picking it up. The youth are making tremendous strides in returning to culture and learn. So I've already seen that one. So the thing that we don't talk about in our communities is the impact that it had on our immediate families, like our biological ones, and our communities and things that we don't talk about why we're not talking about it. You know, I didn't get a grand ceremony when I went home at 16. Actually, nobody acknowledged me when I went home. I had a private, private meeting with my, my biological mother. And it was not a good meeting because my mother was intoxicated. And nobody was, you know, on my shoulder saying, so your mother went to residential school, and she experienced this amount of harm. And then you guys were taken away from her. So she copes by drinking and using solvents. There was nobody on my shoulder saying that nobody there to provide support. It was just me reading my drunk mother, not understanding why she was drunk and, and me having high expectations that my, my birth mother was going to look like share. Because that was the only person I seen down and had long hair at the time. That's my stereotype of what Indigenous person look like. So the things that we don't talk about in our community and why we're not talking about 60 school, we're just went to residential school, day school, day school, day scholars, right to current child welfare issues. And, and one of the things that we don't talk about is the grief, the shame, the guilt, the blame, and angry and the fear of talking about the 60 school and the children that were taken away. And the reasons were because the people felt powerless and still feel powerless, the lack of context, why it happened, or leadership, no support. There is no support for 60 script survivors in our communities. None. We have to do it for ourselves. If we want things to change, we have to make that change. Our leadership is not going to do that for us. And the lack of awareness, the issues. So sometimes our own people don't even know what happened. And we have to do it around. So I call it the elephant in the room because we know it's there. But our communities aren't talking about it. So we're, we're totally for time. We're at the hour. Wow. One thing I'd like to share is the, that we, you know, a bunch of us got together and we started doing this, this work here and we do it in ceremony. We went to an Algonquin elder here in Claudette commended and asked their quick permission and support to do this work. And she gave us the name, which means to come home to yourself. Home is not a physical location. It is a feeling. It is coming home to yourself. We recognize the need to gather and have a collective space for 60 script survivors to feel validated to be heard and learn a safe environment. At that time in 2014, nobody was doing this work. There are little small groups across Canada right now, but there still needs to be more. There's a huge lack of awareness in indigenous and non-indigenous organizations and even our own communities. And we fund this. I am going to send out this. Oh, I just want to say our biggest supporters are non-indigenous communities themselves. And we've had a lot of support from unions and lots of activists. So, thank you for listening and supporting the work you do. Not that I'm just saying thank you. I just want to show you some of the pictures from the gatherings we've had since 2014. And we had land-based gatherings in ceremony. We do blanketing and blanketing ceremonies to welcome survivors to the larger connection of survivors across the country. People come from all over Canada, the United States, and even as far as New Zealand and Spain to attend our gatherings. This was the year that we had six tornadoes in Ottawa. It happened at the time of the gathering. It was wild. And then, of course, there's a mapping project. So who here is aware of the mapping project? Yeah. So what I'd like to do is share that. Let me know if you can see it still. Yeah. So there's a search tool. So folks, survivors who are looking for other survivors or family members can search and see if they're family members. This is a participatory map. So in order for to be found, you actually have to like have a profile and have like your story on there. So the way the map works is by the more and more survivors add their profiles and so on, the larger the map grows. So we've added the option of like sharing it to Twitter and to Facebook so you can share your own story and to connect. So some survivors say that they can be contacted on their profile. And I don't know if you listened to some of the stories that are on there. But there are just did. Yeah. Okay. So we I just noticed that somebody else has added their own story on the like people can upload their own story through YouTube. So this is the so far the people that have interacted with the map. And in order for the map to grow, we need more survivors to be aware of it and to learn it. So this is what the the map looks like for displacement of children who were taken out of the country. And a lot were taken to Europe. One person was taken. Well, that was Elaine that was taken to Botswana. And then another person who was taken to New Zealand up here in the visualization tab, you can actually like see where they were taken from and where they were taken to. So Alberta. Folks were taken to British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and so on. It's really cool to have it visualized like this, but also shows by year so obviously nobody was taken in 494. Most of them were taken in 1962 1969 night. You'll see the interaction. So so far this is who we have on the map and then you can actually look at the stories. There's the red YouTube thing that shows their story. So it's really cool to like look at their story, talk, they can share as little or as much as they want. And if you want to contact them, you can. So it's, it's a tool for us. It's a platform to show to show the world what happened to us. It's a platform for survivors to find biological members of family members and it's a it's a platform for us to share what's happened to us as for as little as much as they want to. And then the other thing so people have seen that one. We're also working with DNA detectives genetic detectives who were at one time sending out DNA kits, and then helping family members find their biological family. If they had biological family members in the database. So this can go back as far as like so. I know that these folks here reached out to me and said you know they're looking to identify somebody who was a woman who was found murdered in California, and their DNA connected to my DNA. So we had a common ancestor from muskwajis. And they were able to find her family but it was just amazing what DNA can do. So we were pretty, pretty adamant that this was not about refuting or denying indigenous indigenous identity that this was more about finding your biological members. So that's something that you can find on our website as well. Here's the folks that were featured in our stories. Daniel is from Spain, but he's originally from Saskatchewan. Alessandra is in Alberta, and Lou was from Tuck Dayak Tuck. He was raised in Edmonton. James is from Amiti from Alberta and he was raised in Minnesota. Barbara was taken from Manitoba and raised in Pennsylvania, I believe. And it's interesting to talk with them because their stories are very different. And in some ways they're the same. But their experiences are different and they have accents, which is wild to be visibly indigenous and have an English accent or an American accent, but be from First Nation and Canada. Kim Wheeler is a CBC correspondent and she does a lot of writing. She's kind of like a celebrity. So I was very happy that she took part in the project. And then we did our constellation, which is a start blanket with photos that are ironed on to a start quote. And we're still in the process of figuring out how we're going to deal with this project because we want it to be featured and to show the children who were taken through the 60s scoop. Right now I'm delivering training through trauma-informed training that includes learning about the 60s scoop and anti-indigenous racism. There's our website and Ed Bendog is usually reaching citizens of the nation. And our work with Legacy of Hope. And then we believe culture saves lives. So I can't tell you the amount of healing I've done since I reconnected to culture and ceremony and to the people here. So we make our home where we live. And just because I'm not in Treaty 6 in my own territory doesn't mean that I can't learn and build community here with the people here who I'm learning from. The Anishinaabe, the Gokwin people, I learn and thrive here. So I've done a tremendous amount of healing in this territory and I want to thank you for listening. And if you have any questions, I believe they're going to open up the chat. I would encourage you to talk about this with people in your community and your lives and your family, what they know about the 60s scoop, have they heard of it, share it with people, share what you know and what you learned here today. And challenge yourself to learn more, to listen to survivors, to support the work that we're doing. And of course, we are very underfunded. So we rely on grants to do this kind of work. And, you know, you can visit our website at 60s scoop network org, and to, to reach out to us. If you have any questions or if you want presentation. So thank you so much. Thank you so much, Colleen. You really opened yourself up to all of us so many people and really we appreciate learning a bit of your story and also the story of so many others that you've come in contact with. So maybe if you want to take your presentation down now, we'll, we've opened up the chat and there. I'm just going to take a look here. Colleen McLeod says she has a short story to share. Maybe if you want to keep it very, very short, we'll take that comment for a minute. And while others are thinking of their questions for Colleen. Thank you. In 1974, my family lived in Northern Manitoba, and it was the Vietnamese boat people time of life and my parents decided to adopt some of the Vietnamese children and when they went to the social workers to do that social workers said, Well, no, you could just adopt indigenous kids from Manitoba. And so we received to a boy and a girl. Before it was finalized, we were transferred my dad was in the RCMP to Nelson BC, and we were told in BC, indigenous were not allowed in non indigenous families and before that was finalized we were transferred to Richmond BC. And again, it was finalized there but because of the rules and the laws the children were and some other reasons that Colleen did mention. The children were removed from our family and sent to Pennsylvania where they were 100 kilometer 100 miles from one brother and 100 miles the other way from two sisters. And thanks to Facebook, I made contact with my sister. And we're friends on Facebook now and they have made they've reconnected with their family in Manitoba. And I introduced her to the 60 scoop money that was happening with the federal government and she's received her money now and so life does happen. And yes, it's just a pleasure and a, and a real privilege to learn from Colleen. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. That's encouraging. I'm glad that you were able to connect and drew 16 groups out on this because there's many people in the survivors who were left out of that because they did well because they lived out of the country. So thank you. And I'm glad you reconnected with them. Perhaps for many of us this is new information. And so it takes a little while to formulate questions and think about what what is there anything that you would want to hear more about that would help you to be able to share it with others in your family and your community. I'm always, I'm always wondering if people this is something you just heard about, or is there something new that you learned here today that you didn't know. Or if you need to let it sit perfect because it's a lot of information. Every time I do this presentation, especially for folks who've never heard of it before they're overwhelmed with the information. Ultimately, I didn't know this. All right, I see Tara's hand. And then there's a question in the chat after. Thank you, Colleen. I think this was a really wonderful presentation. And thank you so much for your advocacy. I came to Canada about 20 years ago. So all this is, you know, just learning about reconciliation and, you know, Indigenous rights has been quite a learning curve for me. My daughter worked with legal services aid in in Canada. I mean, she worked. She did a stint. And I was wondering about, you know, the millennial scoop that you're talking about, you know, the birth alerts, and is there any change in policy about that? As you mentioned, you know, the provinces during the 60s scoop, the provinces had the child welfare system, you know, the change in policy. So I was just wondering about that. I don't believe that's changed at all. I know that there's been a lot of push for it to change because their child welfare is still showing up and we're handing children at birth. And I know that it's happening because I see on Facebook, sometimes people share like they need an emergency intervention because child welfare is showed up and are demanding to be apprehended child for whatever reason, whether it's legitimate or not. So, you know, the hospital is still calling to welfare. And sometimes it's for really, like really unnecessary reasons. So, I know recently I'd heard of one in Manitoba where the parent was like doing a live video of them season the children that I found they found out a couple days later that child was put back in that family. But yes, birth alerts are very much still happening. Thank you. I mean, and Tara, there's a question from Ann Richardson. Oh, you know what, maybe this didn't go to everyone so I'll read it out. She starts with a thank you thank you thank you for being so open and vulnerable and generous with your story. How did you start to change the cycle for yourself. How would you recommend talking to someone or being available to them. If you know someone who was adopted. Oh gosh, it happened gradually. For me, I felt that something was wrong that I didn't fit into my, I mean, this isn't the case for every adoptee but especially if you have an abyss of family. You still want them to accept you. And I never got that so I started questioning like, why did this happen to me and my sisters and everyone was very gradual, lots of anger, lots of resentment, lots of blaming. I blame my, my biological parents. Like why couldn't you just stop drinking. Like why did you have like why did you have to lose us like I had, of course I had no context I didn't understand what happened to them so there's a lot of learning and you know stereotypes and bias and examining my own values and beliefs and what I knew and learning and listening. It took a long time it's taken since. Gosh, I didn't even learn about culture till I went to college when I was 29 years old. I never, I never got it from my family so I got it in at to college in the curriculum. I nobody smudge nobody told me about anything, because it was gone from our community it was wiped out through residential schools so my family didn't have anything to offer no culture at all because of colonization so it's take and it still takes time for me I'm still on learning and re-learning. You know, for a while, I felt, I would forget that I'm indigenous. It's easy for me to slip back into it because it's all I know. Just look back into mainstream and not lifestyle and that ideology because that's all I know. So it's much harder to work at learning my culture and learning because it's painful because it's an acknowledgement that it was lost. So it's, it's harder to work at it and it's harder to work at it with my children and my grandchildren, because they grew up without it too. It's like learning French when you're 51 years old. So it's a, it's gradual and and to talk to somebody about it. They have to be wanting to talk about it. They have to want to learn about it. Sometimes a spark, sometimes there's a spark where they might come to what the great thing about they are gatherings is some of them come not knowing anything and it begins the journey of their healing. Where they're like, I want to learn more about my culture. I want to learn about my biological family so it can be the jump up point for many people's healing. Yeah, I would encourage them to reach out to us if they, if they get to a point in their life where they want to know more and understand what happened to them. Excellent. Thank you. And Sherry walk. So Wilker has her hand up for comment and then I'll just note to folks that I was thinking that that I, the chat was changed to being open for everyone, but I realized it was only to the host. So I have now actually opened it so that you can chat amongst yourselves if there's someone you know in the audience. I didn't see any questions. Yeah, I've got a number of questions. So very early on, Carmen. Cataly. If you would put your hand up then we'll be able to see where you are. You'll pop to the top of my screen and then we'll get to you soon. I have a few others to read out after Sherry. Oh, but you need to unmute yourself Sherry. There we are. Okay. Thanks very much for, for telling your story calling in. I was married. Well, first of all, my great grandmother was born at Six Nations in Ontario. And she married a white man so she had to, she had to move out of the reservation. And so my grandfather was raised as white. And when I was married in 62. Shortly after I had two children by the time I was 1965. And I kept seeing these ads in the paper about these poor orphan children whose parents gave them up or whose parents weren't weren't capable of raising them because of them and so forth. And so I talked to my husband about adopting because we, we already had two children. So we'd be happy to have another one. And I put it off. I was a registered nurse and I was working full time and my husband was working full time and life happened and time went on and eventually then there was the, the Vietnam war and we ended up taking a Vietnamese refugee who was 16 years old and and of course our children were, were about that age at that time. So that worked out. She was with us for two years and, and went on and got a job and then got married and she still calls me mom. And then her children call me grandma. And, but I've always felt guilty about having not adopted an indigenous child because I felt, I felt it was my duty, and especially because my great grandmother was born at this nation's and I was part indigenous myself. And, and I've, I've kept that guilt until I've learned more lately. I've just learned more in the last two or three years about how, how bad it was because I didn't know any of the culture. I was raised white, just the same as my, my mother and my grandfather were. So I, I just wanted to, to mention that. And the guilt has kept with me I'm 82 years old now and the guilt has stayed with me for, for so long that when I was 78 I went to the University of Waterloo. And took a course in, in speaking Mohawk. But I didn't do very well with it because I was too old to change. That's what I have to say. Thanks for listening. Thank you for understanding and sharing that. Yeah, it's a, I want to learn free soul bad, but it's complicated right it's a complicated language so you know I do a little bit what I can. But, you know, when you're busy, and like it's a way on you it's hard to like just pick up another language right so yeah, thanks for sharing. Thanks Sherry and there. I'm seeing all the chats and there's lots of thank yous here that are directed to you Colleen and some questions. Are records in provinces now mostly open for people to search for their biological family. Yes. The problem is, any identifying information is redacted. So, it's still not a very good process, you know, any identifying information to do with our siblings or our parents is redacted and redacted means and big black lines in it. And we don't have access to it so there are survivors that still don't know who their parents are and some of the ways that we find out where parents are really innovative. I was fortunate enough that when I was. I think it was 12 when my mother, you know, basically told me I was native but also gave me a sheet of paper that had something from Indian affairs that said Colleen and heal so and so is from satellite and and put my parents names on there. So I had my dad's name which was Richard Paul Cardinal and my, my mom was Dolly Esther Crier. And that's how I was registered. I couldn't get it until I turned 18 but that's how I got my parents names. I don't know how other people don't have that but if you're not registered I guess when you're a child like a baby, my parents registered me. Because they were married when I was born so. But other folks, if they're adoptive father or their biological father is not on their birth certificate. Sometimes they didn't cook that logical father on the birth certificate. It was left off on purchase. But like their mother's name could be redacted from all their child welfare files too so it's still a really not good process and I believe Quebec is still kind of like one of the provinces where it's hard to get child welfare information. So I received my child welfare files from CIS and Sault Ste. Marie and all my stuff is redacted and there's very little stuff written about me, which tells me that they didn't take good records. My sisters and I were adopted in 1975, but I was born in 1972. I remember 15, 1972 and I was apprehended at the end of December of the same year and there's very little in my file about me as a baby and me as a child until I was adopted in 1975. Because I spent three years in foster care and nothing was written about me. So that's not good. The files are just not maintained properly or if it was, and I've heard from survivors that there's information there about, you know, the homes that they've been through and some of the nieces they experienced and they're moved around to different places. Even identifying information about social workers or anybody who was involved in the taking of their maintaining of was blacked out. So it's still a really awful process for people. I could argue both ways though, right? So in some cases it protects the biological family too from being contacted, right? Because there are parents that did give their children up and do not want contact again. So in some ways it protects the person who's doing the surrendering but it also impedes those adoptees from finding who they're related to and finding out health information and so on. Colleen, I want to thank you again. We're coming to the end of our time here now and I just want to give you one last moment if you wanted to remind people about how they can be supportive to you and the network and other folks who might be part of the 60s scoop. So when folks ask me, how can they help me? Well, I'll say things like how can you help me? What's your skills? Are you connected to people? Can you push for an inquiry? How come there hasn't been an inquiry into these practices of child welfare of taking children and placing them out of country? That's a huge thing. That's actually an act of genocide in the international criminal court. But it's almost like, because they did our settlement and they completely washed their hands of it, we need support and we need more awareness. So please, if you can raise awareness and use your skills and your power and your privilege, if you have it, ask your, what are they called, the NPPs and so on. Why don't you do anything about this? How come they're not getting an apology, a national apology? How come, you know, there's not an inquiry into why this happened? Where are all these children? So thank you for coming out and listening and if you have any questions, you can reach out to us at our website or follow up with Shannon. Thank you Shannon and thank you Silvia. Is it Silvia? That was our tech support. And I wanted to let you know folks very briefly that this was originally planned as a leadership seminar. There's a group of volunteers from across Canada who are Kairos contacts in various cities. And in various regions and they meet monthly for learning opportunities and inspiration. And if you are interested in taking a bigger role in Kairos, you could contact me. My email was the one that sent you your registration confirmations. But also if you have questions that didn't get answered tonight or want to have some sort of contact that is beyond the website, you can reach out there as well. And so we will be sending the recording to everyone by email and I'll drop a few links in that as well. So once again, I just want to say thank you very much to Colleen and to all of you for coming. Have a good night everyone.