Mother, daughter unite after 40 years

In 1973, a baby girl was born on an Indian Reservation in Canada. In 1975, she was taken from her mother’s care and put into a foster home. She was adopted by white, Christian parents three years later and raised far away from the reservation.

This story is about Maria Schmitt, who, along with her sister, Cynthia, was adopted by Tobias and Elizabeth Yoder and brought to Bonners Ferry in 1978, but it could be about any one of the approximately 20,000 Native-American children who were forced into adoption by the Canadian government during the 1960’s and ‘70’s as part of a widespread practice that is referred to by Canadian historians as the “Sixties Scoop”.

This disruptive government policy, which wasn’t discontinued until the 1980’s when Ontario chiefs passed resolutions against it, was based on the narrow-minded assumption that native children are better off raised in accordance with Christian and Euro-Canadian values. It was upheld by government officials who had no regard for, or understanding of, the traditional values that native tribes had held onto since long before Europeans arrived in North America. It is yet another item on the long list of policies regarding Native-Americans that, fifty years ago, were seen as beneficial, but today can be viewedmore clearly as prime examples of cultural genocide.

Maria Schmitt does not feel victimized, however.

Even though the Yoders rarely talked about her birth mother, Schmitt knew from a young age that she was adopted and that her birth mother was still alive and well on the reservation in Lake Emo, Ontario.

She experienced a happy and fulfilling childhood and grew to love her adopted family and her home in Idaho.

Still, she had never seen her mother or even had a conversation with her, at least not until August of last year, when she headed up to Ontario to finally meet her.

The climactic reunion between mother and daughter turned out to be an inspiring example of how things tend to come around full-circle.

Schmitt, with her husband’s help, has served as a foster parent for five or six children over the years. Through this experience, she was able to see first-hand that even though many foster children are too young and helpless to realize what is happening, their parents often find it extremely and painfully difficult to hand them over to foster care.

“We’ve been foster parents for quite awhile,” Schmitt says. “And just seeing how hard it is for some of these parents to give up their children...it just kinda made me want to reconnect again.”

According to Schmitt, she and her mother hit it off instantly, as if the fact that they have spent practically their whole lives apart from each other was but a minor detail.

Although she admits to being nervous in the beginning, she can now look back on the reunion and say, “It felt very much like coming home.”

It also felt like a homecoming of sorts for the members of her tribe, the Rainy River First Nations, who had not seen Maria Schmitt since she was taken off the reservation at the age of two. The tribe ceremonialized this reunion, holding a pow-wow in June welcoming her back into the community. It was there at the pow-wow that Schmitt discovered she had a brother, Kevin, whom she previously knew nothing about.

Kevin was also part of the “Sixties Scoop”, except he was taken from their mother at birth. “My mom didn’t even get to hold him or anything,” Schmitt says.

Coincidentally, her brother had tracked down their birth mother around the same time that Schmitt reconnected with her.

Schmitt’s mother, Marilyn, has come down to visit her estranged family in Idaho a few times since their reunion in August.

Schmitt says they will continue visiting one another to make up for lost time.