She Spent 71 Years Believing She Was An Orphan. Then She Met Her Sister.
Marie Miller, a 71-year-old woman from Calgary, spent her entire life believing she was an orphan. It was only later that she came to understand the fuller truth: she was not an orphan at all, but a Dene child from Pehdzeh Ki First Nation in the Northwest Territories who had been taken from her grandmother's arms at two years old as part of Canada's Sixties Scoop and placed in a foster home in Selkirk, Manitoba. The Sixties Scoop was a period spanning roughly the 1950s through the 1980s during which Canadian government policy allowed for the removal of an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Indigenous children from their families, placing them in non-Indigenous homes across the country and often leaving them with no knowledge of their origins, their culture, or whether any family remained. For Marie, that left her with a lifetime shaped by the belief that she had no one. This week, a 72-year-old woman named Sally Tripp arrived in Calgary, and that belief was finally undone. Sally is Marie's sister. Neither of them had known the other existed.
When they met, Marie said she could not believe Sally was there, and that if Sally were going home, she was going home with her. Sally said simply that it was really happening, and that it was unbelievable. The reunion came after a search process that had taken years, as Indigenous families across Canada have increasingly used DNA databases, social media, and the work of advocacy organizations dedicated to helping Sixties Scoop survivors find their biological relatives. CTV News Calgary reported that Indigenous artist D'Arcy J. Moses was among those who helped facilitate the connection between the two women. For Marie, the reunion does not undo seven decades of not knowing. But it gives her something she had never had: a sister who is the same age, from the same family, from the same place, and who has been living a parallel life somewhere else on the continent, equally unaware that the other existed. The two women sat beside each other and took that in together, and whatever happened next, they were no longer doing it alone.
