18 March 2022 - Jayli Wolf - Child Of The Government

In the US, we gloss over Native American issues.  

In Canada, they make relatively popular songs about them.

Jayli Wolf grew up thinking she was half-Mexican - but found out she was half First Nations at the age of eight and has reconnected with those roots as an adult.  And, with this, her breakthrough single, she took First Nations issues head on, detailing for a broad audience the atrocity known as the Sixties Scoop, when a lot of native Canadians were removed from their communities by the Canadian government, with Catholic Church assistance.

For those who can't read the text at 3:13 fast enough:

"From the 1950s into the 1990s the Canadian Government & the Catholic Church were responsible for taking, or “scooping” more than 20,000 First Nation, Métis, and Inuit children from their families and communities; known as The Sixties Scoop. They were placed in foster homes or adopted (accounts of children even being sold) into non-Indigenous families across Canada, the United States, & beyond.

Along with the loss of cultural identity, the government went so far as to change some children’s true ethnicity on file. Many experienced severe sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.

Jayli’s father was one of these children."

The song is delivered in a somewhat detached style, but is important enough for the CBC to call it one of the top ten Canadian songs of 2021.