Word.ws English Dictionary

Sixties Scoop

Sixties Scoop proper noun: the government practice of forcibly taking Aboriginal children away from their families to be brought up in foster care or adopted into white families, which occurred from the late 1950s until the 1980s.

Proper noun

the Sixties Scoop

  1. (Canada, historical) The government practice of forcibly taking Aboriginal children away from their families to be brought up in foster care or adopted into white families, which occurred from the late 1950s until the 1980s.

Origin of Sixties Scoop

Coined in the research paper Native Children and the Child Welfare System by Patrick Johnston in 1983.

Questions about Sixties Scoop

What does Sixties Scoop mean?
Sixties Scoop means the government practice of forcibly taking Aboriginal children away from their families to be brought up in foster care or adopted into white families, which occurred from the late 1950s until the 1980s.
What part of speech is Sixties Scoop?
Sixties Scoop is a proper noun.

Words near Sixties Scoop in the dictionary

  1. sixthhand
  2. sixthing
  3. sixthly
  4. sixths
  5. sixties
  6. Sixties Scoop
  7. sixtiesish
  8. sixtieth
  9. sixtiethly
  10. sixtieths
  11. Sixtine

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sixties Scoop (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Sixties Scoop.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sixties_scoop. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.