The Duplessis Orphans

“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
George Santayana

Gazing backwards over history may sound like a practice in calm meditation, but when a specific topic is the focus of the retrospective examination what comes into view is often more shocking than appeasing, generating a perception shift that may greatly influence how today’s world is seen and understood.

We see this in the adoption world regularly. Books like “The Girls Who Went Away” and “The Baby Thief” go a long way toward relieving readers of illusions of a pervading climate of good will in the history of adoptions and stripping assumptions of warm fuzzies and best intentions down to the naked truth that most often had little to do with either.

The University of Oregon’s Adoption History Project is an academic achievement of grand proportions that shines light in many of adoption’s dark corners and provides a wealth of information that frequently highlights the despair and deprivation so many suffered under the banner “adoption”.

In today’s news, a story of history once again comes to the fore, but this time it’s children who weren’t adopted that feature.

From Quebec, a simple announcement of a looming deadline brings tragic history to center stage.

Quebec has alerted former Duplessis-era orphans they have nine more days to apply for “financial aid” under a program of reconciliation for those claiming abuse during stays in the 1940s and 1950s in nine designated institutions across the province.
Applicants for the aid package a lump sum payment of $15,000, tax-free must agree to forego legal action against authorities and caregivers involved with the institutions.

The Dupless Orphans … les Orphelins de Duplessis, so called after former Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis … are a group of several thousand children, most abandoned by single mothers, used in a scam put together by Duplessis in conjunction with the Catholic Church to defraud the Federal government into funding the care of the kids by shifting them from orphanages to insane asylums where the money was better.

Survivors of this horrendous practice, now regarded as one of the largest cases of institution-based child abuse in the history of the world, have been working for compensation for years, and for years beat their heads against brick walls.

The eligibility requirements for what still seems a paltry sum for a childhood sacrificed on the alter of greed include: “orphaned or considered an orphan; admitted between 1935 and 1964 to one of nine institutions; deemed mentally handicapped and unsuitable for adoption, following a psychological assessment before or after admission; did not receive financial assistance under the reconciliation program in effect until May 2003.”

It is violently disturbing to realize that a time so many look back upon fondly and recall as almost idyllic … the days of “Father Knows Best”, hula hoops and Howdy Doody … was, in actuality, an era of torture and suffering in our own backyards.

“Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.”
Carlos Santana

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