Ottawa, Ontario: For decades, Canadian social workers forcibly separated indigenous children from their families, putting them up for adoption by non-native families in Canada and around the world.

On Friday, the Canadian government took a step to make amends for that adoption programme, which began in the 1960s and lasted until the 1980s, by agreeing to pay 750 million Canadian dollars (Dh2.2 billion) in legal settlements.

The settlement — affecting as many as 30,000 people — is part of a broader push across Canada in the last few years to grapple with its legacy of injustices against the country’s indigenous populations.

It includes a similar settlement for indigenous children who were separated from their families and sent to residential schools far from their homes as well as measures like a promise by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to address a long list of native concerns.

Most recently, Trudeau told the United Nations General Assembly that Canada had a responsibility to improve its relationship with its indigenous populations.

“I don’t know what people were thinking,” said Carolyn Bennett, minister of crown-indigenous relations, who announced the settlement in Ottawa on Friday morning.

“I don’t know why anybody,” she continued, “why settlers or government thought they could do a better job than the village, than the chiefs’ responsibility to make sure everybody in the community was well.”

The adoption programme began as a way to provide social services to indigenous children. But social workers without any training in indigenous life or culture arrived in aboriginal communities that were unfamiliar to them, and removed children from some situations in which, the court found, they were not neglected or in danger. Some of the children ended up as far away as Europe and New Zealand.

Chief Marcia Brown Martel of the Beaverhouse First Nation near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, the lead plaintiff in a class action that was one of the cases settled on Friday, said she hoped the settlement would lead to further reforms of child welfare systems.

“I have great hope that because we’ve reached this plateau, this will never, ever happen in Canada again,” Brown Martel said at the announcement.

In 1967 or 1968, when she was just 4 or 5 years old, Brown Martel and her sister were placed in foster care by child welfare workers. She was repeatedly taken away from her reserve, perhaps 10 times, until 1972, when she was adopted by a non-indigeneous family in Southern Ontario.

Commonly known as the Sixties Scoop — because the children were “scooped” from their communities — the adoption programme has generally received less attention than the residential school system. Both, though, stem from a historic effort by white colonial settlers to stamp out the indigenous identity, through children.

Under the school programme, which began in the 19th century, indigenous children were placed in schools far from their homes with the intention of wiping out indigenous cultures and languages.

In 2008, the Conservative government in power apologised for the residential programme as part of a settlement of a class action that also included paying 1.6 billion Canadian dollars to survivors of the system. The settlement created a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which produced a long list of recommendations, most of which Trudeau has promised to implement.

The adoption programme first came under severe criticism in a Manitoba government report in 1985. Two years ago, Manitoba became the first province to apologise for its role in the programme.

A class action in Ontario saying that the government failed to fulfil its obligations to indigenous people in the programme dragged on for eight years before being decided in the plaintiffs’ favour in February.

If approved by the court, the settlement announced on Friday will resolve that case and some others. The government is still negotiating with plaintiffs in other cases, which unlike the Ontario case also involve provinces and include accusations that the plaintiffs were abused by foster or adoptive families.

The government is also still working out the amounts for individual settlements and the wording of an official apology. The settlement announced on Friday will include 50 million Canadian dollars for a foundation to educate adoptees about their native languages and cultures.

In an earlier ruling in the case, Justice Edward P. Belobaba of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice called the adoption programme “well intentioned but profoundly uninformed” and found that it had a profound effect on the children throughout their lives.

“There is also no dispute about the fact that great harm was done,” he wrote in his February decision. “The ‘scooped’ children lost contact with their families. They lost their aboriginal language, culture and identity. Neither the children nor their foster or adoptive parents were given information about the children’s aboriginal heritage or about the various educational and other benefits that they were entitled to receive. The removed children vanished ‘with scarcely a trace.’”