3P96 Week 7 Notes

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Brock University *

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3P96

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Anthropology

Date

Dec 6, 2023

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Settler Colonialism and Childhood Guiding Questions -What is settler colonialism? -What does settler colonialism have to do with children and young people? -How do practices of settler colonialism shape the lives of young people, and how do young people push back against settler colonialism? What is Colonialism? -Power -Domination over something else -Dynamic -Political control -Of population -Of area -Movement -Space -Difference -Features of society -Social structures -Social control -Assimilation -Dominant norms -Enforcement of prescribed norms -Schools -Adult-child binary -Reinforcing dominant norms -Capital (money) -Money = power -A tool for domination -A tool to maintain domination -Race as a critical tool -White supremacy and superiority Why do people colonize? -Money -Area/Land -Power Definition: Settler Colonialism “Settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing.” -There is no post-colonialism in a settler colonialism society because the settlers are still here, as rulers of the land Key Details -A structure, not an event -Settler colonialism is ongoing in government structures that shape how life is lived in Canada -Focus on land theft for capital accumulation

-Removal of Indigenous people is the strategy How Settler Colonialism Works “Settler colonialism works to marginalize, dominate, and even eliminate the prior Indigenous inhabitants through a variety of techniques, which include more direct forms of genocide and eugenics, and more insidious approaches such as the normalization and enculturation of Indigenous peoples into the dominant settler ways of life.” What are some examples of settler colonialism, either historical or contemporary? -Removal of Indigenous ways of knowing from curriculum -Ongoing Indigenous genocide -Residential schools -Creation of reservations -Child welfare systems -Healthcare systems -Criminal justice systems -Education systems -Food supplies and clean water on reservations -Continued resistance to Land Back efforts Settler Colonialism and Children “The federal government chose to invest in residential schooling for a number of reasons. First, it would provide Aboriginal people with skills that would allow them to participate in the coming market-based economy. Second, it would further their political assimilation. It was hoped that students who were educated in residential schools would give up their status and not return to their reserve communities and families. Third, the schools were seen as engines of cultural and spiritual change: “savages” were to emerge as Christian “white men.” There was also a national security element to the schools. Indian Affairs official Andsell Macrae observed that “it is unlikely that any Tribe or Tribes would give trouble of a serious nature to the Government whose members had children completely under Government control.” -Children were seen as the key to national settler security -Children as mutable, more than adults -Children as points of change for individuals, and for society as a whole -Children as sources of political control -Schooling as oriented towards the success of the white state How might the parallel movements of child saving, residential schools, and public schools be connected? -These were in agreement with each other both in terms of ideas about childhood, and political ideals to justify the expansion of the settler state -Within a decade of each other- these all came up together -Child-saving movements were only for white children

-Public education, segregated schools, and residential schools arose at the same time -Children that needed saving were very poor in urban areas -No shoes, sleeping on the heating grate outside a poor area -Vulnerable, unsafe, uncared for- but they should be -Racially segregated classroom in public education -Separated by gender -A photo of control- education as control -Hands behind back, very posed and solemn -Educating poor white children for the success of the white state -Complete transition in residential schools -"This is what Indigenous children will become" -Universal, representative -Changed personality, culture, look -Speaks to the idea of control -Racialized children moving towards white ways of being Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Children “Indigenous child removal constitutes a central plank in colonial governance and the settler society’s regime of the normal.” Attacks on Indigenous Children Under Settler Colonialism -Disappearance and deconstruction of Indigenous kinship networks -Separation of children from siblings and parents -Indian Act forced patrilineal lines of descent -Physical attacks on reproductive organs -Sterilization -Eugenics projects -Abortion rights -Attacks during colonial wars -Massacres and murders of infants, children, and youth -During wars, and not during wars -Missing and Murdered IW 1600s: First missionary schools established in Canada 1831: First residential school 1867: Constitution Act -Claimed Federal responsibility over all Indigenous land -Federal responsibility over Indigenous education 1876: Indian Act 1883: Creation of residential school system authorized 1920: Residential schools made mandatory 1951: Major amendments to Indian Act begin to phase out residential schools and also trigger Sixties Scoop -Attack strategies move from residential schools to child welfare systems -Ability to take children off reserves for child welfare 1985: Manitoba issues moratorium on Indigenous adoption, other provinces follow -Halts adoption, but not the rate of taking children 2009: Class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Sixties Scoop survivors

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2021: Census shows 54% of children in foster care are Indigenous, despite only being 7% of all children in Canada “Several studies have shown that the Canadian child welfare system removes and institutionalizes Indigenous children at disproportionately high rates. In 2016, while constituting seven percent of the overall child population, Indigenous children constituted nearly half of all foster children across Canada. In some provinces Indigenous children constitute the majority of children in child welfare custody. In Manitoba, Indigenous children make up almost 90 per cent of children in the system; in Ontario, Indigenous children are 168 per cent more likely to be taken than white children. Jane Philpott, minister for Indigenous services, referred to this present-day situation as a “humanitarian crisis.” I suggest placing this crisis in its historical context to stress the continuity of colonial practice. What we may perceive as a crisis in the present is a continuation of practice that began in its “modern,” institutionalized form in the late 1800s. Indigenous child removal/theft has thus been a crisis for almost two centuries.” News Articles 1. Indigenous women forced and coerced into sterilization 2. Search for more Indigenous children's remains 3. Death of young Indigenous people in Thunder Bay 4. Investigations into the Indigenous deaths in Prince Rupert Young People Resisting Settler Colonialism -Desire-based vs. damage-based narratives -Not a broken-whole dichotomy -Desire-based narratives are in the middle and show the complexity -Brokenness, wisdom, strength Damage-Based Narratives -Focus on pain or loss, often connected to larger historical frameworks -Stories that narrate "entire communities as depleted" -Work from a theory of change that documentation of harm → gains/reparations Desire-Based Narratives -Focusing on people's complexity -Loss, despair, hope, wisdom, resistance, complicity (no one is a pure agent or victim) -Builds on Indigenous understandings of collectivity Settler colonialism is violent and ongoing, but Indigenous children are not a dying race -Moving from damage to complexity Uncovering Colonial Legacies (Navia, 2018) -Study with 20 Indigenous youth, aged 18-29 -Interviews, discussions, written biographies, production of art -Resistance as refusal, resurgence, and renewal What might be a desire-based narrative for the artists? -The loss and despair of losing her identity as a child, being separated from parents, losing culture -The resilience and forgiveness that she will live on afterwards, that flowers will bloom again -The complexity of the situation; being taken but having hope -Refusal and renewal; refusal to engage with a settler colonial narrative

3P96 Week 7 Notes

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