Settler-Humanitarianism

Healing the Indigenous Child-Victim

Bibliographic Data

ID2109065
AuthorsKrista Maxwell (University of Toronto, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume59
Issue4
Pages974-1007
Publication date2017-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417517000342
OpenAlexW2758210809
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited57

Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to 'heal' these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point for analyzing how and why the figure of the Indigenous child-victim, past and present, is morally and politically useful for settler-states and their public cultures. I use the formulation of 'settler-humanitarianism' to express how liberal interventions of care and protection, intended to ameliorate Indigenous suffering, align with settler-colonialism's enduring goal of Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). Removal of Indigenous children was integral to the late nineteenth-century formation of the Canadian and Australian settler-states. Missionaries and colonial administrators represented these practices as humanitarian rescue from depraved familial conditions. Settler-humanitarians have long employed universalizing moral registers, such as 'idleness' and 'neglect,' to compel state interventions into Indigenous families. More recently, 'trauma' has emerged as a humanitarian signifier compelling urgent action. These settler-humanitarian registers do political work. Decontextualized representations of Indigenous children as victims negate children as social actors, obscure the particularities of how collective Indigenous suffering flows from settler-colonial dispossession, and oppose children's interests with those of their kin, community, and nation. I analyze how and why Aboriginal healing as settler-humanitarianism has been taken up by many Indigenous leaders alongside settler-state agents, and examine the ongoing social and political effects of the material and discursive interventions it has spawned

Colonialism · Compassion · Criminology · Environmental ethics · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Psychological intervention · Sociology · State (computer science · Canadian Identity and History · Child Abuse and Trauma · Ecology · Gender Studies · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · Medicine · Nursing