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This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism has shaped the scholarly literature on the history of childhood in post‐Confederation Canada. The first wave of scholarship on the history of young people in Canada, shaped by the disavowal and “social forgetting” of settler colonialism, focused on issues like the welfare state and child migration. Using the frameworks and methods of social history, these works ignored Indigenous childhoods and failed to consider non‐Indigenous Canadians as settlers. This approach became untenable after the publication of a number of studies of Indigenous children's experiences in day, industrial, and residential schools, and the remainder of the article considers the still uneven ways in which historians of childhood in Canada have discussed Indigenous and settler childhoods and engaged with the concepts of whiteness and settler colonialism.

While most histories of Guiding and Scouting have focused on single national contexts, this article takes a broader approach by discussing the early history of the Guide movement in England, Canada and India. It asks how the Girl Guide movement’s ideology and programs were affected by the imperialism and internationalism that characterized the 1920s and 1930s. The effects of imperial internationalism, the paper argues, were felt at the discursive level (through an emphasis on imperial and international sisterhood), on the organizational level (through bureaucratic changes leading to the formation of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), in international gatherings, and in publications, personal correspondence, radio and cinema. However, Guiding’s varied attempts to create an egalitarian and interracial imagined community were limited by a number of factors, including economic constraints, Anglocentrism and a persistent belief in racial hierarchies.

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