Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History

Abstract

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.

Stigmatized: In/Forming identities of children in Care

“…Moreover, the constructs of children and childhood have traditionally been constituted through Eurocentric norms and practices, centering dominant groups meaning that some children are further marginalized and dehumanized through racism and colonization (Souto-Manning et al, 2018). As Alexandra (2016: 397) has articulated, “in Canada, colonialism has shaped and continues to shape the life chances of Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people in vastly different ways.” It is in this way, through the oppressive discourses of racism and the historic and contemporary practices of colonization, that the constructs of children and childhood intersect with racial and colonial norms and practices. Materially, this manifests in children in care experiencing the poorest educational and social outcomes (Lund and Stokes, 2020) than other children, while recognizing that their experiences of poverty, abuse, neglect, and marginalization cannot be untangled from historic and contemporary policies and practices of colonialism and racism.…”

Indigenous Knowledge in Early Childhood Education: Building a Nest for Reconciliation

“…Here in Canada, as in many other colonial-settler nation states, such systems have developed in ways that privilege one way of knowing and understanding over other ways of knowing and understanding (Battiste, 2013;Kerr, 2014;Kincheloe, 2008;Kovach, 2009;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015;Pidgeon, 2008Pidgeon, , 2016. This system of hegemony privileges the unquestioned use of Western European epistemological and pedagogical systems as the standard in many Canadian postsecondary institutions (Alexander, 2016;Kovach, 2009;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015;Pidgeon, 2008Pidgeon, , 2016. As Jeannie Kerr (2014), an Indigenous scholar from the University of Winnipeg, stated, "educational spaces in higher education continue to support and perpetuate structures of colonialism through an epistemic monoculture based in Western scientific materialism" (p. 83).…”

“…Learners who come to postsecondary education from outside the dominant culture experience the education system differently, depending on how their own values are defined (Battiste, 2013;Kovach, 2009;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015). For many Indigenous learners, postsecondary education is a hegemonic system in which their cultures, languages, and traditions are not included, and their knowledge systems are not recognized as legitimate ways of being, knowing, and doing within the institution (Alexander, 2016;Battiste, 2013;Kerr, 2014;Kovach, 2009;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015;Pidgeon, 2008Pidgeon, , 2016. By continuing to ignore the knowledge traditions of the original occupants of this land, researchers engage in the utilization of a "hegemonic epistemology in league with a dominant power-soaked politics of knowledge operat(ing) to privilege the privileged and further marginalize the marginalized" (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 5).…”

“…This understanding of the hegemonic nature of many Western European academic practices in some Canadian postsecondary institutions highlights the problematic nature of non-Indigenous learners' colonization of thought. We have been educated to believe that the epistemological and pedagogical practices we experience in public schooling are neutral, normal, and right (Alexander, 2016;Kincheloe, 2008;Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015;Regan, 2010). The history of post-contact education in Canada for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples has contributed to the negation and erasure of Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing, and the ensuing void left by the negation and erasure has been filled with many misunderstandings.…”

Turns and twists in histories of women’s education

“…18 Ideas and practices of education also intersected with notions of nation and internationalism and traversed geographic terrains and political borders, shaping notions of girlhood and womanhood in diverse and fractured ways, 19 as the edited collection by Mary O'Dowd and June Purvis illustrates. 20 Correspondence between South African Lily Patience Moya and English feminist Mabel (Atkinson) Palmer demonstrates how the efforts of women educators were often ambiguous, particularly when they crossed the 'color line', 21 while education for indigenous girls in Canadian 22 and Australasian residential schools, 23 and in USA institutions like the Hampton Institute educating Native Americans in Virginia, disconnected women from their communities. Such institutions played into the governance of populations by introducing routines of daily life organised around Western notions of time and space at variance with the cosmologies through which indigenous communities operated.…”