Settler-Humanitarianism: Healing the Indigenous Child-Victim

Abstract

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.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…In Paragi's terms, we might think of this as spirituality for aid. In another approach to how Indigenous peoples encounter extractive humanitarianism, Krista Maxwell () demonstrates that liberal humanitarian projects continue to align with the settler‐colonial goal of Indigenous elimination; she uses the idea of “settler‐humanitarianism” to theorize this dynamic…”

Indigenous student labour and settler colonialism at Brandon Residential School

“…Modernity itself, Wolfe (2006) argues, was underpinned by settler colonialism and the ceaseless growth inherent to the modern capitalist state, in turn, required Indigenous displacement. Along the Western colonial frontier in the late 19 th century, the forces of capitalism accelerated and demanded agriculture and resource extraction to ensure settler‐state economic growth (Maxwell 2017). Harris (2004) famously claimed that one of the driving forces of settler colonialism, the dispossession of land, is, in fact, capitalism's primary impulse.…”

“…Harris (2004) famously claimed that one of the driving forces of settler colonialism, the dispossession of land, is, in fact, capitalism's primary impulse. Rotz (2017, 159; emphasis in original) neatly describes the process of Indigenous dispossession: “land, resources, and people were seized by force to accrue capital and construct a society of settler colonial patriarchal domination.” Under the guise of saving Indigenous children from a life of “savagery” by placing them in “redemptive” institutions, “interventions to remove, contain, and forcibly remold Indigenous children afforded an organized means of dispossession,” that allowed for territorial acquisition but also marched in step with the “moral” role of the settler colonial state (Maxwell 2017, 981).…”

“…Based on then‐new scientific understandings of children as vulnerable and malleable, to British and settler‐colonial elites every child—even the most “degraded”—was “amenable to rehabilitation into a moral, hard‐working citizen” (Maxwell 2017, 982; Hillel and Swain 2010). The agricultural and domestic labour to which children were subjected in residential schools was cast as redemptive (Hillel and Swain 2010) as it “redressed the ignorance and idleness (the reformers) imagined were inherent to Indigenous lifeways” (Maxwell 2017, 984). This forced labour, with the goals of redeeming Indigenous children, demonstrates how colonialism was an embodied experience as the ruling power often used the physical body of the colonized to enact authority and legitimacy (Topdar 2017).…”

“…The paternalistic attitude that Indigenous homes bred incapable mothers persisted in various guises over BRS's lifetime. Through extensive disciplinary regimes and near‐constant surveillance, female students were induced to maintain clean, productive bodies that would fit them for maintaining clean, productive homes—the opposite of the dirtiness and laziness thought to characterize Indigenous life (Maxwell 2017). BRS's Principal Ferrier (1906, 34) made this objective plain when he noted that one of the main purposes of residential‐industrial schooling was to turn out graduates who were “more neat [and] clean,”—especially women, upon whom the future of proper domestic life rested.…”