There are many ways for Indigenous people to disappear.
That’s how I begin this chapter. We’ve disappeared into reservations and off the eastern seaboard. Now I begin to talk about the ways that we disappear from each other. Chapter four looks at our disappearance into residential schools and child welfare and of course these two things are connected.
I used to work in child welfare and for many years I was a true believer. Children deserve to be safe, they should be protected, and it was my job to help families do better. If that didn’t work, then it was my job to put those children with a family who would keep them safe. I can’t remember how many times I uttered the words “if you won’t keep your children safe, I will.” Just thinking about saying that to a woman in an abusive relationship makes my stomach turn now. Knowing that we weren’t helping, that we were putting her at risk and in danger.
Residential schools used the same language of safety and care that child welfare would come to use. I went to a one day symposium on child welfare put on by the law school at York University and Cindy Blackstock was the keynote. On one of her slides she showed a warrant for removing a child to a residential school and it sounded exactly like the warrants we used. It identified neglect and poor parenting, the child was unsafe. We all clapped and applauded but nothing really changed when we went back home because how could it? The entire premise of the system is the removal of children.
I went to a conference at OISE and Dr. Laura Landertinger presented her doctoral thesis Indigenous ‘welfare’: Child Welfare and the Imperial Management of Childhood in Settler Colonial Canada, 1880s - 2000. She talked about her archival research and the violence of caring and how Indigenous children were moved off their reserves and into residential schools and then into foster homes in a seamless shift rooted in the removal of children. When somebody who was studying social work asked her what could be done to reform the system she responded that it can’t be reformed. Burn it down.
We think of reforms as something that make a thing better. And sometimes they are. But more often than not reforms just expand the project because the project is the control and containment of suspect people. So how do you reform that? You expand it into mandated reporting and kinship care that makes everyone the eyes and ears of child welfare and brings the child welfare system into your home. I’ll never forget the grandparents who refused to cooperate with my kinship assessment. “Why would we answer all these questions just to do what we’ve always done? Get out of my house.” But they were a white middle class family and could get away with that kind of refusal.
Nell Irvin Painter wrote The History of White People, and in it she talks about the early years of social work developing in response to the problem of poor whites. It seems that despite being the master race, some white people were simply not amounting to very much and that was a problem that needed a solution. This is where the whole study of “defectives” got started, attributes that were most likely linked to poverty got linked to bad genes or bad parenting. If it was bad genes then the answer was to institutionalize people away from society and if it was bad parenting then you simply removed the children from their parents. Gave them to good empire citizens who would rear them correctly.
And there are legions of horror stories from that era of how these people were treated in both institutions and foster homes because what on earth did anyone expect. You label people as defective in some way and then put them into the care of people with no emotional attachment to them and what do you think is going to happen?
Bad enough for poor whites who got that label. At least they were still white and could at some point make their way into society, or their children could, because they didn’t wear their difference on their skin. They could change how they talked and dressed, adopt different manners and mannerisms. But for Black or Indigenous people? We could learn all those things but our inferiority was infused throughout our skin and our hair. We are still seen as innately defective. We are fast or hostile or aggressive or easy or lazy or drunks or any number of things other than human.
Cindy Blackstock said something else that day at York University. She said that when you promise a child a better life, you need to deliver on that promise. And none of these colonial countries have delivered on that promise. Because these promises aren’t meant for us. We’re meant to disappear. And there are many ways for Indigenous people to disappear.