Children of the State

Kristine Alexander is Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies, Associate Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (UBC Press, 2017) and co-editor of A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Small Stories of War: Children, Youth and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming in summer 2023).

This talk will bring critical childhood studies into conversation with historical scholarship about settler colonialism, liberalism, race-making, and the evolution of Canadian Indian policy between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By thinking more critically and intersectionally about the “developmental logic,” “fatherly eye[s],” and “doctrine of Aboriginal infantilism” that were noted in passing by previous generations of historians, I ask how the emerging Canadian state used concepts of childhood, adulthood, and the relationship between the two to engineer and naturalize the dispossession of Indigenous lands and resources. Using a range of sources including legislation, treaties, parliamentary debate, and periodical literature, this work investigates the origins and application of a particular understanding of children (as malleable, vulnerable, and potential threats to the social order) and adults (as rational and autonomous actors, possessed of a natural authority), which allowed nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian politicians and policymakers to position Indigenous peoples as legal minors and wards of the ‘adult’ settler state.

This webinar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Department of Sociology.

• SC199 Career Development and Making a Difference

Essex students within the department can attend this event as part of eligibility criteria for module SC199. Once attended, you can complete a short reflection on what you learned by attending the event. This can be downloaded here (via Moodle) and then uploaded to FASER.