Honoring Our Ancestors

Jennifer Mccleary,Estelle Simard

doi:10.18060/24146

Abstract

The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. Scholarship of the history of the profession has focused almost entirely on settlement houses, anti-poverty advocacy, and charity in the late 1800s in the northeastern United States as the groundwork of current social work practice. Courses in social work history socialize students into this historical framing of the profession and perpetuate a white supremacist narrative of white women as the primary doers of social justice work that colonizes the bodies and knowledge of Indigenous people and their helping systems. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the US have always had indigenous systems of social care. Yet, the social justice work of BIPOC, and especially Indigenous people in the US, is left out of the dominant narrative of the history of social work practice for several reasons including racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this paper the authors contribute to the critique of the role of white supremacy as a colonizing process in social work history narratives and discuss frameworks for decolonizing social work pedagogy through a reconciliatory practice that aims to dismantle white supremacy.

Highlights

The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond
We provide a path to dismantling white supremacy in social work by reconciling white supremacist social work history with Indigenous ( Anishinaabe) helping systems and Indigenous ways of knowing, and include specific examples of reconciliation, especially between the two authors of the paper, one of whom is a member of the Couchiching First Nation and Anishinaabe, and one of whom is a white descendent of colonial settlers
Our approach to reconciliatory pedagogy consists of five key elements described above: 1) critical self-reflection and relationship repair/building between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, 2) conducting an institutional scan for colonial practices, 3) transforming colonial policies and practices within the institution, 4) incorporating cultural knowledge into curriculum, policy, and practices, and 5) providing an accurate education about colonization and dismantling colonial practices to students, staff, and faculty

Summary

White Supremacy and Colonization of Indigenous Peoples

The coloniality of the child welfare system is perpetuated by social work education programs that don’t recognize or teach the historical legacy of colonization and its current effects on Indigenous people (Coates & Hetherington, 2016). Indigenous content in social work curricula rarely include adequate or accurate histories of Native American genocide and colonization, information about current, living Indigenous Nations, or models of Indigenous social care (Coates & Hetherington, 2016). This lack of adequate education is one important factor in disproportionately high representation of Indigenous children in the child welfare system (Hanna 2021)

Indigenous Pedagogical Ways of Knowing

Dismantling White Supremacy Through Reconciliation

Frameworks for Reconciliation

Conclusion