Abstract
There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and maintaining settler colonial Canada. Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity”, this paper will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized, and classed politics of “settling”.
Highlights
I am sitting on a small wooden dock with my feet comfortably dangling in one of the clearest lakes I have ever swam in
Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity” (Veracini 2010, p. 3), I will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized and classed politics of “settling”
By the mid-19th century, at the same time as an estimated 85% of the earth was owned and managed by European white men (McClintock 1995, p. 5), Britain was facing a crisis of economic inequality that was largely framed as a crisis of population, of job opportunities, or of poor people
Summary
I am sitting on a small wooden dock with my feet comfortably dangling in one of the clearest lakes I have ever swam in. As a millennial urban apartment renter living in an unprecedented housing crisis, this is the only place I have had a lifelong relationship with My grandfather bought this land when my father was a child and it belongs to my uncles, who generously allow my partner and I to continue visiting every summer. The dock at my cottage sits on large rocks because more than half a century ago, my grandparents moved them all into one pile, offering the perfect structure, and clearing a sandy open swimming area right next to it. Today, this practice would be illegal, as it disrupts important habitats for the wildlife in the lake. Inspired by theories and practices of critical family history, which Christine Sleeter defines as applying “insights from various critical theoretical traditions to an analysis of how one’s family has been constructed historically within and through relations of power” (Sleeter 2011, p. 423), I will pair personal reflection with settler colonial theory, Indigenous land defence movements, and family archival information sourced from Canadian census records and immigration records from Library and Archives Canada
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