The colonial logic of child removal

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article we analyse the forced removal of Indigenous children from their kin and country in New South Wales (NSW) as everyday human rights violations. The parallel regimes of child ‘protection’ and criminal laws are discriminatory and function to deny First Nations sovereignty into the future. By incarcerating Indigenous children, the colonial state continuously disrupts families and Elders from passing down culture and law. Targeted removal of Indigenous children is as global as colonialism. While we cannot claim that international human rights regimes have extended everyday enjoyment of rights by First Nations communities, we argue that a global rights-based perspective is conceptually useful for truth telling in curriculum. We reject reductive presentations of incarcerated children as statistics, and of Indigenous people as ‘over-represented’: prisons are not democracies. The rate at which Indigenous children are criminalised and incarcerated is a direct function of decisions and actions by the colonial state. These practices are peoples’ livelihoods, an unfair exchange of futures that forces and keeps generations at the margins. Our purpose is to locate everyday human rights violations in NSW within a broader perspective of international law, colonial history, and unceded sovereignty.