Removal Of Indigenous Children Research Articles

Land, children and politics: Native Americans and Australian Aborigines 1900–1930

In this publication to honour Professor Ann Curthoys this article considers the comparative aspects of Native American and Australian Aboriginal political activism in the time period 1900–1930. Central to the study is the importance of revealing the missing chapters of Indigenous political history in both the countries during these important and largely overlooked decades. The approach undertaken is restorative history and privileges the tools of historical narrative (story). The current study places the significance and impact of Indigenous campaigners at the forefront of an awakening awareness of the shared political and racial challenges confronting Indigenous people in the USA and Australia. There were many similar issues confronting both the Indigenous groups. These included the pressures applied on Indigenous land and its resources and the removal of Indigenous children from their families. The article highlights the tactics and voices of Indigenous opposition in fighting courageously for their rights and people.

Book Review: White mother to a dark race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940

Book Review: White mother to a dark race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940

Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia

This article focuses on the incorporation of Aboriginal children into European families on a private basis in the colonial era. While state-based missions and reserves were central sites where Aboriginal children were placed, other Aboriginal children were privately placed with European families during the colonial era. This article explores the shifting reasons for this practice. It finds that Aboriginal children who entered European families away from the control of the state came under the control of Europeans through a variety of ways. Initially, Aboriginal child removals were conducted during the course of violent frontier conflict or involved children who had been impacted by introduced European diseases. Smaller numbers of Indigenous children were taken as objects of curiosity. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, it became increasingly common for settlers to take Indigenous children for labour purposes. The article argues that the white middle-class family was positioned as a site for “civilising” children, where the moral regulation of childhood was conducted. This article adds a new dimension to colonial understandings about the role and structure of the family. It also expands understandings about Indigenous child removal in Australia's past.

Political Apologies and the Question of a ‘Shared Time’ in the Australian Context

Although conceptually distinct, ‘time’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940

White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940

Margaret D. Jacobs . White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 . Paperback edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2011. Pp. xxxii, 557. $30.00.

Margaret D. Jacobs . White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 . Paperback edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2011. Pp. xxxii, 557. $30.00.

White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (review)

Reviewed by: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 Anne Keary White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 Margaret Jacobs. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Margaret Jacobs’ history of Indigenous child removal in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia and the United States is thoroughly researched and broad-ranging. By making the connections between child removal, the takeover of Indigenous lands, the racialist dimensions of modern nation-building, and the maternalist politics of white female reformers, Jacobs places Indigenous child removal firmly at the center of American and Australian settler-colonial history. At the same time, in focusing on the role of women and exploring the histories of child removal from a comparative perspective, Jacobs’ book extends the study of gender and empire and deepens historical understanding of settler-colonial relations in both countries. For readers unaccustomed to thinking of the United States as a settler colonial nation, Jacobs begins by drawing the parallels between American and Australian histories of dispossessing Indigenous peoples and establishing new settler societies on their lands, while noting that Americans, unlike the British in Australia, did enter into treaties with Indigenous peoples. In her second chapter, Jacobs examines the formulation of Indigenous child removal policies, pointing out that in both post-Civil War America and post-federation Australia, officials came to view child removal as a means of solving the “problem” of Indigenous peoples’ continued existence in nations being redefined as modern, unified and white. The crucial difference was that in the United States, reformers framed removal as necessary to the cultural assimilation of Indian children into the American republic, whereas in Australia officials looked to removal as a means of facilitating the racial or biological “absorption” of Aboriginal “half-castes,” particularly girls, into the white Australian population. As a consequence American Indian children were returned from boarding schools to continue the work of tribal “uplift,” whereas in Australia “half-caste” children were removed permanently. In both cases, Jacobs stresses that removal was not a benign alternative to violence and military conquest but a continuation of settler-colonial efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, this time by breaking Indigenous children’s attachments to their kin and countries. In Chapter 3 Jacobs turns to the work of the white female reformers who played such a crucial role in justifying Indigenous child removal. They did so, paradoxically as Jacobs shows, by representing Indigenous women as unfit mothers and homemakers, even as they used the mantle of white motherhood to argue for a great voice in public policy for themselves. At the cost of Indigenous women’s rights, many of these women advanced their own careers as anthropologists, missionaries or government appointees in fields that had been occupied solely by men. Jacobs notes that American women, supported by stronger organizations and a tradition of evangelical reform, enjoyed more success in this regard than their Australian counterparts who lacked such support and faced stronger hostility from male officials. The greater part of Jacobs’ study examines the experiences of white female reformers and the Indigenous children who suffered removal and institutionalization at their hands. With a wealth of archival material, Jacobs makes excellent use of personal stories to show us how removal worked at the level of intimate human relations. Throughout she tracks the parallels and differences between the two contexts. In her examination of child removal practices in Chapter 4, Jacobs finds that while removal was a traumatic experience for all Indigenous people, in the United States officials did at least raise the issue of parental consent and Indian parents tended to have more leverage. In Australia, by contrast, officials regularly took children without parental consent, often at a much younger age. In Chapter 5, Jacobs shows that in both countries white female reformers tended to engage “in tactical intimate associations with Indigenous families,” befriending and then betraying them in their commitment to the goal of removing and transforming their children. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the institutions to which Indigenous children...

Review Margaret D. JacobsWhite Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xxxii + 557 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00.)

Review Margaret D. JacobsWhite Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xxxii + 557 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00.)

Review: White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940, by Margaret D. Jacobs

Review: <i>White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940</i>, by Margaret D. Jacobs

White mother to a dark race: settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940

List of Illustrations List of Maps Acknowledgments A Note on Terms Abbreviations Prologue: White Mother to a Dark Race 1. Gender and Settler Colonialism in the North American West and Australia 2. Designing Indigenous Child Removal Policies 3. The Great White Mother 4. The Practice of Indigenous Child Removal 5. Intimate Betrayals 6. Groomed to Be Useful 7. Maternalism in the Institutions 8. Out of the Frying Pan 9. Challenging Indigenous Child Removal Epilogue Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

White Mother to a Dark Race

Historical accounts of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities in Australia under colonial assimilation policies have proliferated over recent decades. Within the field, white feminist historiography has involved investigations of the function of gender, domestic space and intimate relations in the colonial enterprise. In this, it has often placed the problematic trope of the maternal as 'a central model of historical identity' (Moore 2000, 95). While similar histories exist in other settler-colonial nations, notably the United States and Canada, there has been relatively little comparative research. In White Mother to a Dark Race, Jacobs provides a substantial comparative account of the removal of indigenous children in North America and Australia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the period when this was a key government policy in both continents. She focuses on the gendered character of the policies and practices and the role of white women as agents of the state in the removal of children. In particular, Jacobs provides a critique of the discourse of maternalism in its various manifestations. In this task, she takes up a point raised in white feminist analysis that a 'disconcerting maternalism persists both in the context of academic theory and the practical politics of forging international alliances' (Jolly 1993, 104).

In an era of stalled reconciliation: the uncanny witness of Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne

Ray Lawrence's Australian film Jindabyne is a powerful national allegory about the denial of historical responsibility and the politics of post-colonial apology across a 'traumatic contact zone' of historical injustice.1 Released in 2006, Jindabyne was produced during a period of stalled reconciliation in Australia. Like many nations in the past 20 years, Australia has been engaged in a painful and uneven process of coming to terms with historical injustice - a process that remains incomplete and unsettling. In 1991, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, inaugurated under a federal Labor government, anticipated that reconciliation would be achieved by the centenary of Federation in 2001. In 1996, in what subsequently became a landmark event in the nation's attempt to respond to the divided legacies of settler-colonialism, a national inquiry was conducted into the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities.2 The final report, Bringing Them Home, found that the removal of children of mixed descent, with the aim of alienating them from their culture and assimilating them to white Australian culture, breached Australian common law and international human rights conventions.3 The national inquiry did not address issues of justice or responsibility. Instead, it documented Indigenous suffering and solicited an affective response from non-Indigenous Australians. By May 1997, when the national inquiry tabled its report calling for a national apology to the Stolen Generations, there had been a change of government. The then Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, did not be heve the current generation of Australians should be made to feel responsible for the past and notoriously refused to offer a national apology. Instead, he expressed his 'personal regret' for the suffering and hurt caused by past policies of child removal. For the next 11 years, no apology was forthcoming, and by the new millennium, the reconciliation process had stalled. In a climate of widespread support for reconciliation generated by the national inquiry, Howard's refusal to apologise became a stain on the nation. In 2008, the first order of business for the new Labor government of Kevin Rudd, after opening Parliament on 13 February, was to offer a national apology to the Stolen Generations and their families and communities. Rudd's and Howard's responses to a national apology were symptomatic of opposing tendencies that marked the reception of Bringing Them Home: on the one hand, an affective response grounded in empathy and identification, and on the other, denial and forgetting. The former response was expressed through the signing of 'Sorry Books', Bridge Walks for Reconciliation in 2000 and support for a national apology. The latter resulted in criticisms of the report and of the 'black-armband view of history', outrage at the claim of genocide and an insistence that 'the past remain in the past'.4 These opposing responses are not, of course, surprising. As Dominick LaCapra reminds us, nations dealing with the unfinished business of the past must confront the problem of how to acknowledge and work through 'historical losses in ways that affect different groups differently'.5 What is striking, however, is how little explicit discussion there has been of what is involved in working through the divided legacies of colonial dispossession, violence and forced assimilation in Australia. Indeed, the long-awaited apology was viewed widely as a necessary and uncomplicated matter of acknowledging the suffering caused by past policies, which would move the nation towards reconciliation. At the same time, the government rejected the national inquiry's recommendation for reparations such as monetary compensation, and Stolen Generations cases repeatedly failed in court. These events raise a number of questions: what is the value of apology without justice or reparation? Is an apology without reparation simply a onesided acknowledgment and expression of regret for suffering caused by past policies? …

Representing the Stolen Generations in the National Museum of Australia

The removal of Indigenous children from their parents has been part of the colonising relations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people since the earliest days of the British occupation of Australia. The National Museum of Australia is beginning the process of developing a collection of objects that will enable it to tell this significant story.The paper will look at this curatorial process of ‘remembering’. It will cover such issues as the structure of the Museum; the particular nature of the Indigenous section and its aims; the contested identity of an Indigenous object; relationships established between Museum staff and the community; the ‘implied contract’ of trust established with this community in order to tell their stories; and the ‘object as witness’ and the ‘object as betrayer’.

The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context

Most academic debate about the stolen generations of Aboriginal children in Australia's past has focused on the twentieth century, when government agents directed official attention to the removal of Aboriginal children from their family groups. This article focuses on the earlier colonial period in Australia, from 1788 to 1901, when generations of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal family groups. Aboriginal children were popularly considered to be more “controllable” or susceptible to assimilation than Aboriginal adults. Consequently, by the late nineteenth century, government officials in various Australian colonies encouraged the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and their retraining in manual labour. This idea of containing an “Indigenous threat” by removing and retraining Aboriginal children clearly guided the “Stolen Generation” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper examines the unity of colonial Australian discourse about Aboriginal child removal and makes some observations about the scale of Indigenous child removal in the colonial era. It argues that the use of a conceptual framework centred around genocidal discourse provides the most effective way of understanding the motivations behind Indigenous child removals in Australia's past.

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Subversive Witnessing: Mediating Indigenous Testimony in Australian Cultural and Legal Institutions

Like many other nations, Australia has been engaged in a painful reckoning with a shameful past. In the past fifteen years, questions concerning the removal of Indigenous children from their families, known as the generations, the extent of frontier violence, and whether genocide occurred in Australia have been central the public controversy over how the story of settlement or invasion should be narrated. Testimony has played a crucial role in this confrontation with the past, as Indigenous Australians have been called upon testify past injustices and their continuing legacies in the present. In the 1980s and 1990s Aboriginal women pioneered the use of personal testimony in memoirs, bringing into visibility forgotten practices of child removal.1 Aboriginal organizations such as Link-Up, which helps separated individuals locate family members, also published collections of generations testimony (see, for instance, Edwards and Read 1989; Link-Up and Wilson 1997). It was not, however, until 1996, when the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) conducted a National Inquiry into the policies, practices, and effects of removing children of mixed descent from their mothers and communities, be forcibly assimilated into white Australian culture, that testimony achieved national prominence. In 1997, HREOC published its moving report, Bringing Them Home (Wilson 1997), which exposed the brutality, loneliness, and loss of family, identity, culture, and language that was experienced by children who had been removed. Although the report drew on international human rights law argue, controversially, that child removal constituted cultural genocide, in foregrounding victim testimony, it participated in a global trend in which claims of historical injustice are articulated through personal stories of suffering.2 In court, testimony is subjected an adversarial process of crossexamination, which is meant reveal whether the is reliable, and whether there are significant gaps or contradictions in the testimony, which may invalidate it. By contrast, semijudicial processes such as truth commissions and national inquiries tend take a dialogic approach, in which testify is to address another, impress upon a listener, appeal a community (Felman and Laub 1992, 204). In this conception, witness refers both the person who gives testimony and the secondary who receives it. Listening and acknowledging the other's suffering and loss are crucial aspects of the testimonial exchange. In asking Australians listen . . . with an open heart and mind stories of Indigenous suffering and trauma, the Bringing Them Home report presented testimony as a dialogic process with social, political, historical, and ethical significance, rather than simply a matter of fact-finding (Wilson 1997, 3). Predictably, some conservative critics and journalists challenged the legitimacy of the testimonies on the grounds that witnesses were not subject a judicial process of cross-examination.3 The Australian public, however, responded the call bear witness, turning out in large numbers express their regret by signing Sorry Day books, participating in reconciliation walks, and offering other symbolic gestures. As historian Robert Manne has noted, No inquiry in recent Australian history has had a more overwhelming reception or ... a more culturally transforming impact. ... It soon seemed many Australians that no historical question was of greater importance than the stolen generations (2001, 5-6). The National Inquiry held out considerable promise for the power of witnessing heal Aboriginal individuals and communities, unify the nation in confronting the past, and contribute the ongoing process of reconciliation. It also played a powerful role in legitimating Indigenous testimony as a significant historical and cultural form. For instance, it recommended that the federal government provide funding collect oral histories from members of the generations, their adoptive parents and carers, and patrol officers and missionaries. …

Antipodean Settler Societies and their Complexities: the Waitangi Process in New Zealand and Native Title and the Stolen Generations in Australia

This article considers the process of determining native title claims and responding to the revelation of forced Indigenous child removal in Australia, together with the Treaty of Waitangi claims process in New Zealand; each of which can be understood more broadly as a response to the aftermath and ongoing consequences of colonisation. We undertake this analysis comparatively, through an examination of the broad sweep of colonial history in both countries, followed by a more detailed consideration of the processes in question, as they have become manifest over the last decade or so in Australia and almost 30 years in New Zealand. We compare and contrast the institutions, epistemological and political preoccupations and language in each case, revealing various latent ironies and incongruities in the systems on both sides of the Tasman Sea.

The Asymmetry between Apology and Forgiveness

Government refusals to apologise for past wrongful practices such as slavery or the removal of indigenous children from their parents seem evidently unjust. It is surprising, then, that some ethical considerations appear to support such stances. Jacques Derrida's account of forgiveness as entirely independent of apology appears to preclude the need for official apologies. I contend that governments are obligated to apologize for past injustices because they are responsible for them and that official apologies should not involve a corresponding expectation for forgiveness. My argument is that an apology and forgiveness are asymmetrical because an apology is based on respect, a perfect duty, and can be a public act, whereas forgiveness is based on love, is an imperfect duty, and is a personal undertaking. It follows from this asymmetry that an apology is a prerequisite for reconciliation, but forgiveness is discretionary. Refusals to apologize tend to impede the reconciliation process and make the possibility of forgiveness remote. The concept of reconciliation has also been criticized on the grounds that reconciliation implies a former harmony that should be restored and fault on both sides. However, I argue it should be understood as a willingness to work together without a presumption of having overcome the past.

Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940

This study of white women's involvement in the removal of indigenous children in a comparative, international context offers an opportunity for recasting the history of women and gender in the American West as part of a larger story of gender and settler colonialism around the globe.

Occupational deprivation: A consequence of Australia's policy of assimilation

Wilcock (2003) has recently reminded our profession of the importance of understanding the occupational experiences of the past, in order to recognise how historical events impact on the health of individuals and communities today. One area of Australia’s history we have found to be notably absent from occupational therapy and occupational science literature is that of the forced removal of indigenous children from their families. However, we believe this period of Australian history holds many lessons for our profession. Hence, within this paper we aim to give a brief overview of Australia’s policy of assimilation of indigenous Australians and how enactment of this policy deprived indigenous youth of engagement in culturally significant occupations. We argue that this lack of engagement of culturally significant occupations is a clear example of occupational deprivation. Whiteford (2000) describes occupational deprivation as ‘a state of preclusion from engagement in occupations of necessity and/or meaning due to factors that stand outside the immediate control of the individual’ (p. 201). Within this paper, we analyse how the forced removal of children from their families and communities, through the Commonwealth policy of assimilation, was indeed an external force of control that deprived indigenous children of culturally significant occupations. This paper outlines our analysis of three aspects of occupational deprivation we believe resulted from children being forcibly removed from their families. (i) in Deprivation of a culturally significant social environment, we discuss how indigenous children were denied access to their families, and consequently prevented from learning their cultures and their associated roles and occupations; (ii) in Spiritual deprivation of one’s land and story, we examine how children were prevented from engaging in occupations relating to the stories of their people, their land and their role within society (the Dreamings, the Dreamtime and/or the Dreaming); (iii) in Deprivation of initiation processes, we analyse how children were denied their rightful place in initiation processes, ceremonies, and occupations, leading to the preclusion of the establishment of culturally significant roles within their community. We will examine evidence of these significant forms of occupational deprivation in an attempt to gain some insight into an area of occupational justice which, so far, has been left untouched within occupational therapy literature.