Sandrina de Finney

Playing Indian and other settler stories: disrupting Western narratives of Indigenous girlhood

This article explores the discourses and practices about and by Indigenous girls that are emerging in an era of globalized, postfeminist girlhood. Post-girl-power discourses impact representations of Indigenous girls in damaging ways by reifying their construction as objects of the colonial imaginary and as cultural commodities. To disrupt their persistent representation as disposable and ungrievable, I tackle three kinds of performances in girl-focused popular culture and media: spectral narratives,epistemologies of ignorance and playing Indian. I then draw on a growing decolonization scholarship in Indigenous studies to take stock of the cultural and political possibilities enabled by Indigenous girl cultures in Western-colonized settler states.This article explores the discourses and practices about and by Indigenous girls that are emerging in an era of globalized, postfeminist girlhood. Post-girl-power discourses impact representations of Indigenous girls in damaging ways by reifying their construction as objects of the colonial imaginary and as cultural commodities. To disrupt their persistent representation as disposable and ungrievable, I tackle three kinds of performances in girl-focused popular culture and media: spectral narratives,epistemologies of ignorance and playing Indian. I then draw on a growing decolonization scholarship in Indigenous studies to take stock of the cultural and political possibilities enabled by Indigenous girl cultures in Western-colonized settler states.

“We Need to Talk About It!”: Doing CYC as Politicized Praxis

Like many others seeking to make room for alternative voices in the narrow canon of CYC theory and practice, our work is steeped in theoretical and activist perspectives on colonialism, neoliberalism, normativity, social power, and social change. This critical, multidisciplinary lens is too often cast outside the realm of authentic CYC. In this article, we share our simultaneous struggles with and passion for our work and the CYC field and consider what can be gained from a critical ethic of practice, research, and activism. Our transtheoretical framework, drawn from Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and poststructural perspectives, helps us unpack how coming together critically, hopefully, productively enables us to trouble exclusionary notions of CYC. We present vignettes from our practice and research that explicitly challenge the assumption that critical practice is somehow less effective and less responsive to the realities of the diverse children, youth, families, and communities with whom we work.

Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism

One of the driving methodological and pedagogical concerns of the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, to which we belong, is the question of how to deal with the mess of the damaged worlds that we inherit and bequeath to future generations. The essays in this special section were commissioned in the wake of a Canadian SSHRC ‘Connections’ symposium organised by the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, and held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in late 2014. This interdisciplinary event brought environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars into conversation with early childhood education scholars and practitioners around the theme of: “Learning how to inherit colonised and ecologically challenged lifeworlds.” The authors of these three essays ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognisant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project. Nothing is finally settled. Moreover, they start from the premise that the ecological legacies of the western colonial enterprise of early modernity closely articulate with the anthropogenic disturbances to the earth’s geo-biosphere that we are