Sarah de Leeuw

Deviant Constructions: How Governments Preserve Colonial Narratives of Addictions and Poor Mental Health to Intervene into the Lives of Indigenous Children and Families in Canada.

Colonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples. In this paper we employ an indigenized social determinants approach to mental health and addictions that accounts for the multiple, intersecting effects of colonial discourse upon the health of Indigenous peoples, and particularly the health effects of colonial interventions into the lives of First Nations Indigenous children in Canada. We focus on both historic and contemporary discourses about Indigenous peoples as deviant, discourses that include particular ideas and assumptions held by government officials about Indigenous peoples, the series of policies, practices, and institutional structures developed to ‘address’ Indigenous deviance over time (including contemporary child protections systems), and their direct impact upon healthy child development and overall Indigenous health. From a discursive perspective, addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples can be accounted for in relation to the ideas, policies, and practices that identify and aim to address these issues, something that the social determinants literature has yet to incorporate into its model.

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia, Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on childrens geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on childrens geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of ...

Indigeneity and ontology

This special issue grew out of a specific moment in time. It was conceived at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2010, at a moment in which geographers, including cultural geographers, were growing increasingly interested in ‘ontology.’ That year, Sarah de Leeuw, Emilie Cameron, and Jessica Place had organized a series of sessions entitled ‘Geographies of Response’ that aimed to bring together scholars interested in rethinking conventional understandings of power and resistance in colonial contexts. The various papers that formed that session (including one by Caroline Desbiens, co-editor of this special issue) aimed to explore the ways in which the responses of Indigenous peoples to historical and ongoing colonization might be thought of outside of the binaries inherited from European philosophy, in which Indigenous peoples appear as either victims of colonization or heroically resistant. The papers and discussions were interesting and lively, but what struck us, as the conference unfolded, was the stark contrast between the ways in which ontology was being discussed in sessions aiming to unpack the intellectual and political merits of an ‘ontological turn’ in the discipline, and the ways in which the ontological was being mobilized by scholars primarily grounded in colonial and decolonizing studies. For the latter group of scholars, concepts like ‘being,’ connection to land, culture, and tradition, have long been eyed with suspicion. Building on decades of activism and critical scholarship, the affiliation between race, nature, humanism, and empire has made critical scholars wary of mobilizing any kind of ‘essential’ Indigenous nature or experience in their work. To invoke Indigenous ontologies, for these scholars, is to tread on intellectual terrain that is heavily shaped by colonial inheritances and interests. It is not so much that critical colonial scholars do not acknowledge that Indigenous ontologies are distinct; rather, they are wary of how Indigenous knowledges, beliefs, and practices are represented and mobilized within colonial structures of knowledge production, and have thus tended to shy away from directly engaging Indigenous ontologies as subjects of research. While some scholars have approached the notion of Indigenous ontologies with caution, others have found themselves turning to accounts of Indigenous knowledges and practices as evidence of ontological pluralism and as sources of new modes of thought. Indeed, whereas in previous years the sessions sponsored by the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the AAG 500229 CGJ21110.1177/1474474013500229Cultural GeographiesEditorial 2013

State of care: the ontologies of child welfare in British Columbia

This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention.This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention.

Troubling good intentions

We are unequivocally in favor of much, much, more space opening up for Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing and being in academic (and myriad other) spaces. We are worried, however, about a current lack of published critical engagement with policies and practices that appear, superficially, to support inclusivity and diversity of Indigenous peoples in academic institutions. We argue that, principally because such policies are inherently designed to serve settler-colonial subjects and powers, many inclusivity and diversity policies instead leave fundamentally unchanged an ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, their epistemologies, and their ontologies. Indeed, we contend that individual Aboriginal peoples are suffering at deeply embodied levels as universities and other institutions rush to demonstrate well-intended “decolonizing” agendas. Drawing from examples in British Columbia, this paper provides a critical intervention into a rapidly ascending, and deeply institutionalized, dominance of policies and practices that claim to promote and open spaces for Indigenous peoples and perspectives within academic institutions. We draw from critical race theorists, including Sara Ahmed, and in our conclusion offer suggestions that aim to destabilize and trouble the good intentions of neo-colonial policies.

With Reserves: Colonial Geographies and First Nations Health

Health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples persist globally. Northern interior British Columbia, where many Indigenous people live on Indian 1 reserves allocated in the late nineteenth century, is no exception. This article reviews findings from fifty-eight interviews with members of thirteen First Nations communities in Carrier, Sekani, Wetsuwet’en, and Babine territories. The results suggest that colonial geographies, both physical and social, along with extant anti-Indigenous racism, are significant determinants of the health and well-being (or lack thereof) of many First Nations in the region.

Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces

Abstract We are two feminist geographers working as practitioners and researchers in creative geographies and the discipline’s creative re/turn. Human geographers interested in new representational and non-representational methods and methodologies are, as we explore in this article, increasingly turning to artistic and creative modes of expression, including (amongst others) literary and visual arts, in which we are both involved. For some time now, we have been curious about what we experience as a lack of expressly politicized critical interrogations of the discipline’s creative re/turn and a shortage of expressly critical and politicized creative outputs. In this article, then, we explore geography’s embrace of creative practices as research methods and as means of developing outputs but, more specifically, we ask about where and how decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer voices, practices, and theorizations might fit within the creative re/turn. Using two different creative geographic works (one a book of poetry, the other a curation project), we trouble what we conclude may be ongoing (perhaps unconsciously) masculinist, often White and colonial, perhaps overly heteronormative, modes of geographic inquiry and practice within geography’s creative re/turn. In this context, we reflexively consider our own creative practices as ones that may offer examples to open new critical spaces and modes of representation for creative geographers.

Challenges in health equity for Indigenous peoples in Canada

Canada’s health-care system, like the country itself, is a complex entity. As the two papers in The Lancet’s Series on Canada make clear, the country’s healthcare landscape is made up of multiple people, places, and policies with often overlapping—and sometimes conflicting—jurisdictions, priorities, paradigms, and practices. These complexities are rooted in Canada’s fairly young colonial history that resulted in a nation comprised of a majority of settler and recent immigrants and their descendants, alongside a steady resurgence of Indigenous populations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples that are growing in numbers, political acumen, and agency. Our response to these Series papers is situated in this context. It is informed by our work as academics and researchers in Indigenous public health. We are, individually, an Indigenous grandmother, a daughter of a recent immigrant, and a descendant of early settlers raising a young family with a non-Canadian partner. Our perspectives represent a small slice of Canada’s diverse populations and the complexities of health-care users. The two Series papers raise important points about the strengths of Canada’s health-care system and the continuing health inequities the country must find ways to address. Some of the inequity challenges are persistent precisely because of their complexity and opacity. This year marks a decade since the watershed WHO report Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health, which set out a 20-year roadmap for improving health equity globally for marginalised populations and acknowledged complexity as a driver of inequity. Recognising dramatic improvements in health in the last 30 years, the WHO report nevertheless called for action to close the gap of population health inequities existing between and within countries. Canada has led health equity work domestically through its universal health-care system and internationally through alliance building and collective action. Still, deep inequities persist in wellness indicators and access to health care for Indigenous populations in Canada. As Danielle Martin and colleagues point out, pride in the Canadian health-care system is based on an “implicit social contract between governments, healthcare providers, and the public—one that demands a shared and ongoing commitment to equity and solidarity”. We remain curious about that implicit social contract: to whom it is implicit, who it serves, by whom it is taken up, and who lives the inequality gaps that persist despite decades of inquiries, reports, policies, and initiatives aiming to ameliorate them. The reality remains that Indigenous children, youth, and their families and communities continue to live with unacceptably disproportionate burdens of ill health, including higher rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, child and youth injuries and death, obesity and diabetes, youth suicide, and exposure to environmental contaminants. Social determinants of health approaches remind us that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples’ health status reflects the socioeconomic, environmental, and political contexts of their lives, a context inextricable from past and contemporary colonialism. Major disparities in the socioeconomic status and environmental contexts resulting from colonial policies and practices continue to drive inequities that have persisted for generations. These disparities include higher levels of substandard and crowded housing conditions, poverty, and unemployment, together with lower levels of education and access to quality health-care services. Taken together with the historic and ongoing impacts of residential schooling, loss of traditional lands, decimation of political and economic self-determination, aggressive social welfare policies that remove children from their families, and other marginalising and traumatising governance policies, these disparities and conditions continue to bear down on the lives of First Nations,

Turning a new page: cultural safety, critical creative literary interventions, truth and reconciliation, and the crisis of child welfare:

Despite the recent Truth and Reconciliation Report in Canada, rates of Indigenous children being apprehended by the state remain disproportionality high when compared to non-Indigenous children. Starting with a critical decolonizing methodology, this article charts connections between historic and contemporary settler-colonial state interventions into lives and places of Indigenous families. We interrogate resiliencies of false settler-state logics based on “for their own good” logics about Indigenous peoples. We then turn to the recent ascendance of cultural safety, considering the concept’s positive possibility, and potential limitations, with reference to child-welfare and apprehension of Indigenous children. Finally, based on established evidence that child welfare is a crucial determinant of broader Indigenous health and well-being, the article concludes with thoughts about how those working with settler-colonial state apparatuses might achieve culturally safe engagements with Indigenous cultures in the contemporary colonial present. Our solutions are located in literary arts, where the article begins.

Tau(gh)t Subjects: Geographies of Residential Schooling, Colonial Power, and the Failures of Resistance Theory

Taking as its starting point intimate colonial geographies lived by First Nations peoples in northern British Columbia, Canada, this chapter argues that theories of resistance do not allow for adequate theorizing of the ways in which Indigenous subjects navigate powerful forces, especially educational ones, that are intent on assimilating and de-Indigenizing them. Schools, classrooms, and the curricula taught within them are conceptualized in this contribution as tense political sites where conflicting modes of knowledge clash and where, ultimately, Indigenous children grapple with (as opposed to simply resist) expressions of (neo)colonial power. This chapter examines historical and contemporary education systems designed with Indigenous peoples in mind and is informed by discussions among human geographers about the discipline’s ontological turn and the need to reinvigorate social justice considerations within research.