Thesis Front Matter

The Department of the Interior described this philosophy in 1877: “Our Indian legislation generally rests on the principle, that the aborigines are to be kept in a condition of tutelage and treated as wards or children of the State.”5 Accompanying these philosophies, a number of policies have sought to undermine Indigenous sovereignty and enact forced assimilation into Canadian society. [...] Glen Coulthard refers to the current discourse as the politics of recognition, which he describes as “models of liberal pluralism that seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous assertions of nationhood within settler sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state” (2014, p.3). [...] Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred asserts in the prologue of Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition by Glen Coulthard that reconciliation processes reduce the scope of colonialism in Canada to one failed policy, convincing many Canadians to turn a “blind eye to the ongoing crimes of theft, fraud, and abuse against the original people of the land that are still the unac. [...] Therefore, I use the term (dis)placement to bring attention to the potential for erasure of a past history through placement in child welfare and in protest of systems that appear to be complicit in the marginalization of Indigenous peoples. [...] After the original investigation conducted by the media outlets, the Alberta government revealed that a total of 741 children and youth involved in child welfare had died between 1999 and 2012 and released a brief report examining the factors associated with death in care of child welfare services.20 While the number of Indigenous children who had died in care was not 18 The Truth and Reconciliati.