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Native peoples and child welfare practices: Implicating social work education
... This complicity is manifested in myriad ways, including social work's surveillance and pathologization of Indigenous peoples (Weaver, 2000), and its imposition of Eurocentric helping frameworks and practices that displace Indigenous traditional helping systems (Carlson, 2016a;Hart, 2003;Weaver, 2010;Yellow Bird & Gray, 2010). Many scholars also highlight social work's implication in promoting agendas of assimilation: through administering 'Indian welfare' (Shewell, 2001(Shewell, , 2004; by participating in the forcible removal and transfer of Indigenous children to residential schools (Blackstock, 2009;Sinclair, 2004Sinclair, , 2007; and by orchestrating the separation of Indigenous children from their families and communities, through the 60s scoop (Sinclair, 2004) as well as on-going practices of child welfare and Indigenous child removal (Baskin, 2011;Blackstock, 2007Blackstock, , 2009Sinclair, 2007Sinclair, , 2016Waterfall, 2006). ...
The recent upsurge of interest regarding environmental social work is unfolding against a backdrop of centuries of continuous struggle on the part of Indigenous peoples to protect their lands and waters. In this article, we consider the ways in which environmental social work frameworks engage the realities and resistances of Indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonialism. We contend that to ethically engage with environmentalism, social workers living and working on Indigenous territories must understand and resist settler colonialism, our implication in upholding its structure and practices, and its contribution to ecological destruction. Drawing upon the work of Indigenous scholars, we briefly describe Indigenous peoples’ conception of their relationships to land and sovereignty and how settler colonialism as a structure is organized with the explicit aim of eliminating these relationships. We then review prominent texts addressing several competing environmental social work frameworks, considering how each takes up (or not) histories of colonialism and Indigenous dispossession and addresses Indigenous identities, relations to land, and assertions of sovereignty. We conclude by offering principles and practices that might foreground the disruption of settler colonialism and respect for Indigenous sovereignty as necessary frameworks for Canadian environmental social work.
Indigenous scholars have called on settler people to engage in processes of decolonization. To investigate how white settler individuals living on Indigenous lands occupied by the Canadian state are responding to that call, it was necessary to articulate a comprehensive research approach that centralizes Indigenous sovereignty and disrupts colonial research dynamics. This article focuses on the articulation, grounding, and deployment of an anti-colonial research methodology by a white settler scholar. Though developed in the context of a specific project, this approach has much wider relevance and application possibilities. I demonstrate the values and practices of the anti-colonial research methodology to academia generally and settler colonial studies specifically.
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