Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

by Patty Krawec

As a profession, social work, of which child welfare is one branch, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a way to manage the problem of poverty in a growing and prosperous country. Then as now, only middle- and upper-class women could afford to stay home. For the rest, both parents had to work long hours to earn enough money to pay for food and shelter. Industrial jobs were dangerous with high fatality rates, mortality rates in general were high for those living in poverty just as they are now, and then, just as now, many children lived in financially precarious single-parent households. Social workers initially focused on poverty, but by the 1920s, they were starting to focus more on families and children. The idea began to emerge that some children needed to be protected from their own families and placed with more suitable ones. In the middle part of the century, as the horrors of the German concentration camps were made visible to the world, Canada and the United States began quietly redirecting the horror of residential schools to the more congenial removal of children from their families via the now fully engaged child welfare system. Instead of redcoated RCMP officers working with nuns and priests to tear children from their families, social workers, sometimes with police officers accompanying them, would take children from parents considered neglectful or dangerous and place them with other families. Once again, children were disappearing from reservations. Bu...