Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History

This article examines the ways in which settler colonialism has shaped the scholarly literature on the history of childhood in post-Confederation Canada. The first wave of scholarship on the history of young people in Canada, shaped by the disavowal and social forgetting of settler colonialism, focused on issues like the welfare state and child migration. Using the frameworks and methods of social history, these works ignored Indigenous childhoods and failed to consider non-Indigenous Canadians as settlers. This approach became untenable after the publication of a number of studies of Indigenous children's experiences in day, industrial, and residential schools, and the remainder of the article considers the still uneven ways in which historians of childhood in Canada have discussed Indigenous and settler childhoods and engaged with the concepts of whiteness and settler colonialism.