Holding the baby: Questions arising from research into the experiences of non‐aboriginal adoptive and foster mothers of aboriginal children (original) (raw)
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The Stolen Children: Their Stories: Aboriginal Child Removal Policy and Consequences
2021
From 1910 to 1970, the Australian government embarked on a policy of Aboriginal child removal which sought to acculturate Aborigine children of mixed descent into white Australian society. The 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, records the individual testimonies of hundreds of victims of child removal and argues that prolonged familial separation caused irreparable damage to native Australian communities. Carmel Bird’s edited version of the report, The Stolen Children: Their Stories, was published in 1998 to disseminate the report\u27s findings and advocate for legislative action. Her book includes the stories of seventeen individuals and responses to the original report from prominent politicians and historians
Resources for Feminist Research 28. 1.2.: 209-228. , 2000
In this essay, I reflect on the experience of interviewing a small group of non-Aboriginal women who adopted or fostered Aboriginal children in Australia, particularly focusing on the difficulties I faced as a white feminist, and considering my own methodology in light of its divergence from methods advocated in feminist research literature. As feminist researchers we need to be wary of formulating and adhering to a too rigid orthodoxy about what kinds of research are "feminist." Any hierarchy of feminist research methods may ultimately serve to delimit feminist inquiry in ways that we should resist.
Australian Historical Studies, 2016
While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and 'native' welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the paper identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation. In Australia the term 'child removal' is used almost exclusively in relation to Indigenous peoples, the corollary being perhaps that the removal of non-Indigenous children has been assumed to be both necessary and just. Historiographically, the treatment of the two processes has been kept largely distinct. Typically, Indigenous child removal is studied by scholars specialising in Aboriginal history. They view it as one aspect of racial discrimination and debate whether the practice is evidence of genocide. 1 Removals amongst the settler 1 Although there are many books and articles which now deal with the subject, the canonical text is Anna Haebich, Broken Circles (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). For 2 | P a g e population are dealt with by child welfare historians, for whom Indigenous children form a very minor strand in a wider field of study. 2 Much of the existing work in the latter area tends to focus on the rights of the child rather than the rights of the parents. 3 Trapped within a discourse in which the locus of fault was firmly placed upon the parents, historians note their relative powerless but tend to accept their guilt or erasure rather than explore the legal process by which the State claimed a right to guardianship of their children. debates around Indigenous child removal and genocide see: Shirleene Robinson and Jessica Paten, 'The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context',
Child & Family Social Work, 2020
The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children living in out-of-home care has more than doubled in the past decade. Research into the experiences of parents who have had their children removed is an emerging area; though very few of these studies are specific to Indigenous children and families. This paper presents a participatory research study that explored the experiences of a group of Aboriginal Australian parents who have had their children removed by child protection authorities in one Australian state, New South Wales. This paper highlights the challenges for Indigenous families navigating the child protection system, specifically the ongoing experience of feeling powerless following the removal of their children, and in creating environments that maintain quality relationships with their children. The paper then offers suggestions for supporting families in light of the findings.
2012
Since 1996 in Australia, significant attention has been paid to the legacy of past practices towards children who had been displaced from their families by poverty, crime, the loss of family or deliberate policy. In that time, there have been three major government inquiries into the treatment of children and each has made it clear that Australian governments and welfare agencies failed the children in their care. In February 2008, the Australian Government apologized to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations and in November 2009, it apologized to the child migrants and 'Forgotten Australians' for their pain and suffering. 2 It is a sad fact of life that some children cannot be raised by their parents, owing to tragic circumstances such as death, illness, accident; or complicated factors such as poverty or family breakdown. In such circumstances, governments and welfare agencies purport to perform a protective function, providing 'care' and, as was often argued in the past, 'rescuing' them from adverse circumstances. The inquiries gave voice to those who grew up under these systems and the apologies recognise that, all too often, the alternative 'care' provided by governments and welfare agencies was loveless and uncaring and, at its worst, abusive. It is time to ask why policies designed to be helpful simultaneously produced such harm. It must also be acknowledged that Australian governments and welfare agencies played active roles in separating children from their families, either by failing to, or choosing not to, support families in crisis, or deliberately removing children from families defined as aberrant, in order to improve society-while policy-makers often stated destitute children needed protection, quite often they just intended to Stolen Childhoods. Reforming Aboriginal and Orphan Children through Removal a...
White mothers, Indigenous families, and the politics of voice
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Ongoing histories of genocide, dispossession and child removal continue to shape the Australian nation. Speaking of such histories is fraught with racial power differentials that dictate which particular voices will be given space within public discourse. Examining how a ‘politics of voice’ is deployed within the writings of white academics is one important site for better understanding how it is that white voices continue to occupy a hegemonic position within the Australian academy and in everyday talk. In this paper I examine how particular representations of white foster/adoptive mothers of Indigenous children in Australia highlight the problematic nature of research seeking to represent experiences classified as previously ‘unspoken’. In examining the work of one particular white Australian academic I suggest that it is important that white academics engage in research practices that highlight, rather than overlook, matters of race privilege and which ground white people in histories of colonisation and in a relationship to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty.
Decolonizing Australia's Body Politics: Contesting the Coloniality of Violence of Child Removal
In this article I develop a critique of the continual historic and contemporary use of child removal to systematically pathologize and criminalize Black, Indigenous, and poor-white motherhood. I demonstrate how the technologies and rationalities put to work as part of the reproduction of the modern state, wound the body politic in ways that disarticulate the conditions of possibility of the political subjectiv-ity of the subaltern. I develop my critique as a re-reading of contemporary child removal in Australia through a decolonizing feminist perspective. Accordingly, I begin by demonstrating how the biopolitical attempt to produce the raced and gendered subject as a non-subject denied rights and rationality is co-constitutive of the foundations and continuing reproduction of settler-colonial societies, including that of the Australian state and polity, in the neoliberal period. However, I do not stop at this point, for this is to re-inscribe the subaltern in the logics of denial of subjectivity of coloniality. Thus in the second part of the article, emerging from activist scholarship with the Family Inclusion Strategy Hunter, Hunter Valley, NSW Australia – an organization comprised of families who have or are experiencing child removal, practitioners working in the out-of-home care and child protection sectors, and critical scholars that are united in their commitment to foreground the voices, knowledges, and perspectives of birth families in the practices, policies, and politics of child removal – I offer a critique through praxis of these dehumanizing state practices. I focus on three areas: Decolonizing Monologues of Intervention through Dialogues of Connection; Co-construction of Knowledges for Transformation; and Encounters across Borders: Embodying and Embedding Critical Reflexivity. My engagement foregrounds how these active processes of subjectivity of racialized subaltern mothers and families, and their allies offer emergent possibilities for a decolonizing politics which seeks not recognition within the " state " of things as they are but a radical disruption of the terms of the conversation as they have and continue to structure Australia’s state and polity. This praxical analysis and reflection contributes and extends our conceptualization of the feminization of resistance by bringing to the centre of our analytic and politi- cal attention the decolonizing epistemological and methodological aspects of this reinvention of emancipatory politics.