In history's shadow: Child welfare discourses regarding Indigenous communities in the Canadian Social Work journal
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Issue Date
2022-04-21
Editor
Authors
Schmid, Jeanette
Morgenshtern, Marina
Subject
Abstract
This article reviews all items in the Canadian Social Work journal over
its almost 90-year history that relate to child welfare practice in an Indigenous
context. We review the journal contents as a way of understanding the profession’s
voice, noting that a journal’s discursive practice reflects disciplinary discourse and
that this journal positioned itself as a platform for social work debates. Our analysis
contributes also to the truth-telling and accountability of social workers. While
around 10% of the 1500 journal articles focused on child welfare practice, only 9
of these 152 articles addressed child welfare practice with Indigenous children and
families. Our discourse analysis highlights that there was contemporaneous silence
regarding social work complicity in the residential schools movement, the Sixties
Scoop, and the current Millennium Scoop. In the 1980s, sustained critique around
the role of social work in perpetuating colonization began to emerge. The journal,
though, left child protection discourse unexamined and thus overlooked its role in
maintaining dominant Canadian child welfare practice. We suggest that White
supremacy and settler colonial discourses support the dominance of the child
protection discourse, and that part of decolonizing child welfare practice relates to
revealing and resisting these discourses and generating alternative decolonized
discourses.
Description
This article was originally published as: Schmid, J. & Morgenshtern, M. (2022). In history's shadow: Child welfare discourses regarding Indigenous communities in the Canadian Social Work journal. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Services, 13(1), 145-168. It is available at: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ijcyfs/article/view/20662