“Constructions of Settler-Colonial and Indigenous Childhoods in Print Culture” - Cheryl Cowdy
Channel: Bibliographical Society of Canada
Date: 2021-06-25

Cheryl Cowdy, York University

The white captive has long been recognized by scholars as a foundational figure of settler-colonial subjectivity in American literature, particularly in Indian Captivity Narratives (Derounian-Stodala and Levernier 1993; Namias 1993; Strong 1999). Scholars of American children’s literature have also interrogated the function of the figure of the captive white child in nation-building (Levernier 1979; Marienstras 2002; Kilcup 2014). The Captivity Narrative has a less prominent history in Canadian literary and cultural scholarship; yet as Andrew O’Malley has demonstrated, one of the earliest examples of Canadian children’s literature, Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852) invokes the captivity narrative when a settler child character is captured by a local tribe (O’Malley 72).

My research into the uses of captivity narratives in historical books for Canadian settler children seeks to redress gaps in representation while also considering the ethical imperatives of white settler scholars in the decolonization of children’s book history and culture. My paper explores the ideological work of the captive white child as a discursive figuration in post-Confederation Canada, placing this unique figuration of Euro-American settler childhood in the contexts of British imperialism and Canadian colonialism, most particularly, the implementation of the Indian Act in 1876. Tracing historical iterations of the trope in Canadian children’s literature and print culture of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, I argue that the captive child as “little white savage” is an ambiguous discursive construction of settler-colonial childhood that radically silences Indigenous childhoods, rationalizing the project of cultural genocide that targeted Indigenous children, capturing and removing them to Residential Schools for over a century.