Please join us for the Arthur Lower Workshop featuring Dr. Kristine Alexander, entitled “Age, Settler Colonialism, and Canadian History.” Workshop attendees should read and be prepared to discuss Dr. Alexander’s paper. To obtain a copy, please contact Steven Maynard (steven.maynard@queensu.ca) by March 4.
This paper offers some initial thoughts about my current research about how “common sense” ideas about childhood and adulthood shaped settler colonial politics and the history of Indian policy in northern North America between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Historicizing and problematizing taken-for-granted assumptions about the political value of (implicitly white and masculine) ‘adult’ autonomy, this work uses Ishita Pande’s concept of the liberal epistemic contract on age (“an implicit agreement that chronological age is a universal and natural measure of human capacity and hence of legal and political subjectivity”) to think more critically and intersectionally about the “developmental logic,” “fatherly eye[s],” and “doctrine of Aboriginal infantilism” that have been noted in passing by scholars like John Milloy, Robin Jarvis Brownlie, and J.R. Miller.
Kristine Alexander teaches in the history department at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (UBC Press, 2017), which received the Wilson Prize and the Canadian History of Education Association Founders' Prize. She is also the co-editor of Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (MQUP, 2023) and A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her current SSHRC-funded book project, Children of the State, brings the insights of critical childhood studies to bear on the history of liberalism, whiteness, and settler state formation in nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada.
