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Budapest W8: Performing Arts - The psychiatrisation of our children


 B. A. LeFrançois, “The Psychiatrization of Our Children, or, an Autoethnographic Narrative of Perpetuating First Nations Genocide through ‘Benevolent’ Institutions,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1), 2013

The author lists their fluid identity associations and discusses their whiteness and adultness which are fixed and visible.

"From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, Indigenous children were taken from their communities in an alarmingly high rate and placed in (mostly) white foster homes; buses were sent to reserves and were filled with the children from these communities. Not surprisingly, this was experienced as traumatizing for children, parents, extended family, and community members alike." p.112

 "This removal into white foster homes and residential schools ensured that these children would not learn cultural approaches to parenting, which would have been modeled for them if they had remained in their communities. This loss of traditional knowledge and culturally appropriate role models reinforces the white agenda of assimilation within the logic of genocide." p.112

 "The provision of so-called culture-specific treatment facilities provides added weight in the request for funding to institutionalize First Nations children outside of Canadian borders, which both blurs and widens the boundaries of—and who is targeted as inmates for —the prison industrial complex (Smith, 2005)." p.114

 "I am reminded of other ways in which the institution of child protection reproduces and reinforces the violence of psychiatrization." p.115

 "It is through these discourses surrounding white identity and ‘benevolent’ institutions that the ‘good’ social worker is formed: one who reconstitutes the social relation of dominance and subordination with racialized and colonized others." p.116

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