Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and Biopower: The Carceral Trajectories of Canada's Forced Removals of Indigenous Children and the Contemporary Prison System

For seven generations, the Canadian settler state sought to take Indigenous children from their parents and home communities, to a network of residential schools, where the goal of the state and the four main Christians churches was to destroy all that was Indigenous in these children. A key purpose was to make Indigenous peoples, alongside their sovereign rights to land, language, spirituality, and governance disappear. As this system wound...