Description
White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 authored by Margaret D. Jacobs professor of history at University of Nebraska compares the boarding school experiences of Native Americans and the experiences of forcibly removed and placed-out Aboriginal children in Australia. This history examines the key roles white women played in these policies of Indigenous child-removal. Government officials, missionaries, and reformers justified the removal of Indigenous children in particularly gendered ways by focusing on the supposed deficiencies of Indigenous mothers, the alleged barbarity of Indigenous men, and the lack of a patriarchal nuclear family. Often they deemed white women the most appropriate agents to carry out these child-removal policies.