White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler colonialism, maternalism, and the removal of Indigenous children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (review)

Margaret Jacobs’ history of Indigenous child removal in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia and the United States is thoroughly researched and broad-ranging. By making the connections between child removal, the takeover of Indigenous lands, the racialist dimensions of modern nation-building, and the maternalist politics of white female reformers, Jacobs places Indigenous child removal firmly at the center of American and Australian settler-colonial history. At the same time, in focusing on the role of women and exploring the histories of child removal from a comparative perspective, Jacobs’ book extends the study of gender and empire and deepens historical understanding of settler-colonial relations in both countries.

For readers unaccustomed to thinking of the United States as a settler colonial nation, Jacobs begins by drawing the parallels between American and Australian histories of dispossessing Indigenous peoples and establishing new settler societies on their lands, while noting that Americans, unlike the British in Australia, did enter into treaties with Indigenous peoples. In her second chapter, Jacobs examines the formulation of Indigenous child removal policies, pointing out that in both post-Civil War America and post-federation Australia, officials came to view child removal as a means of solving the “problem” of Indigenous peoples’ continued existence in nations being redefined as modern, unified and white. The crucial difference was that in the United States, reformers framed removal as necessary to the cultural assimilation of Indian children into the American republic, whereas in Australia officials looked to removal as a means of facilitating the racial or biological “absorption” of Aboriginal “half-castes,” particularly girls, into the white Australian population. As a consequence American Indian children were returned from boarding schools to continue the work of tribal “uplift,” whereas in Australia “half-caste” children were removed permanently. In both cases, Jacobs stresses that removal was not a benign alternative to violence and military conquest but a continuation of settler-colonial efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, this time by breaking Indigenous children’s attachments to their kin and countries.

In Chapter 3 Jacobs turns to the work of the white female reformers who played such a crucial role in justifying Indigenous child removal. They did so, paradoxically as Jacobs shows, by representing Indigenous women as unfit mothers and homemakers, even as they used the mantle of white motherhood to argue for a great voice in public policy for themselves. At the cost of Indigenous women’s rights, many of these women advanced their own careers as anthropologists, missionaries or government appointees in fields that had been occupied solely by men. Jacobs notes that American women, supported by stronger organizations and a tradition of evangelical reform, enjoyed more success in this regard than their Australian counterparts who lacked such support and faced stronger hostility from male officials.

The greater part of Jacobs’ study examines the experiences of white female reformers and the Indigenous children who suffered removal and institutionalization at their hands. With a wealth of archival material, Jacobs makes excellent use of personal stories to show us how removal worked at the level of intimate human relations. Throughout she tracks the parallels and differences between the two contexts. In her examination of child removal practices in Chapter 4, Jacobs finds that while removal was a traumatic experience for all Indigenous people, in the United States officials did at least raise the issue of parental consent and Indian parents tended to have more leverage. In Australia, by contrast, officials regularly took children without parental consent, often at a much younger age. In Chapter 5, Jacobs shows that in both countries white female reformers tended to engage “in tactical intimate associations with Indigenous families,” befriending and then betraying them in their commitment to the goal of removing and transforming their children.

Chapters 6 and 7 examine the institutions to which Indigenous children...