Re-educating representation : challenging Canada's colonial legacies of care

Building on a presentation I was invited to share for a Kilbrandon Children’s Research webinar on media representations of children and young people in the care and criminal justice system, I discuss here the legacies of Canadian ‘care’ practices premised on violent assimilation and erasure. Those legacies include the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in state care and the underrepresentation of Indigenous voices in the media. Drawing on the language of residential schooling, which sought to ‘re-educate’ Indigenous children through assimilation, I highlight the work of Indigenous creators to produce ‘an epistemic dawn’ (Claxton and Winton, 2023) of Indigenous knowing to imagine a potential ‘re-education’ of representation.