This article traces the colonial making of First Nations poverty in Canada through a Foucauldian and settler-colonial lens. Centered on the Cree concept k-ôh-kitimâkisiyahk (“the reasons why we are poor”), it argues that reserves, Indian welfare policy, and the Indian Residential School system operated as intertwined regimes of enclosure, discipline, and biopolitical control over First Nation populations. Drawing on policy history, archival material, and personal narrative, I show how Foucauldian logics of surveillance, moral judgement, and conditional assistance were first applied to poor settlers and then reworked to govern First Nations as racialized wards of the state. A prairie case study of on-reserve welfare in Manitoba illustrates how rationing, agricultural schemes, and postwar “integration” reforms consolidated chronic underfunding, dependency, and jurisdictional conflict that persist in contemporary on-reserve income assistance. The article further examines social work's implication in these welfare regimes. I conclude that First Nations poverty is not a policy failure but a deliberately structured effect of settler colonial governance.
DEBORAH G. YOUNG (Sun,) studied this question.