ABSTRACT
The study of the colonization of aboriginal childhood cannot be undertaken in isolation from the study of the impact of colonialism on other central aspects of aboriginal social organization and culture, including native spirituality, economic and gender relations, ideas about law and justice, and the treatment and valuation of childhood. This chapter examines how aboriginal children in North America were viewed and treated by European colonizers in the period from first contact to the mid-nineteenth century. It looks at how aboriginal peoples may have viewed their own child-rearing practices, and at how they responded to missionaries’ efforts to control the education of their children. The chapter explores European images of aboriginal childhood reflected in the accounts of travellers, fur traders, and missionaries who visited and lived in the northern United States and western Canada before 1850, with an emphasis on encounters between aboriginal peoples and missionaries in and around the Red River settlement in western Canada.
