ABSTRACT
Socially marginalized young people disproportionately experience the delegitimization of child and youth grief due to many compounding factors, such as the inaccessibility of support services, intensified familial stresses due to structural inequalities, and exclusionary social discourses. Indigenous children and youth in Canada (and in other “settler-states”) are commonly confronted not only with many of these challenges, but also with pervasive discourses which deny, rationalize, or otherwise attempt to justify the ongoing colonial violence and dispossession that they experience. This chapter explores these dynamics of loss and disavowal by focusing upon their manifestations within the broad social arena of education. Employing a decolonial lens, historical and contemporary cases are examined to illuminate the manufactured nature of the losses that Indigenous children and youth incur, as well the discourses which mask this reality. Undertaking this form of decolonial analysis has the potential to enrich scholarly and practitioner understandings of how social and political contexts give rise to dehumanized and ambiguous loss and result in the disenfranchisement and dispossession of grief.
