ABSTRACT
In this chapter I analyse regulations and policies that guide child welfare practices, taking as my starting point that child protection is an ontological issue. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day and I review the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. I conclude that anti-Indigenous violence continues in western Canada because of complex practices and processes that, premised in great part on problems of ‘common sense’, (re)produce Indigenous people and places as rarified and othered geographies in constant but always changing need of protection and transformation.
