The Indigenous Public Child and Neoliberal Settler-Colonialism: Theorizing the Intersections between the White Possessive and Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

Abstract

This article examines accountability discourses in Alberta’s legislative debates on child intervention during the years 2016–19. I demonstrate that the supposedly apolitical discourse of accountability functions as a form of neoliberal and settler-colonial governmentality that reaffirms the legitimacy of settler state intervention into the pathologized Indigenous family. Using the death of Serenity in Alberta’s child intervention system in 2014, and the subsequent legislative debates surrounding her death and the lack of accountability in the child intervention system as a case study, I demonstrate that accountability as both a discourse and a mechanism moves between positioning Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as-Responsible-Agents. Ultimately, I argue that shifting discourses of accountability, which move from governmental to societal to individual accountability, re-centre a relationship of settler possession in relation to the Indigenous Public Child, whose life and death become available for consumption by settler publics in exchange for governmental credibility and accountability.