Governing Disappearance: Re-figuring Canadian Responses to Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls

This dissertation considers the history of Canadian policy responses to violence against Indigenous women and girls. I think through how these policy responses constitute processes that figure Indigenous women as objects of policy cut off from social relations and histories. In turn, these measures erase Indigenous agency and augment structures that sustain the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls. In this way, I expose how knowledge production is implicated within processes of disappearance and how relations of elimination are reproduced within policy responses to violence. I argue that settler-expert discourses subtly reassert state power through narratives of care by figuring Indigenous women and girls as “damaged.” I build upon Eve Tuck’s (2009) writing on deficit models of advocacy and Michel Foucault (1978) and Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis of knowledge production to interrogate the assumptions emerging from expert discourses and truth-telling commissions. My work also draws on critical insights from 15 key informant interviews to consider specific policies within four areas: social planning, harm reduction, human rights, and policing. With these theoretical and methodological insights, I undertake a discourse analysis to consider the figuration of Indigenous women across 17 government and nongovernmental reports from the 1960s to the early 2000s. I examine the creation of policy figures as a technique of governing. Through this work, I consider how expert discourses produce new policy figures and generated new techniques of regulation and surveillance that targeted Indigenous women and expanded outward to target Canadian society. My work finds that the downloading and privatization of public and social responsibility to the community and the individual persisted across the postwar period and were enduring facets of disappearance. Expert discourses of care were central in depoliticizing the assertions of Indigenous peoples and their allies while normalizing state power.