Laurie Denyer Willis (Edinburgh): Instructing Settler Families in Canada: The Imperial Order Daughters of The Empire and the Toronto Preventorium as a eugenic experimental site
| Dates: | 23 September 2024 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Laurie Denyer Willis |
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Based on archival research and family-interviews, I consider the “Preventorium” as an early institution for making and instructing white settlers in Canada in the early to mid-1900s. Preventoriums were institutions run by The Imperial Order Daughters of The Empire (IODE). They housed white children taken from their families due to possible exposure to tuberculosis. Children were kept in residential facilities, away from their families, where strict regimens of what was considered healthy & ‘normal’ living were taught, premised in notions of tuberculosis as emerging from dirty households – in both material and moral terms. The stated goal was to “Canadianize” them, or in other words to instruct them/rescue them into becoming good and proper settler Canadians. Residential preventoriums should not be understood in the same way as the Indian Residential School System in Canada, a process of child theft that has accurately been recognised as genocidal. Rather, I look at the child removal practices happening at the Preventorium as a form of instruction rather than destruction. Here child removal was carried out to build up the white settler family, rather than break it down and tear it apart. Working with pseudo-science eugenic ideas of subraces within whiteness, The Imperial Order Daughters of The Empire ran Preventoriums as spaces for making and managing desirable white settler families: eugenic experimental sites.
Speaker
Laurie Denyer Willis
Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Hanson Room
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
