Surveilled and segregated: A Foucauldian inquiry into colonial welfare and First Nations poverty in Canada

Abstract

This article traces the colonial making of First Nations poverty in Canada through a Foucauldian and settler-colonial lens. Centered on the Cree concept k-ôh-kitimâkisiyahk (“the reasons why we are poor”), it argues that reserves, Indian welfare policy, and the Indian Residential School system operated as intertwined regimes of enclosure, discipline, and biopolitical control over First Nation populations. Drawing on policy history, archival material, and personal narrative, I show how Foucauldian logics of surveillance, moral judgement, and conditional assistance were first applied to poor settlers and then reworked to govern First Nations as racialized wards of the state. A prairie case study of on-reserve welfare in Manitoba illustrates how rationing, agricultural schemes, and postwar “integration” reforms consolidated chronic underfunding, dependency, and jurisdictional conflict that persist in contemporary on-reserve income assistance. The article further examines social work's implication in these welfare regimes. I conclude that First Nations poverty is not a policy failure but a deliberately structured effect of settler colonial governance.

Remembering and memories

Lee Maracle (2015) writes “To re-member is, first, directional. Indigenous people commit to memory those events and the aspects of those events that suit the direction we are moving in or the direction we want to move in if a shift is occurring” (2015: 2). And so it is with my memories that I begin with. Many years ago, I was having afternoon tea and bannock, a type of unleavened bread, with my auntie. She was reflecting about a time when our ancestors were hunting and trapping, picking medicines, speaking our Cree language, and living on the richness of our traditional territories that were once filled with natural resources, clean water, animals, and berries. She then turned to me and asked: “How is it, my girl, that our people who were once vibrant, proud, and self-reliant became the poorest of the poor in a span of 100 years?” I remember my auntie being genuinely perplexed by her own question as she tried to make sense of what happened to us, as every single First Nation person has been explicitly and implicitly touched by settler colonialism.

I was only a young teenager when I had this exchange with my auntie, and her words and question never left me – it was as if she planted a small, burning ember inside me that would eventually rage into a fire of inquisitiveness. Her straightforward and seemingly simple statement on poverty shaped my scholarly curiosity about why, when, and how First Nations became the poorest of the poor when we at one time lived and thrived on the richness of the land and its natural resources long before the settlers came.

Introduction

Informed by Foucault's theories of power and biopolitics, I argue that the creation of reserves, the implementation of distinct and separate welfare programs for “Indians” on reserves, and the powers vested in Indian Agents mirrored disciplinary institutions such as prisons and Indian Residential Schools – structures designed not to support but to monitor, regulate, and ultimately assimilate First Nations peoples and children. This article examines how colonial policy, treaties, and federal legislation functioned as deliberate biopolitical mechanisms to produce and sustain structural poverty among First Nations living on reserves. These colonial structures are k-ôh-kitimâkisiyahk – the Cree term for “the reasons why we are poor” (McLeod, 2016: 38)

This article speaks directly to the fields of social work and social policy by critically examining how colonial policy has historically operated as a tool of domination and surveillance. Drawing on a Manitoba case study, I show how on-reserve welfare developed and how it continues to shape contemporary federal First Nations policy. By tracing these historical and policy trajectories, the article contributes to debates in critical social policy and settler colonial governance. It foregrounds how colonial welfare regimes continue to structure contemporary conditions of First Nations poverty and control, while also outlining implications for decolonial social work practice. In this context, social work is not a neutral profession: it carries a legacy deeply entangled with colonial governance and faces ongoing tensions commitments of equity, decolonization and reconciliation, and the institutional mandates that can reproduce and maintain harm. Kuokkanen (2008) states that decolonization is the “ongoing process of dismantling colonial regimes, structures, practices, and discourses” (2016: 143). Thus, understanding the historical construction of First Nations poverty through colonial policy is therefore not simply an academic exercise; it is foundational to more accountable, decolonial practice in contemporary social work and social policy.

Situating myself – who claims me?

For many First Nation scholars, our stories, lived experiences, and scholarship often weave together like a braid of sweetgrass, each strand giving meaning and substance to the other strands. For me, my interest in better understanding the rise of the on-reserve welfare state is grounded in both scholarly and personal perspectives. As a Cree social work scholar, I am interested in First Nation–settler relations, decolonization, reconciliation, policy, and evolution of social work in Canada.

In Canada, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, formal agreements were made between First Nations and the British Crown, known as the Numbered Treaties, which included promises such as reserve lands, annuity payments, and supports (for example – farming implements), in exchange for land-sharing or land-cession. There are eleven Numbered Treaties; my ancestors were signatories to Treaties 1 and 5. Both my maternal and paternal relations are Cree, and collectively our ancestral roots are embedded in the soil of what is now named by the settlers as Manitoba.

My maternal grandpa considered himself a farmer even years after leaving his First Nation to become a construction worker in the city, while my paternal grandpa viewed himself as a hunter and trapper in the North. He later became an activist for education and language rights, a Chief, and a respected Elder in our Cree community. Both my grannies were proud homemakers who managed the house, cooked, and cared for their very large families. Each of my grandparents, and our relatives before them, would have witnessed first-hand the impacts of reserve confinement, including the implementation of agricultural and welfare policies in First Nations. I often wonder what it would have been like to see through their eyes and to feel what they felt living a traditional way of life based upon Cree spirituality and belief systems before the impacts of settler colonialism began to dismantle our families, languages, and ceremonies, including the importance of land, berry, and sky teachings.

I am also an intergenerational Indian Residential School Survivor, as both my parents (along with their siblings) and my paternal grandpa, were taken from the comfort and security of their family and community and spent their childhood formative years at Indian Residential Schools. I have witnessed the damaging impacts of historical violence and trauma, and yet I marvel at the resiliency and strength of my grandparents, aunties, uncles, and parents who survived colonial government, education, and church systems designed to destroy the very essence of who we are - Cree. Acknowledging those who walked before me and owning my positionality as a Cree woman allows me to honor and pay respect to family, the Cree Nation, and everyone who has been harmed by settler colonialism.

Theorizing colonial Canadian welfare: Discipline, biopolitics, and the creation of “native” identity

I view colonial welfare in Canada as a set of intertwined disciplinary and biopolitical projects that seek to produce and govern “the native” as a particular kind of subject within a settler Canadian state as Mamdani (2012) describes “… the native is the creation of the colonial state: colonized, the native is pinned down, localized, thrown out of civilization as an outcast, confined to custom, and then defined as its product” (2012: 2–3). I use Foucauldian analysis of discipline whereby welfare institutions can be understood as intentionally created sites where docile bodies are watched, assessed, categorized, and trained in the name of care and improvement (Foucault, 1977: 197). Through case files, home visits, and eligibility rules, First Nations people were rendered legible to the state and folded into bureaucratic routines that aimed to cultivate “docile bodies” – subjects who would accept surveillance, internalize norms of work and family, and appear as compliant recipients of assistance. Discipline and docility in this sense is not only repressive; it is productive, generating a particular type of First Nation subjectivity that align with state visions of order, enforced submissively, and enslaved productivity.

Foucault's work on biopolitics is equally important for understanding colonial welfare. In Society Must Be Defended (Foucault, 2003) the notion of biopolitics, the reserve and welfare systems can be understood not only as disciplinary regimes that produce docile bodies, but also as techniques for managing First Nations life and death at the level of a population through the regulation of food, movement, health, and economic survival so that First Nation poverty itself becomes an instrument of settler governance. Biopolitics distinguishes between those whose lives must be protected and fostered and those whose lives can be exposed to premature death. Racializing discourses and practices are central here: race then becomes a way to divide the population, such that the death, containment, or deterioration of some is framed as necessary for the security and flourishing of others (Foucault, 1977).

Settler colonial scholars help to situate these disciplinary and biopolitical processes within a broader structure of governance (Morgensen, 2011; Nicols, 2014). Wolfe (2006) argues that settler colonialism is a structure rather than an isolated event, organized around a logic of elimination that seeks to erase Indigenous presence as a political and territorial claim (2006: 388). Mamdani's work complements both Wolfe's logic of elimination and Foucault's notion of biopolitics by showing how “the native” is produced as a juridical and political category through law, administration, and territorial regimes (Mamdani, 2012: 43–45). In Canada, the Indian Act, 1876, legislated status (who is a status Indian and who is not), created and maintained the reserve systems, and differentiated welfare and education reserve regimes, which are distinct and separate from provincial systems, and through state sanctioned legislation, Canada made First Nations as wards of the federal state: dependent, underdeveloped, and in need of supervision, yet also politically contained and segregated. Colonial welfare policy, in this view, is not a neutral response to poverty but a central mechanism through which “the native” is defined, governed, and repeatedly positioned as the racialized ‘Other’ of settler Canada.

At the same time, power within these created-federal regimes are never total. Foucault (1977) reminds us that “where there is power, there is resistance: power relations are always contested, negotiated, and unsettled” (1977: 280). First Nations people did not simply become docile objects of welfare policy and program directives; they resisted, refused, and reworked these interventions in multiple ways - by challenging decisions, withholding consent, mobilizing community networks, and strategically engaging with legal frameworks to secure resources and advance collective claims to lands, resources, and the protection of their children. Throughout the analysis that follows, I have use archival materials and policy to show that federal colonial policy not only managed but also disciplined all aspects of First Nation life from birth to death. This framing allows colonial welfare to be understood simultaneously as a project of genocide, elimination and control, and as a field in which First Nation agency and resistance persist.

Colonial production of on-reserve first nations poverty – k-ôh-kitimâkisiyahk

The Euro-Western colonial welfare regimes I have used in this analysis are rooted in Elizabethan models of poor relief, built on surveillance, moral judgment, and highly conditional assistance that were first directed at poor settlers and later imposed on on-reserve First Nations peoples. However, I argue First Nations poverty was not simply another instance of general deprivation because on-reserve welfare was designed as an additional colonial framework that targeted First Nations peoples as a racialized, political category who needed to be contained, transformed, and assimilated. While poor settlers might be stigmatised and scrutinised, they were not simultaneously governed as “wards” of the federal government, confined to reserves, or subjected to a comprehensive project of cultural elimination and targeted genocide of a people (MacDonald, 2019; Mamdani, 2020). To understand First Nations poverty in Canada, it is therefore necessary to move beyond generic accounts of class and marginalization and attend to the colonial mechanisms that deliberately structured First Nation dispossession of land and welfare dependency.

The dispossession of land and the creation of the reserve system which were often on small or agriculturally marginal tracts of less desirable land to agricultural settlers, severed First Nations from vast territories that had sustained complex economies, trade networks, and seasonal movements. Mamdani (2020) describes the purpose of land acquisition: “Engaging in a mixture of genocide, forced migration, and legal and economic coercion, white settlers and their governments systematically drained North American territories of their Indian inhabitants, so that the land could instead be owned and used by Europeans and their heirs” (2020: 38). This containment limited access to both traditional subsistence activities and emerging wage labour markets. It concentrated risk and underinvestment in particular places, while freeing up surrounding lands and resources for settler use. Poverty in these contexts was not merely a failure to participate in the modern economy; it was the predictable outcome of a deliberate strategy to displace First Nations peoples from their lands while offering only minimal, tightly controlled forms of relief.

The Indian Act, 1876, deepened this process by creating a distinct legal category of “status Indians” governed under federal legislation rather than provincial regimes. This jurisdictional arrangement positioned First Nations people as wards of the Crown, with entitlements and obligations defined through the Indian Act. Drawing on Nicols’ (2014) concept of the “settler contract,” we can see how this legal framework rests on a broader political fiction about the foundation of Canadian society. As Nichols explains, “the term settler contract references the strategic use of the fiction of a society as the product of a contract between its founding members only insofar as it is employed in these historical moments to displace the question of that society's actual formation in acts of conquest, genocide, and land appropriation” (2014: 102). Access to income assistance, health care, and other social programs was mediated through this settler contract - in this case, through First Nations’ distinct legal status - and frequently became the subject of federal–provincial disputes over who had responsibility to pay for which health or welfare services. In practice, this meant that on-reserve First Nations encountered chronic underfunding, fragmented services, and delayed or denied support. Poverty here emerges as a legal and administrative artefact: it is produced and sustained through the very frameworks that purport to manage it.

Education and child welfare policies further entrenched these dynamics. Indian Residential Schools and related institutions were explicitly designed to “kill the Indian in the child” by severing children from their families, languages, and lands (Churchill, 2004: 12–13). These so-called education institutions did not equip students with the skills or credentials required for equitable participation in settler labour markets; instead, they prepared First Nations children for low-wage, subordinate positions, while inflicting deep trauma and intergenerational harm. Subsequent waves of child removal through mainstream child welfare systems – often justified through racialized notions of neglect and unfitness – continued to destabilize kinship networks that had long functioned as primary systems of social protection and care. This forced removal of First Nation children from their homes and communities is known as the “60s Scoop.” Thousands of First Nations children were placed in white homes across Canada, the United States and in Europe; a child welfare practice that in fact extended well beyond the 1960s until the late 1980s (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), 2015: 138). The erosion of these networks intensified vulnerability to poverty while pathologizing First Nations families as the source of the problem.

Threaded through these policies were powerful currents of scientific racism and moral discourse that cast First Nations as inherently deficient, improvident, or incapable of managing their own affairs. These narratives justified both the imposition of intrusive welfare, Indian Residential Schools, and child welfare interventions, including the chronic underfunding of services on reserve. It also allowed policymakers to interpret First Nation poverty as the outcome of cultural or individual failings rather than as the predictable consequence of dispossession and exclusion. In this way, colonial welfare regimes did not simply respond to pre-existing poverty; it actively produced, legalized, and then moralized it.

These colonial logics did not end in the 1970s. Rather, they were reconfigured through later reforms. From the 1970s onward, the federal government increasingly devolved the administration of social programs, including aspects of income assistance and child welfare, to First Nations agencies and band councils. On paper, this move was framed as a gesture toward self-determination and community control. In practice, devolution often transferred responsibility without providing adequate authority, stable jurisdiction, or sufficient resources. First Nations organizations were tasked with implementing programs designed elsewhere, within tight funding envelopes and rigid reporting requirements, leaving the underlying structures of colonial welfare largely intact.

At the same time, broader shifts in social policy toward neoliberalism and welfare retrenchment reshaped the landscape of poverty management. Across Canada, social assistance was increasingly tied to activation, employability, and personal responsibility. These workfare logics were layered onto communities where colonial policies had systematically undermined employment opportunities, disrupted education, and constrained mobility. For First Nations, the demand to become self-sufficient within local economies that had been historically weakened by dispossession and resource extraction was not simply unrealistic; it reproduced the pattern of blaming First Nations individuals and families for conditions created by colonial policy.

Persistent jurisdictional conflicts between federal and provincial governments further extend these dynamics into the present. Disagreements over who should pay for income assistance, child welfare, housing, and other services for First Nations people continue to generate gaps, delays, and chronic underfunding. Contemporary legal decisions and political commitments that assert that no child should be denied services because of jurisdictional disputes are, in part, responses to this long-standing pattern of passing responsibility back and forth. The result is a durable structural architecture in which First Nations poverty is continually reproduced at the intersection of racialized law, territorial containment, and fragmented governance.

For many First Nations people, imposed reliance on welfare symbolizes not only a history of oppression, racism, and deception, but also everything that is wrong with the First Nations–settler relationship in Canada. This is so despite recent calls for reconciliation and increased public awareness of Canada's colonial history, documented in detail in the TRC reports (2015) and Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG, 2019). There was also a common belief that if First Nations suffered enough hardship - including starvation, as Daschuk's (2013) research uncovered - they would have little choice but to embrace a dominant capitalist market economy. Alfred (2009) describes how this colonially generated cultural disruption compounds the effects of dispossession, creating near-total psychological, physical, and financial dependency on the Canadian state. Colonial policies were thus used to justify the acquisition of First Nations lands to develop a market economy grounded in liberal ideology and individualism. First Nations were expected either to willingly embrace this philosophy or to have it forced upon them through oppressive systems, including the creation of the reserve system, restrictive agricultural policies, a punitive welfare state, and Indian Residential Schools targeting the most impressionable - the children.

Coulthard, a Dene scholar, applies a Marxist framework to demonstrate how economic and capitalist power relations, combined with land ownership, tore Indigenous societies and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood - the land (Coulthard, 2014). He describes the settler colonial relationship is defined by a particular form of domination: “that is, it is a relationship where power – in this case, interrelate discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial and state power – has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority” (2014: 7). Land becomes the unifying connector between colonizer and colonized, but what ultimately separates the two is who holds power over the distribution of resources; in other words, who controls the land.

Seen through this lens, First Nations poverty cannot be understood as an unfortunate residue of an oppressive era of the past; it is the cumulative effect of a settler colonial welfare state that has, over generations, structured dispossession, dependency, and underdevelopment, while representing these outcomes as First Nation failures attributed to individual and community deficits. It is within this historically sedimented terrain that contemporary social work and social policy operate, and within which calls for reconciliation must be situated.

The Foucauldian Indian reserve

The creation of a state controlled Indian reserve can be viewed as organized surveillance and regulation of a population in the name of order, security, and the avoidance of conflict (Foucault, 1977: 141–142). Colonial structures, federal legislation, and Numbered Treaties were quickly put in place, pushing First Nations people onto parcels of land designated as reserves. The reserve system effectively removed First Nations people's access to their traditional territories, limiting land-based teachings, berry and medicine picking, and hunting, and severing relations with land as a source of sustenance, governance, and knowledge.

Foucault's work in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is relevant here because he examines historical practices of punishment – from torture to forced labour – that laid the foundation for the modern penitentiary system, and I would argue that important parallels can be drawn between Foucault's analysis of the birth of the prison and the creation of the reserve, particularly in relation to power, identity, and settler colonialism. For Foucault, discipline is a form of social and economic control – a “policy of coercion” characterized by the calculated manipulation of behaviour (Foucault, 1977: 143). Discipline requires specific techniques: individuals are enclosed away from others (the prison), within further enclosed spaces (the cell), and the prison itself becomes a protected site of disciplinary monotony (Foucault, 1977). Enclosure enables authorities to enforce principles that oppose idleness and wastefulness, behaviours deemed morally and economically corrupt. Systems are put in place to dismantle and rebuild the moral character of the prisoner and to enforce the rule of God. These same Christian principles underpinned the colonial state's efforts to civilize and ultimately assimilate First Nations peoples into Canadian society.

The concept of enclosure is analogous to the reserve system, where First Nations people were placed, controlled, and their movements continuously monitored. Even the physical layout of many reserves replicates the logic of the prison: small tracts of land with run-down houses lined along a single main road to facilitate observation. Foucault's (1977) concept of panopticism refers to the surveillance of prisoners (1977: 195–197); in this context, First Nations people living within reserve boundaries were observed at every turn. Their movements were supervised and recorded by a hierarchical figure – the Indian Agent. The Indian Agent were appointed by the federal government to oversee every aspect of band governance and enforcing the Indian Act by controlling mobility, resources, and decision-making. Indian Agents were in place from the 1830s to 1969 (Reynolds, 2024).

The Indian Agent also wielded the power to label and define the identities of his “prisoners” (the reserve “Indians”) using binaries such as clean/dirty, worthy/unworthy, sane/insane, harmless/dangerous. Through federal legislation, he also had the power to determine who was, or was not, legally an “Indian.” This constant classification had profound implications for First Nations self-perception and community well-being. Indian Agents maintained continuous surveillance of their wards, creating a heightened state of consciousness and a sense of permanent visibility among First Nations people. This assured the automatic functioning of the Agent's power. Even when he was not physically present, his authority persisted - mirroring the panopticon tower, where “one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault, 1977: 202). Over time, panoptic surveillance and reserve enclosure produced “docile bodies,” the result of discipline and the point at which the “mechanics of power” are fully realized (1977: 199).

Foucault (1977) also outlines additional characteristics of disciplinary enclosure; first, there is the dismantling of collectivity: everyone is assigned an individual space. While Foucault refers to prison cells and solitary confinement, an analogy can be made to the reserve system, where individuals and families were allocated separate plots of land to manage and farm. At Indian Residential Schools, First Nation children experienced another form of solitary confinement, removed from the collective influence of their communities and families. Second, sites of enclosure must be functional, designed to correct behaviour through coercion and discipline. These spaces are used not only to supervise but also to disrupt communication between individuals and the broader collective. While Foucault's examples include prisons, hospitals, and factories, the Indian reserves, welfare offices, and Indian Residential Schools, which were built, imposed, funded, and regulated by both the federal government and the churches, clearly fit this model of subservience, surveillance, and isolation. Third, these disciplinary sites are mutually reinforcing and interchangeable: within this broader network of discipline, bodies are individually ranked, distributed, and circulated in ways that sustain colonial authority. In the Canadian context, the reserve, the welfare system, and the Indian Residential School together form a disciplinary – and later biopolitical – apparatus for managing First Nation life, labour, and mobility.

Taken together, the reserve, the Indian Agent, and the Indian Residential School illustrate how discipline, enclosure, and panoptic surveillance became central techniques of colonial governance. In the mid-twentieth century, these disciplinary arrangements were increasingly supplemented by welfare policies that targeted First Nation life at the level of the population – what Foucault would call a biopolitical management of poverty, reproduction, and dependency.

On-reserve welfare: A Canadian prairie case study

In this section, I trace the historical rise of on-reserve welfare and later use a Manitoba case example to show how these policies consolidated a punitive regime of care that continues to shape contemporary First Nation–state relations. The negotiation of the Numbered Treaties, and despite the promises made within each of the Treaties, it marked the abrupt end of traditional way of living for First Nations peoples. Treaties removed First Nations from the vastness of open territories to small, marginal tracts of enclosed land, much like Foucault's birth of the prison. A major commonality of all the Numbered Treaties was the emphasis on promoting on-reserve agricultural activity through the provision of land, hoes, spades, a wooden plough, livestock, and a horse and wagon. With hoe in hand, First Nations people began to till their land. Even though much of their reserve land was unsuitable for farming, many First Nations worked diligently to produce a harvest to feed their families and to sell for profit. However, because of colonial paternalistic policies, the isolation of many reserves, and the power of the Indian Agents made agriculture neither profitable nor sustainable for First Nations families. Perhaps one of the most damaging impacts of colonial policy on the Prairie First Nations farmer was the “permit system,” which required First Nations people to have a pass from the Indian Agent to leave the reserve (Buckley, 1992: 53). This requirement not only restricted their ability to hunt and gather outside reserve boundaries but also prevented them from selling whatever produce they had harvested from their farm fields to nearby towns. This, of course, contributed to increased reliance on the state and a call to establish an on-reserve welfare system.

Indian welfare policy under the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development developed in three distinct stages. The first stage began in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when the federal government's attempt to implement an agricultural regime on reserves had failed. This failure cannot be attributed to First Nations peoples; historical evidence shows that, despite significant challenges, First Nations farmers persevered. Their efforts were consistently undermined by restrictive colonial policies that limited access to tools, markets, and land. During these years, Indian Agents reported dire conditions of extreme hardship and starvation on reserves (Daschuk, 2013). Federal officials in Ottawa initially dismissed these reports, operating under the assumption that Treaty promises of farming equipment would lead to economic independence - even as the Department's own policies ensured that First Nations farmers would struggle. Eventually, the Department had little choice but to adopt a rudimentary ration system for destitute First Nations. This system, intended as a temporary measure, became the backbone of Indian welfare administration for the next fifty years, institutionalizing on-reserve poverty as an object of ongoing management.

The second stage of Indian welfare policy evolved gradually during the 1950s but shifted direction in 1958 with a policy change that provided relief through cash payments and credit vouchers instead of food rations. This change reflected an ideological shift in the Department's thinking, heavily influenced by social scientists and academics who were advancing modern social work philosophy and practice. The Department now claimed to place more responsibility on First Nations to manage their own affairs and to maintain “the morale and self-respect of persons who must accept help” (Department of Indian Affairs, 1957–1958). In practice, this marked a move from overtly paternalistic rationing toward forms of “self-help” that continued to operate within tightly controlled welfare arrangements. A key development in this era was Jean H. Lagasse's 1959 socioeconomic study of the Indian and Métis population in Manitoba. The Lagasse study made three important contributions to federal thinking: first, it promoted integration (rather than explicit assimilation) as the guiding objective; second, it offered a detailed analysis of the “Indian program,” reinforcing the notion of welfare dependency as a central policy problem; and third, it recommended that the “Indian problem” could be alleviated through a new, ostensibly progressive strategy of “community development.”

The years 1960–1967 comprised the final stage of the Department's Indian welfare policy in this period. Two major developments occurred. First, the Special Joint Committee on Indian Affairs (1960–1961) reviewed the federal government's Indian policies. The tone of these hearings resembled that of the 1946–1948 Joint Committee hearings on the Indian Act, and many presentations were highly critical of the Indian Affairs Branch's approach to welfare. Nonetheless, the hearings helped consolidate a further ideological and political shift in federal thinking: the emphasis would no longer be on assimilation, but on the integration and advancement of First Nations within a settler society.

Many of the Committee's presentations and recommendations echoed the Lagasse study's conclusions, calling for a comprehensive community development program. In response, the federal government laid the groundwork for one of its most ambitious undertakings - the 1964 Community Development policy. The Department insisted that the success of this policy depended on the active participation of First Nations people themselves, as “it represented purposeful change in the initiative of the community and must arise out of the needs of the community as seen by its members” (Holmes, n.d.). This rhetoric of Indians “helping themselves” became the driving rationale for subsequent policy development, even as the state retained control over funding, direction, and evaluation.

Two major policy initiatives occurred between 1964 and 1969. In 1964, Canada launched a comprehensive survey of the socioeconomic conditions facing First Nations living on reserves. A commission of experts, government officials, and academics was appointed to study these issues; notably, no First Nations person was invited to participate. Chaired by Dr Harry Hawthorn (1966), the study became known as the “Hawthorn Report.” When the Commission concluded its work in 1967, it called for sweeping reforms to the delivery of welfare programs for First Nations, including a recommendation that provinces become directly involved in providing social assistance on reserves. This new arrangement, it was argued, would facilitate a smoother transition from reserve to urban settler life.

Building upon the central themes of the Hawthorn Report, the second major development came in 1969 with the release of the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, which quickly became known as the “White Paper.” The White Paper argued that the continued application of “special status” for First Nations people obstructed equality and successful integration into mainstream settler Canada, and that special status should be eliminated. The White Paper's proposals to eliminate “Indian status” and dismantle Treaty-based obligations in favour of integrating First Nations into provincial social welfare systems, First Nations organizations and leaders across the country organized a rapid and sustained response, which provoked widespread outrage in First Nations.

From coast to coast to coast, First Nations leaders prepared well-articulated counterproposals challenging the policy. Many of these responses articulated early visions of reconciliation and proposed ways to rebuild and transform relationships between governments and First Nations. The Indian Association of Alberta's (1970) Citizens Plus (often called the “Red Paper”) and similar position papers from other First Nations organizations rejected the White Paper's assimilationist logic and insisted on treaty rights, inherent sovereignty, and community control over all First Nations programs and services. This resistance not only forced the federal government to withdraw the White Paper but also contributed to later shifts toward recognizing Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and to the gradual expansion of First Nations control over education, health, and social service delivery. In this sense, First Nations did not simply receive social policy as “docile bodies”; they actively contested, redirected, and re-authored the trajectory of Canadian social policy.

Media coverage and broader public support strengthened this opposition but sustained First Nations resistance forced the federal government to reconsider its position. In 1970, after a year of intense criticism and mobilization, the federal government shelved the White Paper. What remained, however, was a punitive on-reserve social assistance system - shaped by rationing, “self-help,” and community development discourse - that continued to marginalize and discipline First Nations peoples under the guise of integration and modernization.

Social work, colonial welfare and contemporary practice

Social work is not an external nor noncompliant observer of the Canadian welfare state (on or off reserve) as I believe social work as a profession is complicit in the ongoing maintenance of settler colonialism. Throughout the twentieth century, social workers were at the frontline of colonial welfare regimes, visiting homes, assessing families, and determining eligibility for assistance or child apprehension and removal. They functioned as the caring face of the state, translating policy and programs into everyday decisions about who counted as deserving or undeserving, fit or unfit, salvageable or beyond help. In the context of First Nations, these decisions were made within a framework that already constructed First Nations peoples as wards of the state and as a problem population to be managed as Shewell (2004) writes that many Canadian settlers also rely on racist, stereotypical troupes: “Indians are lazy, welfare has made them lazy, they have to stop drinking, they should get a job, they should leave the reserve – in short, they should be like us [white people]” (p. 105). Therefore, any contemporary discussion of social work's role in decolonizing practice must therefore begin from the recognition that the profession has been deeply entangled in the governance of colonial poverty enmeshed in racist ideologies, particularly in the areas of child welfare, family regulation, and income assistance.

Many of the technologies of surveillance and categorization that shaped earlier welfare interventions have contemporary analogues in social work practice. Historical forms of home inspection, character assessment, and moral judgment have not disappeared; they have been reshaped into standardised risk assessment tools, eligibility criteria, and case management systems. Social workers today routinely complete structured risk scales, safety checklists, and needs assessments that sort families into categories of high or low risk and that determine the intensity of intervention, the likelihood of child removal, and access to supports. These tools appear neutral, but they inherit and reproduce earlier assumptions about what constitutes a safe home, a good parent, or a properly organized family. In First Nations, where overcrowded housing, unemployment, and health inequities are themselves the products of colonial policy, these criteria disproportionately flag First Nation families as risky and deficient, even as they obscure the structural conditions that generate such risks.

Neoliberal restructuring has intensified these dynamics. As income assistance and social welfare programs have shifted toward activation, employability, and personal responsibility, social workers have been tasked with ensuring that clients comply with work requirements, treatment mandates, and behaviour contracts. In many First Nations, social workers operate in settings where employment opportunities are scarce, housing is inadequate, and funding is precarious, yet they are required to enforce conditions premised on the availability of stable work and services. Devolution has also transferred program delivery to First Nations agencies and organizations without necessarily resolving the underlying issues of jurisdictional conflict and chronic underfunding. Social workers in these agencies may have greater cultural and relational proximity to community members, but they are still constrained by funding formulas, reporting requirements, and program designs established within a settler colonial welfare state.

These continuities generate profound tensions for practitioners. Social workers are often committed to principles of social justice, cultural safety, decolonization, and reconciliation, yet they work inside institutions that continue to produce and manage the very inequalities they seek to address. First Nation social workers may find themselves in a double bind: expected to act as brokers of reconciliation while implementing policies that remove children, police families, or deny services because of jurisdictional constraints. Settler social workers may experience moral distress as they recognize the disjuncture between commitments to anti-oppressive practice and the everyday demands of risk management, compliance monitoring, and cost containment. Decolonizing practice, in this context, risks being reduced to a matter of individual attitudes, cultural competence, or equity training while the structural conditions of colonial poverty remain untouched.

Thus, decolonizing social work practice requires practitioners to actively unsettle the colonial welfare arrangements that continue to organize helping systems. This means building historical literacy about social work's entanglement with Indian Residential Schools, child welfare, and the governance of poverty, and then translating that knowledge into everyday practice by scrutinizing how assessments, eligibility rules, risk frameworks, and organizational common sense reproduce older logics of surveillance and control. Decolonizing practice also involves materially shifting power: aligning practice with First Nation-determined laws, services, and governance so that authority over decisions affecting children, families, and community well-being is located with First Nations rather than delegated through state systems.

At the level of policy, the implications are equally significant. Addressing First Nations poverty and over-involvement in child welfare cannot be achieved solely through better training or more culturally appropriate programming if funding regimes, jurisdictional arrangements, and legislative frameworks continue to produce scarcity and conflict. Social workers and social work organizations have a role to play in advocating for reforms that align resources with need, honour First Nation jurisdiction, and move beyond federal–provincial disputes that delay or deny services. This includes supporting policy changes that address housing, income, and land restitution as central to child and family well-being, rather than treating these issues as external to social work.

In sum, situating social work within the history of colonial welfare illuminates both the constraints under which practitioners operate and the possibilities for transformation. The practices of surveillance documented in earlier periods persist in contemporary assessment, risk management, and funding structures, even as they are rebranded in the language of evidence-based practice and managerial efficiency. For social workers committed to their decolonizing practice, the challenge is to navigate these structures critically: to recognize when their work reproduces colonial logics, to use their discretion to resist and mitigate harm where possible, and to align themselves with First Nation-led movements that seek to remake the conditions under which care, support, and social rights are defined.

Conclusion

The Canadian government made treaty promises of land and farming implements under the guise of benevolence, but I argue that the deeper intention was to remove First Nations people from their traditional territories and advance Canada's project of genocide, elimination, and assimilation. First Nations children were central to this project: they were taken from their families and communities and placed - often thousands of miles away - into Indian Residential Schools. Contrary to the myth that reserves, agricultural programs, and schooling created the conditions for economic independence, these systems produced separateness, isolation, and poverty that drove communities into reliance on welfare - a narrative that remains painfully alive today.

Early forms of on-reserve welfare were fashioned as tools of social and economic assimilation, especially after the failure of on-reserve agricultural policy. In the postwar era, officials recast Indian welfare policy as a pathway to integration into mainstream settler society, drawing on the language of modern social work and community development. Yet these initiatives were never able to escape the paternalistic assumption of caring for the poor, helpless Indian. Program philosophies, administrative structures, and funding arrangements remained rooted in colonial logics of control. There have been no dramatic shifts in the underlying structure or philosophy of this welfare regime since the early 1970s, and First Nations continue to be among the poorest of the poor in a country rich in natural resources and boasting a strong economy.

Recent reforms to federal on-reserve First Nation income assistance attempt to address some inequities in this broken system, but they leave the fundamental architecture of colonial welfare largely intact. The program remains fragmented, underfunded, and constrained by federal designs and provincial objectives – even when delivered by First Nations administrations. Effectively addressing so-called “welfare dependence” is therefore not simply a matter of program redesign; it requires confronting the deep roots of the system in settler colonialism and racialized governance. Any meaningful transformation must begin from First Nations self-determination, with communities leading the design, rebuilding, and implementation of systems that reflect their own priorities, laws, and resource development.

My quest to answer my auntie's seemingly simple question – “How is it that our people who were once vibrant, proud, and self-reliant became the poorest of the poor in a span of 100 years?” - has taken me down a difficult and deeply personal path. I have come to see that reliance on welfare is not a cultural failing but the outcome of a long and complicated history of policy and program decisions that are intertwined with the making of settler Canada itself. My modest investigation into the onset and evolution of the on-reserve welfare system is an attempt to answer my auntie, but it is also a story for all my relations: my grandparents and parents, my aunties and uncles, my own son and daughter, my grandson, my relatives before them, and the generations yet to come. It is a story not only of dispossession and control, but also of strength, resistance, resilience, and continuing First Nations identity.

The answer to my auntie's question is neither easy nor tidy - because the question itself is not. This journey has led to more questions about how we might unsettle colonial welfare regimes and imagine other futures grounded in First Nation sovereignty and relational accountability. Sometimes, tea and bannock with a loved one are all I need to acknowledge my Cree identity, my connection to family and land, and to be courageous and inquisitive enough to begin telling this story from a First Nations voice, into the heart of critical social policy debates.