Five Centuries’ Material Reforms and Ethical Reformulations of Social Elimination

Abstract

I once worked in an institution where almost all the children were Indigenous. Many were children of survivors of “Indian Residential Schools,”¹ and all had a disability diagnosis or suspected diagnosis recorded in their files (Chapman 2010; 2012). In wondering about historical developments through which places like this had emerged, I was surprised to find that North American timelines of the educationally oriented confinement of intellectually disabled people and of the Indian Residential School system mapped neatly onto one another. In the 1840s, both systems emerged, and their abolitions both began in the 1960s. What can be made of this? What historical developments paved the way for these new sites in the 1800s, and what legacies live beyond their specific abolitions, making contemporary incarcerations seem natural, politically neutral, and necessary (Ben-Moshe 2012; A. Davis 2003; Drinkwater 2005; Snyder and Mitchell 2006)? This chapter maps out tentative answers to these questions, exploring the “moral economies” (Ahmed 2010; Thobani 2007) circulating within five centuries’ forms and reforms of social elimination, through reading “political rationalities” (Foucault 1994b, c) that narrate practices of power.