Criminology's Time: Settler Colonialism and the Temporality of Harm at the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg, Canada, 1958–1973

Abstract

This article examines the delimiting role time plays in criminological research, especially with respect to historical studies related to genocide in a settler-colonial context. In short, we argue that criminological temporalities often exclude forms of collective destruction defined by a more complicated duration or scope. We do this through investigation of Canada's residential school system, with specific attention to a single Indian Residential School (IRS) within this system, the Assiniboia Residential School (ARS) in Winnipeg. Assiniboia was different than other residential schools in Canada because, despite playing a role in Indigenous assimilation, students experienced more freedom and less abuse than was characteristic of other schools. We argue that grappling with an institution such as Assiniboia, as part of an experience of state crime, requires that the notion of crime as a temporal event, or as the outcome of a linear criminogenic process, be challenged and opened to concepts of time that are pulsating, uneven and persistent within a broader settler-colonial mesh.

The Crime of Crimes

“…The UN's legal definition of genocide also leaves out the systematic destruction of culture and language, or "cultural genocide", even if the intent to destroy the group in part or whole is the same (United Nations, 2019). Woolford and Hounslow (2018) explain how the creator of the term "genocide", Raphael Lemkin, intended for systematic cultural destruction to be considered simply another method of committing genocide, not a separate typology.…”

“…In other words, the backward analysis that criminologists usually apply to genocide typically leads to a disregard for the multiple evolving factors that can contribute to the process in which genocide is carried out. This retrospective lens can also lead to a less contextual view of genocide, as Woolford and Hounslow (2018) explain. "Criminology too frequently tends to treat its research objects as singular events separated from the ebb and flow of time" (p. 216).…”

Historical Gendered Institutional Violence: A Research Agenda for Criminologists

“…Other jurisdictions have also grappled with the legacies of institutional abuse, including Northern Ireland (McCormick & O’Connell, 2021), Australia (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017) and Canada (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). Across these international comparators, with some honorable exceptions (e.g., McDonald, 2020; Woolford & Hounslow, 2018), there is arguably a similar criminological silence. We therefore make no claims for Irish exceptionalism.…”