Honoring Our Ancestors

Abstract

The US social work profession has historically claimed primarily middle-class white women as the "founders" of the profession, including Jane Addams and Mary Richmond. Scholarship of the history of the profession has focused almost entirely on settlement houses, anti-poverty advocacy, and charity in the late 1800s in the northeastern United States as the groundwork of current social work practice. Courses in social work history socialize students into this historical framing of the profession and perpetuate a white supremacist narrative of white women as the primary doers of social justice work that colonizes the bodies and knowledge of Indigenous people and their helping systems. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the US have always had indigenous systems of social care. Yet, the social justice work of BIPOC, and especially Indigenous people in the US, is left out of the dominant narrative of the history of social work practice for several reasons including racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this paper the authors contribute to the critique of the role of white supremacy as a colonizing process in social work history narratives and discuss frameworks for decolonizing social work pedagogy through a reconciliatory practice that aims to dismantle white supremacy.

Igniting Pathways for Land-Based Healing: Possibilities for Institutional Accountability

“…In this reality, acknowledging the university's inescapable ties to the violence of coloniality, the accountability process in this space acknowledges the inability of the racialsettler colonial institution to offer meaningful amends or reparations for the damage it has been complicit in and benefited from (McCleary and Simard 2021). While efforts are made to acknowledge its role, stop ongoing harm, and offer attempts at ameliorating the effects of the harm, these are overtly contextualized as insufficient, yet necessary and important, in comparison to the suffering and pain caused by their existence.…”