« The captivity narrative (i.e., the settler woman out of the house) as settler crisis: Treva Elaine Hodges, The captivity narratives of Cynthia Ann Parker: settler colonialism, collective memory, and cultural trauma, PhD dissertation, University of Louisville, 2019
If settler colonialism is about reproducing a social body in the place of another, the settler polity is an empire of homes: Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘Reconsidering Domesticity through the Lens of Empire and Settler Society in North America’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1249–1266 »

The other captivity narrative (indigenous women in the house) as a settler story: Victoria Haskins, ‘Domesticating Colonizers: Domesticity, Indigenous Domestic Labor, and the Modern Settler Colonial Nation’, The American Historical Review, 124, 4, 2019, pp. 1290–1301

13Oct19

Abstract: The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate.


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