Inappropriate settlers: Jamie Marie Lukow, Inappropriate Settlers And East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction Of The British Home Children, MA dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Inappropriate settlers: Jamie Marie Lukow, Inappropriate Settlers And East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction Of The British Home Children, MA dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2024

10Oct24

Abstract: This project captures the intricacies of the BHC movement’s eugenic philosophy from the British perspective starting in 1868, charting its origins within Poor Law policy and Galtonian theory, as well as establishing its pervasive presence within in the works of Thomas Barnardo and William Booth. For this research, I utilize dozens of primary and secondary sources including, but not limited to, the entire collection of Dr. Thomas John Barnardo’s self-funded publications and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. I also demonstrate how the eugenic philosophy undergirding the British Home Children Movement originated in Britain. Inappropriate Settlers and East End Heathens: The Philanthropic Abduction of the British Home Children. This project establishes the survivors of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial anomalies whose complicated identities as well as resistance to settler colonial constructs contributed to their mistreatment in the settler Dominion of Canada. Undergirding this research are primary and secondary sources in the form of periodicals, philanthropic publications, and personal testimonies which illuminate how the Home Children’s experiences share drastic similarities with the First Nations Children forced into residential homes across Canada. My research also incorporates the works of immigration and British Poor Law scholars like Sally Brooke Cameron and Lydia Murdoch to establish the transatlantic tensions which rendered the subjects of the British Home Children Movement as settler colonial outcasts with no home or heritage. This parallels the First Nations Children of Canada who were abducted from their families, dispossessed of their heritage and homelands, and shunned by the invading settler community. In its paying attention to the Home Children’s abductions, institutionalizations, and burials within mass unmarked graves across Canadian provinces, this project challenges the settler colonial binary and reestablishes the Home Children as what historian Patricia Rooke calls “inappropriate settlers.”

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