the indigenous public child and neoliberal settler

The Indigenous Public Child and Neoliberal Settler-Colonialism: Theorizing the Intersections between the White Possessive and Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

Miranda Leibel

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Journal of Canadian Studies • Revue d’études canadiennes

The Indigenous Public Child and Neoliberal Settler-Colonialism: Theorizing the Intersections

between the White Possessive and Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

MIRANDA LEIBEL

Abstract: This article examines accountability discourses in Alberta’s legislative debates on child intervention during the years 2016–19. I demonstrate that the supposedly apolitical discourse of accountability functions as a form of neoliberal and settler-colonial governmentality that reaffirms the legitimacy of settler state intervention into the pathologized Indigenous family. Using the death of Serenity in Alberta’s child intervention system in 2014, and the subsequent legislative debates surrounding her death and the lack of accountability in the child intervention system as a case study, I demonstrate that accountability as both a discourse and a mechanism moves between position-ing Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as-Responsible-Agents. Ultimately, I argue that shifting discourses of accountability, which move from governmental to societal to individual accountability, re-centre a relationship of settler possession in relation to the Indigenous Public Child, whose life and death become available for consumption by settler publics in exchange for governmental credibility and accountability.

Keywords: child intervention, reconciliation, accountability, transparency, neoliberalism, settler-colonialism, Public Child, governmentality, Indigenous child welfare

Résumé : Le présent article traite des discours sur la responsabilisation dans les débats législatifs de l’Alberta concernant l’intervention auprès des enfants entre 2016 et 2019. L’auteure démontre que le discours supposément apolitique sur la responsabilisation est en fait une forme de gouvernementa-lité néolibérale et coloniale qui réaffirme la légitimité de l’intervention de l’État colonialiste dans la famille autochtone pathologisée. À partir d’une étude de cas – la mort de Serenity dans le système d’intervention auprès des enfants de l’Alberta en 2014, les débats législatifs entourant sa mort et l’absence de reddition de comptes dans le système d’intervention auprès des enfants –, elle montre que la responsabilisation, à la fois discours et mécanisme, situe les Albertains tantôt comme victimes, tantôt comme parties prenantes et, finalement, comme agents responsables. En fin de compte, selon l’auteure, le discours changeant sur la responsabilisation, qui passe successivement de la responsa-bilité gouvernementale à la responsabilité sociétale puis individuelle, remet au centre la relation de possession du colonisateur par rapport à l’enfant autochtone confié aux services publics; la vie et la mort de ce dernier sont ainsi à la disposition d’un public de colonisateurs en échange de la crédibilité et de l’obligation redditionnelle du gouvernement.

Mots clés : intervention auprès des enfants, réconciliation, responsabilité, transparence, néolibéralisme, colonialisme, pupille de l’État, gouvernementalité, protection de l’enfance autochtone

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Advance Access Article 2021 This advance access version may differ slightly from the final published version

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Introduction

This article examines accountability discourses in Alberta legislative debates on child intervention during the years 2016–19, with a focus on the discourse of accountability as a mechanism of neoliberal settler-colonial governmentality. I examine legislative debates that emerged in response to the death of a young girl named Serenity in 2014 and the sub-sequent debates in Alberta’s Legislative Assembly. I argue that “accountability,” articulated as a nonpartisan issue and a core value of Albertan democracy, becomes a flexible signifier through which settler possession of Indigenous children is re-inscribed. Significantly, I assert that the discourse of accountability enables and organizes a form of governmen-tality that functions horizontally in neoliberal, settler-colonial Alberta. This form of gov-ernmentality emerges particularly in relation to the settler possession of the Indigenous Public Child, a term I use to build on Robbie Gilligan’s (2009) concept of the “Public Child” in order to complicate the notion of the “public” in the context of racialization and settler-colonialism. In order to make this argument, I first trace the term “accountability” in Alberta legislative debates on the issue of child deaths in the child intervention system over a three-year span (2016–19), examining its shifting and overlapping meanings, as well as the way it is positioned in relation to multiple political actors. I then argue that accountability is mobilized as both a discourse and a mechanism that legitimates the settler public as the most suitable manager of the Indigenous family.

Even as the meaning of “accountability” shifts from “holding the government accountable” to “holding Albertans accountable,” it reinscribes settler possession of Indigenous children. In the context of a United Conservative Party (hereafter “UCP”) governed Alberta, this shift reflects the devolution of accountability from governmental representatives and offices onto individual Albertans. Within provincial child intervention practices, this form of devolution must be considered within neoliberal governance of the family, in which power divests responsibility through delegation to increasingly lower lev-els, prioritizing the family as a central unit of governance (e.g., Harder 1996). Ultimately, I argue that shifting of accountability onto individual Albertans is reflective of an attempt to depoliticize accountability into individual responsibilization.

I use the term “the Indigenous Public Child” to advance the notion that Indigenous lives are taken on by the settler state as public property. When I began this research proj-ect, I was not expressly looking for instances of Indigenous child deaths within provincial child intervention systems, but rather was broadly looking at examples of accountability and transparency that emerge directly or indirectly as a result of child deaths. However, every case of a child death that resulted in large-scale public scrutiny involved an Indig-enous child in the child intervention system. There is, of course, no single causal factor in this process: One might look, for example, at ongoing efforts of Indigenous peoples to mobilize and demand government accountability (e.g., Blackstock 2016) and the history of


Indigenous child removal and its relationship to contemporary child intervention practices (e.g., Cull 2006; Sinclair 2007). I therefore argue that the crystallization of Indigenous trauma as something that belongs to all Albertans is reflective, rather than prescriptive, of a relation of settler possession.

Finally, I acknowledge that I am writing this article from the position of a white settler academic, and so my aim is to use my positionality to critique the management of the settler state. As a result, this article does not extensively discuss Indigenous perspectives of care, child welfare, and other forms of resistance to colonial violence. I do not believe it is my position to articulate these frameworks. Therefore, while I highlight some of the work done by Indigenous scholars and activists in relation to care, my critique is itself focused on the settler state and the constitution of settler publics.

Theoretical Foundations: Settler-Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and “the White Possessive”

This research cannot proceed without first centring the fact that Alberta is shaped by structures of settler-colonialism. Lorenzo Veracini argues that settler-colonial studies rep-resent a distinct area of colonial critique that pays particular attention to “circumstances where colonisers ‘come to stay’” (2013, 313). Elsewhere, Veracini argues that the distinct character of settler-colonialism (in comparison with other forms of colonialism) is that settlers act as “the founders of political orders and carry sovereignty with them” (2010, 3). Here, Veracini contends—and I agree—that settler societies function first in an attempt to eliminate Indigenous political and legal systems and subsequently by replacing them with their own. This process of annihilating other polities is part of the process of “settler indigenization,” through which settlers assert their legitimacy as native inhabitants of a territory and use these assertions to validate their own claims to the land as legitimate (Johnston and Lawson 2007; Veracini 2008), rendering Indigenous claims to sovereignty invisible and incommensurable with the settler-colonial ideologies of sovereignty, land, and property (Veracini 2010, 95). Evelyn Nakano Glenn similarly argues that “the object [of settler colonialism] is to acquire land and gain access to resources,” in particular, through the elimination of Indigenous nations and peoples and through the securing of land for settlers (2015, 55). In Canada, regimes of elimination took on different forms, including forced assimilation (most notably through the residential school system) (e.g., Sinclair 2016), forced sterilization of Indigenous women (e.g., Stote 2012), and historical and contemporary child removal practices (e.g., Richardson and Nelson 2007).

A key argument advanced throughout this article is that settler-colonialism has not always functioned in the same way throughout time and is not an ahistorical structure. In particular, in the context of this article, I examine the transformations of settler-colonialism through the lens of neoliberalism. Wendy Larner argues that

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neoliberalism as a political rationality is premised on five core beliefs: the individual as the central unit of politics; freedom of choice as the most significant form of liberty; market security; laissez-faire economies; and minimal government (2000, 7). In the con-text of social policy, neoliberalism contributes to an ever-devolving form of policy control, where social responsibility shifts to increasingly smaller units of governance (e.g., from the federal government to the provincial government to community associations and non-profit organizations). Ultimately, in relation to social policy, one of the primary goals of neoliberalism is the minimizing of costs associated with the maintenance and repro-duction of the social well-being of individuals.

Neoliberalization has had specific consequences for child welfare policy and practice. For example, the “re-familialization” of care work in the neoliberal context (Harder 2003) has resulted in an increased demand on families to be able to provide all-encompassing forms of care that were previously allocated to various welfare providers. Neoliberalism requires the state to increase its surveillance of families, while lessening the economic and social dependence of families on the state (McKendrick 2016). Families, especially pathologized families (e.g., Indigenous or racialized families, queer families, poor families, and single-parent families), increasingly come under surveillance.

The case study examined in this article cannot simply be understood through a com-bination of both settler-colonial studies and critiques of neoliberalism. Rather, I argue that neoliberal settler-colonialism is in and of itself a distinct manifestation of settler- colonialism and operates in ways that are unique from both historical forms of settler-colonialism and more generalized ideas of neoliberalism. The confluence of increased self-determination, cultural recognition, and devolution comes up against a reality in which “neoliberalism is fundamentally assimilationist … [because it] eschews cultural values that do not rest on a belief in unbridled individualism, and are instead built on social reciprocity and communal responsibilities” (Cunneen 2015, 33). Cunneen goes on to argue that

community-based approaches also face the danger inherent in the reframing of basic government obligations to meet human needs around housing, health, education, and employment. Rather than being seen as fundamental human rights, they become tied to a discourse about community and family responsibility for child protection and crime prevention. (2015, 33)

As the case study examined in this article reveals, the contradictory nature of assimila-tion and cultural recognition (in this case, the recognition of community responsibility and kinship practices) in the context of neoliberalism also enables individualization and re-sponsibilization in the form of surveillance. Many scholars of neoliberal settler-colonialism have noted this contradiction. For example, Elizabeth Povinelli argues that recognition of cultural difference is mobilized under neoliberalism in order “to provide the symbolic and affective conditions necessary to garner financial investment” and that “cultural


intolerance is [ultimately] a market matter” (2002, 42). Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez further argues that neoliberalism “has opened up space for the recognition of indigenous rights … [even as] this recognition has reinforced the authority of the state and produced zones of legal dissonance” (2018, 43).

The thread of recognition, I argue, is ultimately shaped by social investment capi-talism, which is a particular model of neoliberalism. As Denis Saint-Martin argues, the “emblematic figure” of social investment capitalism is the child (2007, 284). Saint-Martin further argues that “convergence does not mean uniformity, however. For different actors, the social investment model means different things” (2007, 282). Social investment cap-italism “is an institutional and political form centered around the future … by its focus on the child, the future worker of this new economy and the central figure around which social policy is reconstructed” (Saint-Martin 2007, 286). Furthermore, “an investment model also implies that social expenditures should have a payoff, a return on investment” (Saint-Martin 2007, 286). In the context of social investment capitalism “children matter because human capital formation matters” (Myles and Quadagno 2000, 27). As I demon-strate, however, the capital of the Indigenous Public Child is distinct from conventionally theorized human capital.

Significantly, social investment state comes up against what Aileen Moreton- Robinson (2015) has articulated as “the white possessive” of settler-colonialism. Moreton- Robinson argues that the white “possessive logics” of settler-colonialism refer to “a mode of rationalization … that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and affirming the nation-state’s ownership, control, and domination” (2015, 212). I therefore posit that social investment logics come up against the need to reaffirm the state as the most functional, competent, and logical manager of Indigenous children and families, and therefore the “investment” is not so much investment in Indigenous children as an investment in securing settler governance of child intervention even as it increasingly devolves to First Nations.

Context: History of Indigenous Child Removal in Settler-Colonial Canada

It has been well documented that state projects like the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop were violent assimilationist strategies, and, furthermore, that these strategies functioned directly through forcible removal of children and the attempted breakdown of Indigenous families (e.g., Cull 2006; Sinclair 2007; Stote 2012). This section of the article will therefore speak briefly to this context, before addressing the contemporary realities of child welfare in the settler-colonial state of Canada, as well as highlighting anti-colonial and decolonial resistance work taken on by Indigenous peoples.

The most well-known example of settler-colonial family regulation in Canada is the residential school system. Residential schools were a site of institutionalized violence

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in which Indigenous children were taken away from their families and re-educated according to settler notions of civility. Residential schools in Canada operated from pre-Confederation times until 1996 (National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation 2020). The purpose of residential schools was to “isolate, control, and reform” Indigenous peo-ples in order to assert and legitimize settler-colonial authority (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015, 133). In 1883, John A. Macdonald justified the practice of residential schooling by stating to the House of Commons that Indigenous

children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes and thoughts of white men. (Canada 9 May 1883, 1108)

An analysis of contemporary Indigenous experiences with child welfare in Canada begins with the residential school policy and the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families with the express goal of assimilation (Fontaine et al. 2015, 5). Estimates from the federal government suggest that at least 150,000 Indigenous children were subject to the residential school system (Fontaine et al. 2015, 6).

During the mid-twentieth century, the Canadian government began transitioning between the residential school system and provincially managed child welfare systems (McKenzie et al. 2016, 2). Rather than being placed in residential schools, Indigenous children were more likely to be adopted into white families, sometimes transnationally (Sinclair 2007). Rhetoric used to justify the Sixties Scoop closely mirrored that of resi-dential schooling, and it has been documented that apprehension and adoption was a favoured method of intervention because of its capacity to aid in the assimilation of Métis children (Patterson et al. 1965, 96). By the late 1960s, an estimated 30–40% of children in the Canadian child welfare system were children with Indian Status (non-Status and Métis children were not counted in these statistics) (Fournier and Crey 1997 cited in Landertinger 2017, 241).

As Raven Sinclair argues, however, “child intervention practices that emerged in the 1950s, referred to in retrospect as the Sixties Scoop, were the tip of the emerging iceberg of what is now the institution of Aboriginal child welfare” (2007, 68). Sinclair demonstrates that one of the key differences between the Sixties Scoop and the Millennium Scoop is that Indigenous “children are being institutionalized through long-term foster care and institutional care with little chance for adoption” (2007, 68). In 2011, an estimated 48% of children in Canada’s child welfare system were Indigenous, and in Alberta, where this case study had taken place, this number increased to 69% (Aboriginal Children in Care Working Group 2015, 7). These programs fundamentally reflect an attempt at state-managed social reproduction within the context of settler-colonialism.

It is also worth noting that a number of legal and political battles have taken place in order to address the chronic underfunding of child intervention services for First Nations


children in comparison with other children in Canada. Most notably, Cindy Blackstock, a Gitxsan activist and scholar, and founder of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, has been at the forefront of these battles. Blackstock has demonstrated that child welfare in Canada functions “as a two-tiered public service system where First Nations children get less” (2009, 2) In 2007, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (2016) and the Assembly of First Nations filed a human rights complaint against the Canadian government, arguing that the provision of child welfare services to First Nations children and families on-reserve is “flawed, inequitable, and thus discriminatory under the Canadian Human Rights Act.” The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal confirmed these findings, and, since their 2016 decision, “has issued seven compliance orders against Canada” (Assembly of First Nations 23 April 2020).

Given the issue of chronic and widely demonstrated underfunding of First Nations child welfare in Canada, it is worth revisiting the framework of the social investment state and the way this framework can be applied to the argument at hand. It is indeed a contradictory reality, in which the state continues to use the rhetoric of investment, espe-cially as it pertains to children, to justify transformations to the welfare system, while at the same time smoothing over the realities wherein discriminatory race-based funding practices permeate the system. However, throughout this article I argue that this contra-diction remains part of the work of the social investment state in the context of neoliberal settler-colonialism. In particular, I argue that the settler-colonial social investment state accords value to the Indigenous Public Child as the possession of the settler state as a form of capital that continues to legitimize settler rule.

Indigenous Practices of Care and Child Well-Being

Indigenous practices of child well-being pre-existed the settler state’s child intervention practices and continue to exist alongside ongoing child apprehensions. Jeannine Carriere and Cathy Richardson argue that “practices that encourage extended family care and community connection” are central aspects of a response to mainstream child welfare that emerges from a settler-colonial paradigm (2009, 52). Broadly speaking, Indigenous theorists of care practices emphasize the centrality of strong kinship relations for the well-being of children (e.g., Carriere and Richardson 2009; Youngblood Henderson 2000, 260) and foreground the reality that “We [Indigenous peoples] have kinship relations that transcend the Western notion of the nuclear family” (Carriere and Richardson 2009, 55).

Hadley Louise Friedland explores the concept of the Wetiko and child victimization through the lens of Cree and Anishinabek legal principles. Friedland argues that the Wetiko provides a legal basis for understanding how to address lateral violence and abuse within communities (2018, 46). Friedland demonstrates that the Wetiko acts as a legal framework and anchor to address how “we [Indigenous peoples], as a group, respond

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when someone among us, whom we may know and love, becomes dangerous or threatens imminent harm” (2018, 46).

Friedland’s analysis of Wetiko principles is one example of how Indigenous law, legal traditions, communities, and theorists are actively reclaiming and rethinking legal and social systems that provide the basis for addressing seemingly unthinkable forms of violence, like child abuse and child death. Friedland’s discussion of Wetiko principles also provides an alternative concept of accountability that exists outside of the kinds of neoliberal accountability discussed throughout this article.

Context for Legislative Debates: Serenity, Child Welfare, and Accountability in Alberta

Serenity is the name of a young First Nations girl who died in kinship care1 in Maskwacis, Alberta, in 2014, at the age of four. The details surrounding her death have been highly pub-licized in both media and governmental debates, and, as a result, I am actively refusing to re-publicize those details in this article and in any of my work, drawing on an Indigenous fem-inist methodology of refusal (Simpson 2007). Serenity has become a symbol of the failures of Alberta’s child intervention system, and her name was invoked not only in relation to her own death, but as a reminder of the flaws of the system and the lack of accountability within it. Serenity has also become emblematic of the colonial nature of Alberta’s child welfare sys-tem, and her name is often invoked to discuss the overrepresentation of Indigenous children within the intervention system, as well as the debates around culturally appropriate forms of intervention, including kinship care. The Government of Alberta established the Ministerial Panel on Child Intervention in 2017 as a direct response to the public scandal surrounding Serenity’s death and the highly publicized nature of the child intervention system’s failure.

An underlying argument of this article is that Serenity is evoked as a “Public Child” (Gilligan 2009) in reference to not only her own death and, broadly, to deaths within the child welfare system but also to the fact that she functions as a Public Child who has become symbolically representative of accountability (or the lack thereof) in public services in Alberta. I borrow the term “Public Child” from Robbie Gilligan, a social work scholar from Ireland who has worked extensively on child welfare and foster care; however, I am expanding the term’s critical edge in arguing that not all children in child intervention systems will become the “Public Child” in the same way. Serenity, like other Indigenous girls (e.g., Phoenix Sinclair and Tina Fontaine), becomes a public symbol of political dysfunction that is produced not only by Indigenous nations but also by white settler Canadians, and, as demonstrated in this article, particularly elected officials. The avail-ability of the Indigenous Public Child for political debate reveals a quality of possession or possessiveness on the part of settler-colonial Alberta.

An underlying assumption of this article, then, is that there is something distinct about the Indigenous Public Child that was not articulated in the Irish context from which


Gilligan writes. At once, the Indigenous Public Child is singular as an abject entity and also invoked as a universal child, in this case, the child of all Albertans, for whom all Albertans are responsible. The Indigenous Public Child is therefore at once the specific and the uni-versal. Serenity is continuously invoked as a child who could be any Albertan child: Wildrose Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Jason Nixon argues that Serenity’s death was “a major wake-up call for all in [the] Assembly and all Albertans” (5 December 2016, 2276), suggesting that the specifics of Serenity’s life and death were in fact something that could happen to any Albertan child at any time. At the same time, there is an underlying assump-tion that, of course, Albertans know that this could not happen at any time to any child in Alberta: Serenity was a First Nations girl in a province in which approximately 70% of chil-dren in the child intervention system are Indigenous (Office of the Child and Youth Advocate Alberta 2016); a First Nations girl placed in kinship care with First Nations family members, who were alleged to be responsible for her abuse and death (Wakefield 16 August 2019); a First Nations girl for whom governmental attempts at “reconciling” the child intervention system were part of the supposed lapse of accountability in the child intervention system.

Methodology

In this article, I use a critical discourse analysis methodology to build my argument. Broadly speaking, using this methodology assumes that language is a social practice that plays a substantive role in constituting social life (Wood and Kroger 2000, 4). A primary assumption of a discourse analysis methodology is therefore that “discourse constitutes and/or constructs whatever phenomenon we are interested in” (Alvesson and Kärreman 2011, 1122), in the case of this article, the implicit and explicit connection between the Indigenous Public Child and governmental accountability, as well as the individualization of accountability in child intervention in Alberta. Rather than arguing that the discourse utilized in legislative debates merely reflects social and political shifts outside of the con-text of these debates, a discourse analysis methodology asserts that discourse, to some extent, “constructs organizational reality” (Hardy et al. 2005, 60).

I also pay specific attention to the fact that different speech acts are highly contex-tualized (Wood and Kroger 2000, 5). The specificity of the speech acts documented in legislative debates in the Alberta Hansards requires a specific analysis that highlights the function of the highly public debates of elected officials (as opposed to, e.g., media representations or interviews with members of the general public). Legislative debates are indicative of an official discourse that is both highly mediated and also not pre-defined, as in the context of official public statements delivered by government representatives.

This research is also framed through a governmentality analysis. Anne-Marie D’Aoust (2015), following Foucault, defines governmentality as the ensemble of institutions, proce-dures, analyses, reflections, tactics, strategies, and calculations that allow for the ongoing

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administration and maintenance of regimes of power. In other words, as Sarah Marie Wiebe (2017) argues, governmentality can be understood as the “toolbox of power.” Significantly, as a Foucauldian strategy, governmentality analysis is intended to help theorists understand the modern state in terms of its historical specificity as the administrator of persons, things, and relations through a regime of structured freedoms (Fischer 2016). As a method of analysis, governmentality frameworks ask what processes, practices, and measures are implemented to ensure the ongoing circulation of power in an orderly fashion (McDonald and Marston 2005). For the purposes of this article, I am most interested in how a governmentality anal-ysis enables a critique of “the art of governing” or, in other words, the practices by which we manage to “structure the possible field of actions by others” (Abélès 2015, 309).

The discourse of accountability invoked throughout the Alberta legislative debates is one of the practices that operates within the broader framework of a neoliberal settler- colonial governmentality. In other words, the centrality of accountability as a core value of Albertan democracy is used to monitor and pathologize the Indigenous family while legitimizing settler intervention into Indigenous families. The discourse of accountability becomes a mechanism through which the Indigenous family, the individual community worker, and, eventually, the individual Albertan are not only governed and managed but also called into action to govern and manage themselves and others around them. A governmentality lens is necessary in the context of this case study, as there is not a clear implementation of top-down power, but rather multiple indirect avenues of circulating power that call various actors to be effective and answerable for their errors.

I also enact an Indigenous feminist methodology of refusal as much as possible within the context of this article. Throughout the course of researching and writing this article, I have used a series of questions posed by Audra Simpson to question what is included and how I have chosen to include it: “What am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?” (2007, 78). As a white settler researcher, I am trying to work against the grain of an academy in which Indigenous peoples are “overstudied Others” (Tuck and Yang 2014, 223). My work seeks to actively critique the ways in which Indigenous peoples are invoked as a “spectacle of the settler colonial gaze” (Tuck and Yang 2014, 223). As much as possible, my focus within this article is on the discourse present in legislative assemblies and away from the spectacle of Indigenous trauma produced within the settler colony; yet, at the same time, I am working to ensure that the political agency of Indigenous peoples resisting these settler-colonial structures is not invisibilized.

The Public Child: Ownership, Possession, and Settler-Colonialism

I argue that the concept of the Public Child might be used more productively to reference a child whose life and death become available for public debate and function as a symbol for a given political issue (or a number of political issues). In other words, Serenity is a Public


Child not because she had been involved in the child intervention system at the time of her death but because her death has become reframed as a code for the lack of accountability within Alberta’s child intervention system (and perhaps its political system, more generally).

Most importantly, I emphasize that there is a possessiveness that is articulated around the Public Child in political debates. In other words, the Public Child is not simply a child who is a ward of the state or a child whose involvement in child welfare services receives some kind of public attention. Instead, I argue that the Public Child is a political figure, and that, within the context of a settler-colonial state, the Indigenous Public Child is always encoded as a form of property of the settler public. Alyosha Goldstein argues that “Whiteness in the United States has been historically constituted not only as a form of property, but also as the capacity to possess” (2014, 1077). Although the experiences and practices of settler-colonialism are not identical, the quality of white possession and possessiveness is arguably a consistent practice across anglophone settler colonies ( Moreton-Robinson 2015), even as the details of this possession differ.

Public Scandals

The concepts of scandal, accountability, and transparency are uniquely situated in the context of Alberta democracy, and this specificity is central to my analysis. Here I highlight the specificity of a province governed by the same political party for over four decades. In 2007, Liberal MLA and leader of the Official Opposition Kevin Taft wrote Democracy Derailed: The Breakdown of Government Accountability in Alberta—and how to get it back on track. The publication of this book reflected a popular account of the seemingly impenetrable nature of Progressive Conservative rule in Alberta, with an emphasis on that government’s many public scandals. This political landscape is not new in Alberta, as, prior to 2015, “only three changes of government have occurred” in the province (Stewart and Archer 2000, 11). Taft argues that the lack of conventional party politics is compounded by the recent (at the time) wealth of Alberta’s energy economy: “In the midst of so much prosperity, citizens find it hard to hold their government to account. Whatever the prob-lem or blunder, the government has the surplus cash to paper it over” (2007, 15). I raise this issue not as an irrefutable truth but rather to emphasize how one form of popular discourse surrounding the political specificity of Alberta, and why accountability, may be invoked as such a core value, in particular by opposition parties and by those parties with a populist political stance, like the Wildrose and the UCP. Furthermore, popular discourse in Alberta positions the fundamental “foe for Alberta [as] ‘big government,’” and its threat to individual autonomy and a sense of prairie self-sufficiency (MacPherson 2013, xv). This liberal-individualist ideology is compounded by a political specificity wherein single parties have maintained power for prolonged periods appears to have emphasized the significance of “accountability” in the relationship between Albertans and their government.

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The need to invoke accountability throughout the legislative debates relating to Serenity’s death and to the Ministerial Panel stems directly from the fact that Serenity’s was constructed throughout Alberta as a public scandal. The connections between inves-tigative journalism and the Government of Alberta’s accountability (and lack thereof) in the deaths of children in the child intervention system predate Serenity’s death in 2014 and existed before journalist Paula Simons published her initial coverage of Serenity’s death in 2016. For example, one could point to the investigative journalism of the Fatal Care series published in the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald in 2013. However, for the purposes of this article, the analysis of the scandalization of Serenity’s death began with Simons’ report of her death on 19 November 2016 in an article titled “Her Name Was Serenity. Never Forget It.”

In this article, Paula Simons asserts that “key information” about Serenity’s death, including medical records indicating abuse, was withheld from the public (19 November 2016). The lack of public access to information, including autopsy reports, quickly becomes the central component of the scandal. The key assumption underpinning Simons’ article is that Albertans deserve to know what is happening in their child inter-vention system, therefore constructing Albertans as key stakeholders in the circulation of information related to Serenity’s death.

Broadly speaking, the child intervention system is a fairly common site of scandal. Juliet F. Gainsborough argues that “child welfare policy is frequently characterized by scandal” (2010, 2). The contemporary child intervention systems that exist in Canada are no exception to this claim: One could point to the deaths of Phoenix Sinclair (Global News 31 January 2014; Lambert 10 December 2012) and Tina Fontaine (CBC Radio 13 March 2019; Nicholson 11 March 2019), both known to Manitoba Child and Family Services; the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child intervention services (Government of Canada 7 June 2021; Office of the Child and Youth Advocate Alberta 2016); and the ongoing legal battle to end racial discrimination in Canada’s child intervention systems (Blackstock 2019) as only several examples. I argue that the maintenance of child interven-tion systems as a site of public scandal is derived directly from the fact that it straddles the boundaries between what constitutes the supposedly public realm and what constitutes the supposedly private realm.

It is, however, significant that not all scandals are treated equally in media interven-tions, public discourse, and political debates. I therefore argue that there was something distinct about the death of Serenity, and, in particular, the lack of access to public infor-mation about her death, which enabled that moment to become a scandal. In other words, unlike literature on public commissions and inquiries that assumes that governmental responses to scandal happen coherently (e.g., Stark 2018), I argue that there is much more ambiguity concerning what constitutes a scandal and which events become public scandals. The political response to Serenity’s death was not only about the specific actions


that occurred or did not occur in relation to her association with the child intervention system, and the Government of Alberta’s questionable responses to her death, it was also a process of constituting the scandal. Jaime M. Johnson argues that

[S]candals can be seen as crucial sites in the reproduction of particular representational logics and knowledge claims. They can also be seen as enabling and realising a particular form of politics. (2017, 704)

Building on Johnson’s argument, I maintain that the scandalization of Serenity’s death in the Alberta legislature was not, in fact, emblematic of any desire to radically change child intervention systems or other political institutions in Alberta. Instead, it is best understood as the enabling of a settler-colonial possession of Indigenous bodies and lives, and a realizing of neoliberal devolution of responsibility to the level of the individual. Existing political rationalities are therefore reasserted, rather than undermined, in these performances of scandal.

In the case of Serenity’s death, however, I argue that reconciliation attempts on the part of governments can also constitute public scandals. It is important that Serenity’s death, which was highly publicized in comparison with other child deaths, happened while she was in the custody of her Indigenous family members as kinship caregivers (rather than, e.g., in a foster home). It is the very attempt at supposed reform of child interven-tion systems framed through Indigenous principles and the autonomy of self-governing First Nations that is called into question as the cause of Serenity’s death. The assumption here is that if the Government of Alberta had been more responsible and more account-able in its management of Indigenous kinship caregiving, Serenity would not have been subject to danger. The concern for the settler state becomes the dangers of a supposedly too-politically-correct reconciliation, which would see Indigenous children placed with Indigenous family members, rather than fully in the care of the settler state that becomes a scandal for the settler state.

In the provincial legislature on 21 November 2016, Serenity’s death became a focal point of debate, and, in particular, the decision to move Serenity from a non-Indigenous foster family to Indigenous kinship caregivers was taken up. Wildrose MLA Leela Aheer asks: “why was she wrenched from this [ foster] family for kinship?” (Alberta 21 November 2016, 1913). Wildrose MLA Ron Orr built on this question by suggesting that the NDP government was so determined to enforce kinship caregiving as policy that it negated all other questions of care for Serenity:

When it gets to the point where it’s not about the best for the child, when it’s about forced kinship at any cost, the risk of abuse, forced kinship regardless of safety of the child, forced kinship without any consideration to the people who are already caring for her and realize what’s going to happen regardless of safety, where does that come from? It comes from government policy being pushed down the system to individuals without any care for the

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child … What do I say to them [the former foster parents] when they come in crying with grief for this little girl because they were giving her good care and true love, and they got thrown under the bus by the system and the policies and the bureaucrats who said: “No, she has to go into kinship care regardless of her safety, regardless of anything for her benefit, regardless of warnings; it has to happen because it’s policy”? That is a crime, my friends, of the highest degree. (Alberta 21 November 2016, 1911)

In this instance, MLA Ron Orr articulates both (1) that reconciliation is simply the product of “policies and bureaucrats” and (2) that the insistence that culturally appropriate care must occur “regardless of anything” affirms that Serenity’s death was not a product of the child intervention system itself but merely of the insistence that the intervention system must reconcile itself with Indigenous families.

Defining and Theorizing Accountability

“Accountability” is a ubiquitous term in political debate. Mark Bovens argues that “its [accountability’s] evocative powers also make it a very elusive concept” (2006, 5). Broadly speaking, it is used in political rhetoric to evoke a sense of “transparency and trustwor-thiness” (Bovens 2006, 5), while also indicating a relationship of responsibility, where one actor is obligated to justify and explicate conduct and behaviour (Almquist et al. 2013, 2). In the public sector, this relationship of accountability is most often conceived of as the “relationships between politicians and citizens” (Almquist et al. 2013, 3); how-ever, Almquist et al. also argue that accountability is highly contextual and that the actors involved shift according to circumstances (2013, 3). Significantly, accountability regimes are frequently built around a sense of obligation toward a set of so-called “stakeholders” (Almquist et al. 2013, 4). I argue that the fluidity between the positionality of citizenship versus the positionality of a stakeholder should be critiqued, as it further complicates boundaries between public and private life. For example, to be a citizen is to occupy a public position relative to rights and responsibilities, whereas the position of a stakeholder is more conventionally understood in its relationship to fiscal investment (and, ideally, a return on this investment).

Accountability is therefore assumed to be normatively good and therefore something that governments should be aspiring toward (Tumber and Waisbord 2019, 95–96). The notion of social accountability also presumes that accountability is derived from below, from “ordinary” citizens (Tumber and Waisbord 2019, 101). This presumption, however, assumes that there is a clearly defined category of “ordinary” citizens and that there is relative equality within this group. A social accountability framework also presumes that power flows along either a top-down or a bottom-up path and ignores what governmental-ity theorists have raised as the intersecting networks of power (D’Aoust 2015; McDonald and Marston 2005; Wiebe 2017). In the context of this research, it is significant to pay


attention to the ways in which accountability is flexible in its movements, a quality I attri-bute to its function as a mechanism of governmentality. Accountability is therefore both a term and a discourse that circulates and ascribes meaning to action but that also functions as a mechanism of governance itself and cannot be reduced to a mere discourse or idea.

Accountability is a flexible term that has not been clearly defined in research. It is a difficult concept to assess critically, in no small part because of the assumptions that it is a normatively good aspiration: Why would we not want our governments to be accountable? Stacey Ritz et al. make a similar argument in their research concerning medical institu-tions: The “emotionally and morally compelling” nature of accountability discourses can also function to “shield social accountability against critique” (2014 153). They further note that accountability discourses experience “considerable slippage” (Ritz et al. 2014, 153). This is also true in the case study examined in this article: Accountability here is clearly not referring to one single thing but is invoked to construct meanings around respon-sibility, transparency, fiscal responsibility, access to information, and the relationships between governments and individuals. In the case study examined in this article, I argue that the transformation of accountability as both discourse and mechanism can be traced through a narrative arc of Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as-Responsible-Agents.

Tracing the Shifts

When Serenity’s death first entered the Alberta legislature on 21 November 2016, mem-bers of all opposition parties made clear that the debate was one of government account-ability: not only to Serenity and to her family, but, significantly, to Albertans. During this time, Alberta was governed by a majority New Democratic Party (hereafter “NDP”) government, elected in the spring of 2015 (approximately a year after Serenity’s death). Brian Jean, then the leader of the Wildrose Party (the Official Opposition), announced during the Oral Question Period that while “no one [was] directly blaming the government for causing harm to children … [they were] asking for accountability” from the NDP in direct response to Serenity’s death (Alberta 22 November 2019, 1929). Greg Clark, the leader of the Alberta Party at the time, argued that “they [Albertans] want to know who will be accountable and when” (Alberta 22 November 2016, 1931). This comment reveals particular functions of the discourse of accountability in this moment, in which account-ability is clearly articulated as a top-down relationship between the government and them/Albertans. On a different occasion, Clark goes so far as to assert that “the role of private members in this assembly is to hold the government accountable” (Alberta 1 May 2018, 668). In both of these comments, there is an underlying assumption that opposi-tion parties are closer to the “average” Albertan than the party forming the government, which is in itself an interesting contradiction given the premise of electoral democracy.

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However, for the purposes of the argument at hand, what is most significant is that accountability clearly flows in a downward direction away from government and toward “Albertans.” Progressive Conservative MLA Ric McIver reaffirms the centrality of this downward motion of accountability by reminding Rachel Notley (then the Premier and leader of the NDP) that “when you [Notley] were in opposition, you called for resignations based on what you saw as a lack of ministerial accountability” (Alberta 12 December 2016, 2500). Through this discourse of top-down accountability, members of opposition par-ties are tasked with “never [letting] up in holding the government accountable” (Alberta 4 December 2018, 2331) on behalf of Albertans.

The maintenance of this top-down or vertical function of accountability persists through most of the legislative debates. It is, however, important to acknowledge that a top-down approach to accountability does not necessarily mean the approach is systemic rather than individualized. The repeated demands from opposition parties—at least in the early days of the debate—are primarily concerned with finding an individual who can be held accountable for the mishandling of Serenity’s death. Brian Jean asserts that “change needs to start at the top” and proceeds to demand “what specific measures … the Premier [is] taking to end the secrecy” of the child intervention system in Alberta (23 November 2016, 1982). In a subsequent debate, Wildrose MLA Dave Hanson asks the minister of Human Services whether or not “any of the people responsible for the oversight on any … cases have been fired, suspended, or held accountable” (Alberta 30 November 2016, 2183). Significantly, within one week, the discourse already begins to veer from a clear vertical approach to a search for individual workers who might be held accountable by the people of Alberta.

Throughout this article, I draw on language developed by Thomas Schillemans (2010) and public administration literature to differentiate between vertical and horizontal forms of accountability. Schillemans defines horizontal accountability as accountability mechanisms where “agencies report to others than their hierarchical principals, such as clients, partners, professional peers or independent boards” (2010, 301). Vertical accountability, on the other hand, is used to refer to the more conventionally described mechanism of accountability, in which accountable parties report to their superiors (or, as in the case described in this article, governments report to their electorate). The move toward horizontal discourses and mechanisms of accountability is situated within a neoliberal framework and has important implications for the ongoing maintenance of settler-colonial power in Canada.

The discourse of individual responsibility in some ways clashes with the discourse of vertical accountability in the legislative debates. Rather than assuming a structural or systemic issue with the child intervention system, the discourse articulated seems to make the case that there are simply some bad apples within the system as a whole: At one point, Scott Cyr demands that the “Premier admit that the minister [of Children’s Services] is incapable of managing her department” and “hold someone responsible for the tragic


death of Serenity” (Alberta 8 December 2016, 2477). At other points in time, although accountability is still broadly conceived of as a governmental responsibility, it is clear that accountability is managed at an individual level. For example, Notley is repeatedly asked to hold a particular minister or a few ministers accountable for the mishandling of Serenity’s death: “If the Premier won’t hold any of her ministers accountable for the mess, she needs to start giving Albertans some real answers” (Alberta 8 December 2016, 2477).

Serenity’s Law

The shifting usage of accountability is perhaps most apparent in the recurring discussions of Serenity’s Law, an amendment to Bill 202. Serenity’s Law first appeared in Alberta’s leg-islative debates as a Private Member’s Bill in 2017 by UCP MLA Mike Ellis (introduced as Bill 216 at the time). The basic premise of Serenity’s Law is to mandate adults who knew of a child in possible need of intervention to alert either the police service or the child in-tervention director in their region. It also imposes a $10,000 fine or six months in jail for adults who are found to have failed to alert authorities. It was not successfully introduced under the NDP government; however, when the UCP government was elected in Spring 2019, it was reintroduced into the House and received Royal Assent on 30 October 2019.

What is significant about this Bill in relation to my argument in this article is that the approval of this piece of legislation is pivotal in changing the language and implementa-tion of “accountability” for child intervention in Alberta. Rather than promoting the insis-tence on a vertical framework of social accountability, Serenity’s Law is discussed as a Bill that would be able to hold Albertans responsible for the (mal)treatment of children. How-ever, the introduction of Serenity’s Law is not instantly transformative—its initial debate in the Assembly was most interested in keeping the NDP government accountable, and the fact that the Bill was not immediately passed was also used as an indication that the NDP government was not accountable: Wildrose MLA Ellis, who brought the Bill forward as a Private Member’s Bill, argues that the NDP government has “refused to implement” this Bill instead of taking urgent action to save children’s lives (Alberta 15 May 2018, 1083).

Albertans: From Victims to Stakeholders to Responsible Agents

The shift from governmental accountability to individual or horizontal accountability maps on to a discursive shift in the way “Albertans” (as everyday, apolitical agents) are invoked in the legislative debates. I argue that this invocation can be traced through a narrative arc of Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as- Responsible-Agents. This narrative arc can also be mapped onto the public scandals of child deaths as well as political shifts in governance. The shifting position of the “everyday” Albertan is indicative of the process of neoliberal devolution of responsibility away from the gov-ernment and toward the individual but, perhaps more importantly, shifts the context and

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meaning of accountability against the framework of a supposed public–private dichotomy and, finally, the question of ownership and possession of the Indigenous Public Child.

At the outset of the debate, Albertans are largely referred to as the victims of govern-ment mismanagement and secrecy. This representation is particularly significant when we recall that the debates analyzed here largely centre on the death of one particular girl; however, the victim of the narrative fluctuates between Serenity and her family, and everyday Albertans who have been betrayed by their government. Discursively, Albertans are given no agency as actors but are instead acted upon by the government: “Why did the Premier and multiple ministers keep Albertans in the dark in relation to Serenity and her death?” (Alberta 8 December 2016, 2476). In these kinds of statements, Albertans supplant or take the place of Serenity and her family as those who have been wronged. Significantly, I argue that this substitution is made possible because of possessive rela-tions encoded within settler-colonialism. In other statements, members of opposition parties declare emphatically that “all departments of this government mislead Albertans” (emphasis added) (Alberta 8 December 2016, 2476). Ultimately, “their [Albertans’] faith in your [NDP] government is shattered” (Alberta 12 December 2016, 2502) as a result of this lack of accountability. In other words, the clear victims of the mishandling of Serenity’s case are not only Serenity and her family but all Albertans who have been abandoned by the NDP government.

The ways “average” Albertans are invoked continue to shift, eventually taking on the role of a concerned stakeholder or business partner in the affairs of the government. Rather than being portrayed as victims of an ineffective government, Albertans are dis-cussed as though their concern in the child intervention system is one of responsible investors. “Albertans” are often invoked as a group of people whose stake in the mis-handling of the case is one of taxpayers, who are not seeing appropriate gains on their investments. As concerned investors, Albertans are discussed with more agency, often presented as expecting or demanding things from their governments.

It is difficult to make the case that the discourse of Albertans-as-Stakeholders is sub-stantially different from a discourse of Albertans-as-Citizens. The speech acts included in this section reflect an approach in which Albertans are agential parties who are owed something as a result of their implication in the death of Serenity and the mismanage-ment of child intervention systems: For example, “Albertans expect a death review system that is not only transparent but also holds government accountable” (Alberta 1 June 2017, 1481). In this discourse, compared with other examples discussed throughout this article, it is clear that Albertans are neither passive victims of mismanagement nor responsi-ble for addressing that mismanagement. My argument that Albertans are represented as stakeholders rather than citizens is premised on three core assumptions: (1) that Albertans are constructed as a distant third party whose primary desire is ongoing access to information; however, they are a third party with a vested interest in the resolution


of the so-called scandal of accountability; (2) that the reality of a settler-possessive of In-digenous children constructs the “everyday” Albertan as being owed information about Serenity; and (3) the framework of the neoliberal social investment state has functionally transformed the nature of citizen–state relations, in which government social spending becomes an act of investing in future prosperity through human capital (e.g., Elizabeth and Larner 2009; Lister 2003). I argue that the combination of these three underpinning assumptions creates a context wherein the social is primarily understood in terms of its financial and economic qualities and that these financial and economic qualities are organized according to the racial logics of settler-colonialism. As a result, Albertans are positioned as stakeholder partners, rather than citizens, in relation to their government. Jennifer Henderson (2015) has previously identified this phenomenon as that of “taxpayer citizens.” Henderson argues that, in the case of residential school apologies, “vicarious liability” embroiled individual Canadians into a form of responsibility (2015, 22). However, this form of responsibility “did not constitute an invitation to non-Indigenous Canadians to consider what responsibilities might flow from their position as the vicarious benefi-ciaries of colonial policies” (Henderson 2015, 22). Instead, the fundamental relationship between the individual Canadian and the accountable Canadian government was primarily fiscal in nature. The “taxpayer citizen” is therefore implicated in the history of residential schools (and I argue in this article, settler-colonial child intervention practices) by virtue “of having entrusted … funds to government for wise management” and subsequently being embarrassed at their mismanagement (Henderson 2015, 22).

The invocation of Albertans as concerned stakeholders who have a vested economic interest in the mismanagement of government affairs is particularly significant in the context of the social investment state that dominates contemporary political economic ide-ology. The contemporary social investment model of neoliberal governance pays increased attention to human capital, investments in lifelong learning, and other emphases on investing in the future (Saint-Martin 2007). Unsurprisingly, children are a favoured site of investment for the neoliberal social investment state (Saint-Martin 2007). Because ratio-nalities like neoliberalism and the social welfare state operate as assemblages, they cannot be divorced from the political, social, and historical contexts that inform them, meaning that the investment logics of the Canadian social investment state not only produce racial-ized effects, but are also grounded in the racialized logics of un/deservingness that emerge from settler-colonialism (Elizabeth and Larner 2009). In other words, settler stakeholders believe themselves to have a legitimate stake in the development of the “human capital” of Indigenous children. I therefore posit that, as a result, Albertans-as-Stakeholders are already positioned in a possessive relation with Serenity as an Indigenous Public Child, whose life and death have been mismanaged by the Government of Alberta.

Finally, following the UCP election in the Spring of 2019 and the passing of Serenity’s Law, we see a massive shift in the ways Albertans are invoked within the legislative

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debates. This shift is central to the argument I am making in this article: that rather than passive victims or concerned investors, Albertans are called to be responsible individuals in the practice of child intervention. The central concern of debates around accountabil-ity in child intervention is no longer the accountability of the government, but instead becomes the duty of individual Albertans. The amendments to Bill 202, passed through Serenity’s Law, emphasize Albertans’ responsibilities to report suspected child abuse or neglect: “Bill 202 will be a large step forward in keeping adults accountable for their actions” (Alberta 21 October 2019, 1884). This statement is indicative both of the shift from vertical to horizontal accountability and of the legislative power of accountability as a mechanism (in addition to a discourse). Particularly with regard to the context of Indigenous child welfare in neoliberal Canada, shaped largely by ongoing efforts to devolve welfare services to First Nations, a horizontal version of accountability implies that in a devolved system, all Albertans, regardless of race, must report on one another. If all Albertans are accountable to one another, the structural power of settler-colonialism becomes invisibilized in a supposedly democratized and equal terrain. Child abuse is reaffirmed as an individual pathology, rather than a systemic issue, and Bill 202 is intended to make it “clear to Albertans that there are considerable consequences for their abuse towards children” (Alberta 21 October 2019, 1884).

It is especially important to note that the passing of Bill 202 and the reaffirmation that Albertans are to be responsible for managing child abuse is that the debate is no lon-ger concerned with making changes to the child intervention system itself. What began as a debate on how Alberta’s child intervention system mismanaged information and report-ing around child deaths in the intervention system slowly morphed into a conversation on “responsibilizing” and penalizing individuals for not properly addressing child abuse in their families and communities. The discourse utilized to approve Bill 202 serves to devolve the responsibility of care away from the government and back onto individuals and families. Instead of assuming the top-down approach of social accountability frameworks, Bill 202 “sends a clear message to Albertans that we cannot turn a blind eye if we suspect that a child is in need of intervention. It [Bill 202] will also ensure that Albertans are held accountable” (Alberta 29 October 2019, 2045).

It is important to note that what I have defined here as three discourses of Albertans as actors in the debate of accountability are not three clear and distinct discourses. In other words, they overlap chronologically, cross party lines, and are even used at differ-ent times by the same speakers. Rather than clearly articulated positions, the discourses reflect the reshaping of narratives of accountability based on different needs at different times. I argue, however, that these reshaped narratives of accountability are fundamentally shaped by settler-colonial and neoliberal governmentality that articulates particular pre- existing power relationships, such as the relation of possession between settler Albertans and Serenity as the Indigenous Public Child.


Partisanship, Nonpartisanship, and Debating the Obvious

One of the most central threads throughout the legislative debates is the assertion that both child well-being and governmental accountability are nonpartisan issues. Repre-sentatives of different parties assert that this is not an issue that requires debate. This often repeated statement becomes a political slogan for all parties that enacts a particular private space of concern that exists in contradiction to “the political.” Although this is not directly revealed in the coding analysis for “Accountability,” it is returned to throughout the debates because both “accountability” as an ideal and the well-being of children are assumed to be nonpartisan, normative goals that all members of the Legislative Assem-bly should be working toward. Even as opposition members critique the NDP for their shroud of secrecy and lack of accountability, NDP MLA Nicole Goehring asserts that “our [the NDP] government is committed to accountability and transparency” (Alberta 1 November 2018, 1736). Arguably, it is not surprising that a government responds to alle-gations of a lack of accountability by asserting that they are committed to accountability. However, I argue that although perhaps unsurprising, it is significant that something like accountability becomes framed as a nonpartisan debate and as something that all mem-bers of the Assembly are equally concerned with. In relation to a lack of accountability in the child intervention system, this is doubled down on: Members of all political parties assert that this is not fundamentally a political issue. Wildrose MLA Jason Nixon states that “everybody in this House cares about kids. They care about their kids. They care about their neighbour’s kids. They care about kids” (Alberta 21 November 2016, 1910). He goes on to directly argue that “this [debate] should not be about politics” (Alberta 21 November 2016, 1910).

I argue, however, that the assertion that children’s well-being and accountability for children’s well-being are apolitical issues is in fact a reaffirmation of the public–private dichotomy addressed earlier in this article—one that functions to enable the devolution of responsibility for care back onto individuals and families by coding children and care as a fundamentally private issue and accountability as something that is individual, rather than political or systemic. The notion of horizontal accountability itself reinforces the sense of the non-political: Children’s well-being and the accountability for children’s well-being are affirmed to be an issue for communities and individuals rather than for governments. The artificiality of the public–private dichotomy is revealed in the neces-sity for multiple MLAs to consistently assert that what they are debating in the highly politicized space of provincial partisan politics is in fact not political. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most recent iterations of the debate centre individual Albertans—community members, neighbours, teachers, etc.—as the responsible and accountable party. The discourse of accountability has been upended in such a way as to invert the relationship of public accountability: No longer are the elected members

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accountable to Albertans, but, instead, Albertans are accountable to the government for the governance of one another.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the discourse of the apolitical nature of the debate of Serenity’s death ultimately flattens the complexity of a situation wherein Serenity, an Indigenous girl, is invoked in public debates as a spectral reminder of accountability. To speak of Serenity is to speak of the lack of accountability in child inter-vention in a way that produces Serenity as the property of “everyday” Albertans for which the government and then individual Albertans are ultimately responsible. The fact that Serenity’s life is made available to public debate in the way that it was demonstrates a relationship of possession toward Serenity as a Public Child in a way that is possible only because of her Indigeneity in the context of settler-colonial Canada.

Conclusions

On 20 November 2018, Alberta Party leader Greg Clark stood in the legislature and an-nounced: “The [publication] ban shrouds the entire system, Madame Chair, in secrecy, and just absolutely takes away from any ability to have public accountability” (Alberta 20 November 2018, 2006). He then asks his fellow members, “Isn’t that why we’re here in the first place? It’s why we’re here in the first place: public accountability” (Alberta 20 November 2018, 2006). In this comment, he both asserts that any media publication ban surrounding the details of Serenity’s death is a direct affront to accountability, while simultaneously arguing that an affront to accountability is a direct challenge to Alberta’s democracy. Significantly, the primary concern that emanates from the legislative debates on Serenity’s death is largely the concern for accountability—sometimes, though not always, understood as public accountability.

It is important that what is at stake in this debate is not always public accountability, but also individual responsibility and the clear delineation of what is public and what is private. In the context of neoliberal settler-colonialism, the Indigenous Public Child, in this case Serenity, is always made to be available for public debate through a relationship of settler possession. At the same time, the discourse of public–private accountability shifts: Sometimes the Indigenous Public Child is invoked as Albertans’ possession, that the Albertan government is responsible and accountable to settler publics. At other times, the Indigenous Public Child is relegated to an even more private space, for which Albertans are all called to be independently accountable.

The shifting narrative of accountability, while revealing multiple overlapping logics of individual responsibility and public transparency, fundamentally reifies the possessive relationship between settler-colonialism and the Indigenous Public Child. The emphasis on Albertans-as-Stakeholders, who are called to become responsible agents in their own surveillance, potentially functions as its own form of public–private partnership, in which


the important work of eradicating child abuse cannot be left to be resolved by the govern-ment. In the case of Serenity, the Indigenous Public Child becomes a form of affective currency that can be reasonably traded for governmental accountability and legitimacy in the eyes of settler stakeholders.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Jennifer Henderson for her ongoing support, including feedback on multiple drafts of this article. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Garret Lecoq, Margot Challborn, Justin Leifso, Lindy Van Vliet, and Bridgette Desjardins, for their comments at various stages of this article. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their nuanced and thought- provoking suggestions. This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Miranda Leibel is a PhD candidate in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her research examines governmental discourses and mechanisms of accountability and transparency as they are situated at the intersection of neolib-eralism and settler-colonialism. Email: [email protected]

NOTE

1. Kinship care is a form of child intervention in Alberta that places children with members of extended family networks, rather than apprehending them and placing them in foster homes or group homes. The practice makes it easier for children to remain in their community and is part of the Government of Alberta’s efforts to increase the number of culturally appropriate interven-tion services (Government of Alberta 2020).

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