Invested Indifference

Download or read book Invested Indifference written by Kara Granzow and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as “indifferent” to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference offers a divergent perspective by examining practices during three different periods in the place we now call Edmonton, juxtaposing early settler texts, documents concerning the former Charles Camsell Indian Hospital, and contemporary online police materials. Kara Granzow reaches a startling conclusion: that what we see as societal indifference doesn’t come from an absence of feeling but from a deep-rooted and affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Granzow demonstrates that through mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space, violence against Indigenous peoples has become symbolically and politically ensconced in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.