White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940

Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 592 pages. ISBN 978-0-8032-3516-8. $35.95 paperback.

White Mother to a Dark Race by Margaret Jacobs is a painstakingly researched and brilliantly written account of the key roles White women played in the removal policies of U.S. and Australian governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Little wonder then that this book won the 2010 Bancroft Prize. Jacobs examines how White settler women in both countries were culpable in the removal of thousands of children from Indigenous homes, all in the name of reform, progress and benevolence. She also documents how White settler women in both Australia and...