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Abstract: This article examines the delimiting role time plays in criminological research, especially with respect to historical studies related to genocide in a settler-colonial context. In short, we argue that criminological temporalities often exclude forms of collective destruction defined by a more complicated duration or scope. We do this through investigation of Canada's residential school system, with specific attention to a single Indian Residential School (IRS) within this system, the Assiniboia Residential School (ARS) in Winnipeg. Assiniboia was different than other residential schools in Canada because, despite playing a role in Indigenous assimilation, students experienced more freedom and less abuse than was characteristic of other schools. We argue that grappling with an institution such as Assiniboia, as part of an experience of state crime, requires that the notion of crime as a temporal event, or as the outcome of a linear criminogenic process, be challenged and opened to concepts of time that are pulsating, uneven and persistent within a broader settler-colonial mesh.
Keywords: genocide; settler colonialism; temporality; forced assimilation; residential schools
Introduction
This article examines the delimiting role time plays in criminological research, especially with respect to historical research related to genocide and mass violence. In short, criminological temporalities often fail to fully capture forms of collective destruction defined by a more complicated duration. Through investigation of Canada's residential school system, with specific attention to a single Indian Residential School (IRS) that was less outwardly violent than others in this system, the notion of crime as a temporal event, or as the outcome of a linear criminogenic process, is challenged and opened to concepts of time that are pulsating, uneven and persistent.
The need for regarding other ontologies of time is illustrated through the Assiniboia Residential School (ARS), which opened in 1958 on Academy Road in Winnipeg's River Heights neighbourhood and closed in 1973. Initially, ARS served as a residential school for upper-level students who had previously attended residential schools closer to their home reserves. Later, it was a dormitory where students resided while attending Winnipeg public schools. ARS represents an entryway for consideration of how settler-colonial harm travels through a multitude of divergent times and spaces, often taking a shape too amorphous to be bound by rigid understandings of crime as an event....