A Critical Reframing of Play in Relation to Indigenous Children in Canada

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the implications of applying critical perspectives to the play occupations of Indigenous children in Canada, and of reframing play as an occupational determinant of health. First we consider the normalizing construction of play in early child development. We then apply critical perspectives to discuss the implications of reframing play as an occupational determinant by exploring how Indigenous children's play can be shaped by broader historical, political and socio-economic structures that may otherwise remain obscured. We propose that a critical reframing of play as an occupational determinant of health may be important in fostering health equity for Indigenous children.

Keywords:

• Occupational determinant of health
• Health equity
• Early child development and intervention
• Aboriginal populations
• Indigenous people

Notes

1. We use the term ‘early child development’ to refer to a broad range of scholarship that is focused on the period of human development from 0-5 years. Increasing evidence suggests that this is a critical period for early intervention, particularly for children who have developmental differences or who are living with social disadvantages, in order to promote their health and well-being across their life course (Milteer & Ginsburg, 2012, p. 208).

2. By ‘culturalist discourses’ we are referring to the complex practices and ideologies that conflate culture with ethnicity as the primary analytical lens for understanding presumed differences about various groups of people. In the context of Indigenous peoples, culturalism is complicit in a colonial discourse of ‘Othering’ (Browne & Varcoe, 2006).

3. Battiste and Henderson (2000) identified the features common to Indigenous knowledge, including: (1) knowledge of and belief in unseen powers in the ecosystem; (2) knowledge that all things in the ecosystem are dependent on each other; (3) knowledge that reality is structured according to most of the linguistic concepts by which Indigenous (people) describe it; (4) knowledge that personal relationships reinforce the bond between persons, communities and ecosystems; (5) knowledge that sacred traditions and persons who know these traditions are responsible for teaching “morals” and “ethics” to practitioners, who are then given responsibility for this specialized knowledge and its dissemination (p. 42).

4. Indigenous ECD programs and services may include childcare/daycare centres, part-time preschools, home visiting programs, outreach programs, adult and tot drop-in programs, Head Start programs, and programs based in community centres.

5. Colonial discourses promoted essentialism “to create the idea of the inferiority of the colonial subject and to exercise hegemonic control over them through control of the dominant modes of public and private representation” (Ashcroft et al., 2007, p. 73).

6. There are now more Indigenous children in ‘state care’ than at the peak of the residential school system (Blackstock, 2011).

7. Racialization refers to a process of attributing social, economic, and cultural differences to race. Racialization may be conscious and deliberate (an act of racism that discriminates openly) or unconscious and unintended. It “takes its power from everyday actions and attitudes and from institutionalized policies and practices that marginalize individuals and collectives on the basis of presumed biological, physical, or genetic differences” (Browne, Smye, & Varcoe, 2005, p. 21).

8. Neoliberalism is a political ideology grounded in a fundamental philosophy of contemporary capitalism, in which people are constructed by their labour power, and illness is significant for one's inability to work or participate in consumerism (Bryant et al., 2010).