Migration Across the Global Regimes of Childhood

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

The upcoming daylong IHRC symposium called Migration Across the Global Regimes of Childhood, will be held on Friday, September 21, conceived and organized by Dr. Kelly Condit-Shrestha. The symposium introduces such categories as "childhood" and "childhood studies" to rethink the field of migration studies generally. But it goes further. It promises to engage directly with the contemporary problem, particularly the current administration's family separation policy. Our keynote speaker, Laura Briggs of UMass Amherst will guide us through the challenge of facing reality and connecting the past to the present. Taken from their parents at the border, migrant children are being detained in Custom and Border Protection facilities across the country. Variations of historical memories of state-sanctioned violences have already been recalled in the aftermath of this policy of "zero tolerance." Condemnations came from many corners, drawing lines to connect the off-reservation  Indian boarding school experience, the World War II Japanese American incarceration, and the systematic denial of Black family formations so central to the American institution of racial slavery and punishment to the present crisis. The IHRC's first symposium of this academic year will issue a stark reminder of still present colonial and racial pasts and in so doing recast emergent conversations on what the historian Tera Hunter calls "the long history of child-snatching."
The event is free and open to the public.

American Indian adoptee and author Trace Hentz is a presenter, via Skype. 
Her paper is:

Disappeared: Finding Survivors of the Indian Adoption Programs (and Healing the Hard Stuff)