Criminology's Time: Settler Colonialism and the Temporality of Harm at the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg, Canada, 1958–1973

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.