Adultism is baked into western politics and “[f]rom its earliest formulations adulthood is viewed as an inherently political existence understood in opposition to a child’s non-political or pre-political way of being” (Rollo Reference Rollo2018: 63). Adultism applied as a practice of political suppression is fundamentally anti-democratic. While scholarship continues to evolve regarding children’s political agency and self-determination, children are still widely considered to be in a category of “becoming” political agents in western democracies (Erdemir et al. Reference Erdemir, Erdiller-yatmaz and Demiral2025). As such, the premise of this article is that the debate of whether children are born political or non-political is an ontological one; it is a question of being that is underacknowledged in a culture of incremental rights-based inclusion and in aspirations of reform. Beyond western democratic practice, there exist societies practicing or reviving democracies that view children as critical political agents, and that may prompt political transformations in Canada that exceed reform.
The political “voice” of children is an issue that receives attention from all modern democratic states (I speak largely to Canada throughout), although the exercise of children’s political participation and influence is restricted by democratic norms, with those below voting age encouraged to appeal to elected adults, participate in peaceful protest, or pursue formal avenues of advocacy (Johnson and West Reference Johnson and West2018). When children’s political organizing transgresses the expected boundaries of their informal democratic participation, they face adultist presumptions about their political agency.
In scholarship, research has pushed back against the idea of the child as neutral and has increasingly expanded ideas relating to children’s roles in shaping the world, not only through limited avenues of state-determined democratic participation but also through the alternative political spaces of their social lives (Erdemir et al. Reference Erdemir, Erdiller-yatmaz and Demiral2025: 520). Erdemir et al.’s (Reference Erdemir, Erdiller-yatmaz and Demiral2025) study on the political agency of children witnessed “… that childhood does not withhold children’s capabilities for being political; rather, their political agency stems from specific geographic and social experiences…” of politics, and “[i]n contrast to dominant adultism and ageism, children competently demonstrated how political they could become” (536). School strikes, for example, trigger accusations of immaturity and anti-state sentiments despite their democratic orientations because “by going on strike, protestors actively choose not to use their right to schooling [which serves as a pipeline to the workforce], thereby challenging the profit-oriented priorities of their governments” (Biswas and Mattheis Reference Biswas and Mattheis2022: 146). The strikes are an example of children working to politicize education while stretching “… the boundaries of democratic participation and education” (153). Despite developmentalist rhetoric, it is not childhood as a stage of life that restricts children’s political agency, which is practiced robustly beyond state politics; it is a society’s restrictions on children’s influence and participation in formal politics—which are also culturally contextual—that stifle political agency.
In this article, I use a critique of rights-based approaches to children’s democratic participation to highlight the cultural chasm that separates state-sanctioned concessions to children’s political agency from the design and principles of child-centric Indigenous institutions. This critique is a primer for the exploration of Indigenous modes of democracy that I present in the second half. Critiquing rights-based approaches to Indigenous issues is commonplace in Critical Indigenous Studies; it gestures to the state’s (intentional) misinterpretation of inherent Indigenous rights which are embedded in the Canadian constitution but pre-date and exist separately from the state, within a liberal human rights framework (Corntassel Reference Corntassel2008). And while democracy as a concept may be redeemed, “… [l]iberal doctrines contend that adults possess rights by virtue of their capacities for reason and representation,” and through that logic refuse child and Indigenous rights that may interfere with the pockets of corporate elites, with the latter also posing a threat to Canada’s territorial sovereignty (Rollo Reference Rollo2023: 73). Drawing on a range of Indigenous political thought, I identify themes relating to infant and children’s political agency within Indigenous institutions, most notably the centrality of children in governance structures and the language of infants and children and conclude with a reflection on what a turn toward Indigenous democracies might entail.
I do not attempt to conceal my bias in this article. I believe children—infants to youth—are critical political agents in governance with humans and more-than-human beings; that we should reject the production of social vulnerability that is utilized to silence children; that children are born critical thinkers; and that our societies should be centered around them, or at the very least, have children at the table on their own terms influencing politics on all issues, not just children’s issues.
To reject the production of social vulnerability is to reject the ontologies that permit its existence. Social vulnerability is typically characterized as distinct from innate—or biological—vulnerability, the latter of which might be better characterized as dependence, is something we all experience over our lifetimes, not exclusively in infanthood. An example of (so-called) biological vulnerability might be infants’ reliance on adults to feed, clothe, and shelter them. But the impairment or issue requiring care itself is not vulnerability (even if it is socially produced, i.e., through environmental racism or intergenerational trauma); vulnerability is produced through neglect or exploitation of people with particular manifestations of dependency. Put otherwise, it is not the impairment or condition of a person that determines their vulnerability; rather, it is the punishment, neglect, or exploitation of those who are unacceptably dependent on others by western neoliberal social norms.
The concept of vulnerability, or social vulnerability, is relevant here because it functions to justify further intervention in the lives of all oppressed peoples. This is paralleled in the developmentalist surveillance and intervention programs in place in Canadian health care and early childhood education and care programming, though the latter has seen some expansion and inclusion of marginalized knowledges (Davies et al. Reference Davies, Abawi and Richardson2026). The Ages and Stages Questionnaires: A Parent-completed, Child-monitoring System, for example, are still widely distributed to families for parents to surveil and report on their children for failing to meet hegemonic developmental markers. HealthLinkBC (2023) concerningly frames these variances as “developmental problems” while simultaneously tethering them to neurodivergence. And while early intervention may have a myriad of benefits for children, the developmental psychology framing and its “…advancement of the Eurocentric culture through its promotion of a generic ‘White’ development,” forces families to adhere to strict Eurocentric norms, or risk … “becoming the Other in terms of mental, physical, social, and emotional domains, and targeted for interventions intended to remake the self in the image of normality” (Varga Reference Varga2011: 139). The imposition of the White, male image of normality has stripped children’s growth and changes from their cultural context, denies them their agency, and champions a particular type of vulnerability that recruits parents in policing their children (Varga Reference Varga2011).
My framing here has clear overlap with the social model of disability, which identifies ableism as the foundational barrier for disabled people, defined in a working definition by Talila A. Lewis as “[a] system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness” who further notes that “[t]hese constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism” (Lewis Reference Lewis2022). Relevant to this article, disability, age, race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status have never been the cause of vulnerability. Vulnerability is both the potential and the result of society, its institutions, and its people enacting harm through the production and exploitation of those they deem less valuable and less human.
In a settler-colonial context, all vulnerability is social vulnerability because dependence makes vulnerability in a hyper-individualized, ableist, and capitalist society. Vulnerability is weaponized against children, disabled people, Black people, Indigenous people, People of Color, the unhoused community, queer and trans people, and anyone else who is either not “productive” in the eyes of neoliberalism or who threatens the normative order. Yet, despite societal efforts to produce difference, and consequently hierarchy, between “dependent” and “independent” people, the logic fails to recognize that we are all always dependent on others, in all stages of our lives.
People are made vulnerable in a society that is structured to enact harm upon people who require care and reciprocity that fall outside of the norms and expectations of neoliberalism. Infants and children offer insights into this as a matter of ontology, as those deemed as invariably dependent in their early years. Dependency on others for life is something that all humans require, but social vulnerability as a consequence of dependency is not inevitable. In a care-centric society grounded in relational accountability, interdependency is a condition of a functional society, where reciprocity makes a hostile environment for hierarchies and exploitation. And, as I demonstrate in the second half of this article, relational accountability can be a blueprint for governance, rather than a burden.
I draw on my own experience in parenting, and the Indigenous perspectives I share in the second half of this article, to demonstrate how adults may be considered interdependent with children from birth within alternative ontologies. The Indigenous perspectives included articulate that while it is undeniable that infants and children are dependent on adults for some things, they are not without agency, and they are not without offerings and a reciprocity of care. Infants and children from across the globe have been, and still are in many contexts, born into care-centric societies that value their agency and contributions from birth and beyond western markers of development.
Anecdotally, I have learned more about relational accountability, abolition, and good governance from my now 3- and 5-year-old children than I learned in my first 30 or so years of life. Children are disruptive in the best ways. In our home, the carceral logics embedded in western parenting norms quickly came into the purview with the arrival of our children and challenged us to understand abolition, in part, as an intimate here-and-now process (Ritchie et al. Reference Ritchie, Gumbs and Brown2023). Our children forced us to lean on community and push ourselves beyond boot-strap individualism toward something more generative. And, most relevant to this article, we received two key lessons in governance: 1) adults would not be the governing authority in the house simply because they were adults, and 2) we needed to learn a new dialect quickly if we were going to honor lesson one.
Our children began to govern our home in the most literal sense; they brought a new type of democracy with them that demanded care and reciprocity above all else. The priority, before any other, was to ensure that everyone’s needs were met. Immediately upon entering this work, my newborn began to articulate their needs to us in a dialect we did not yet understand, but one that we believed existed and that was our responsibility to learn. My child articulated what was happening, and together we faced a brick wall of pediatric medicine. I learned their dialect against adultist, ableist, and racist medical advice, and labored to convince so-called experts on children that they did, indeed, have to listen and learn from children. Consequently, my (ongoing) transformation is not a result of gentle or permissive parenting; it is a result of recognizing the political agency of children and allowing that to upend my life for the better of the collective. These teachings were earned in practice and through the languages and dialects of infants and children, in which I am not yet fluent.
There is an ontological (and consequently, epistemological) difference between societies that are child-centric by design and have honored children’s political agency for 10–20,000 years, and those societies that have woven child rights into the fabric of their governance for the last 100 or so years. For Canada, that legacy is young, with the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) taking place only 35 years ago as of the time I write this. Thankfully, children’s rights are beginning to exceed vulnerability discourse in state democracies and move toward more substantial considerations; one example highlighted by Rollo et al. (Reference Rollo, McDermott, Kahn, Chapel, Steinberg and Down2020) is Article 12 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (2009: 9), which recognizes a host of non-speakingFootnote 1 communication that infants and children may use to express their choices and preferences. Yet the ableist and adultist presumption that non-speaking forms of communication will eventually evolve into verbal, speaking communication with adults in power and on the terms of those adults remains.
The concept of developmentalism in both childhood and economics is a pillar of western political authority and operates to consolidate settler sovereignty in its work to dehumanize children and Indigenous people. Toby Rollo leads in scholarship on the role of the child “… as an ontological ‘other’,” identifying the historical significance of both the role of misopedy, the hatred of children, and the “…historical and conceptual antecedent…” of “… a telos of progress from animal child to human adult…” in the genocide of Indigenous peoples (Rollo Reference Rollo2018: 61). Rollo (Reference Rollo2018) draws out the two primary applications of progress, the first dehumanizing Indigenous peoples, and second demanding linear progress—or “civilization”—to redeem themselves from imposed characterizations of savagery. Moreover, Rollo’s work has mapped the European path to adultism and the work of western ontologies in “… disqualifying [Indigenous peoples] as political agents capable of forming nations with legitimate claims to land” (Rollo Reference Rollo2018: 73).
Today, adolescents in particular are subject to studies on their “… political knowledge, cognitive capacity, independence, political interest, and life experience…” to justify inclusion or exclusion in the democratic process, most commonly via the vote (Oosterhoff et al. Reference Oosterhoff, Wray-lake and Harden2022: 1574). Regarding cognitive development, “empirical studies … have found that late adolescents (ages 16 to 17 years) perform as well as adults - or better - on many different tests of cognitive ability” and score higher than the 65+ age group across the board (1576). While I advocate strongly against exclusion based on western measures of cognitive ability, it is worth noting that the cognitive threshold for “high quality political participation” (1582) that is utilized by states to restrict the participation of youth contradicts the developmentalist science it claims, and if applied evenly would disqualify a significant portion of the adult population. This indicates in plain terms that adolescents face intentional political suppression in western democracies. The vote is representative of “…full integration into a particular state” (Grover Reference Grover2011) and is a universal human right, but it is also a curtain: liberal democracies are so invested in the vote as the ultimate form of democratic participation that alternative practices of democracy are concealed from view (Napoleon Reference Napoleon2022).
The critique of developmentalism I employ is not a critique of supportive infrastructure for infants, children, or adults developing new skills; rather, the critique names the power, exploitation, and oppression through misopedic, adultist, racist, classist, and ableist applications of developmentalist logic upon infants, children, and Indigenous peoples (Varga Reference Varga2011, Menon Reference Menon2026). Critiques of developmentalism are well documented in child and youth care and psychology, in the latter of which Burman (Reference Burman2012) uses anti-psychology, which “identifies as its topic the refusal to accept psychological claims on their own terms, but rather interrogates their concepts and underlying assumptions, and evaluates them in terms of their epistemological, methodological, and especially practical efforts” (128; Burman Reference Burman2008). The developmentalism that permeates Canadian childhoods employs logics of maturation, surveillance, and intervention, that “[c]hildhood is detached from wholeness with a terminology of stages denoting institutional place (preschool; school-age), and temporality (toddler; tweens; teens),” and through which a child becomes “dissected and decontextualized” (Varga Reference Varga2011: 139). Developmental psychology dominates Canadian health care approaches to children and remains central to much of the child-focused programming at post-secondary institutions (Davies et al. Reference Davies, Abawi and Richardson2026), yet many Indigenous nations de-emphasize the importance of developmental milestones and age of achievement, and point instead toward individual journeys of children (Muir and Bohr Reference Muir and Bohr2019).
Human and democratic rights
Humans and more-than-human beings are still being marginalized in mainstream democratic practices, often as groups of interest, but more significantly as active political agents. The democratic rights of animals, for example, have been widely debated, largely over disagreement on the threshold for sentience and consciousness (Kymlicka and Donaldson Reference Kymlicka and Donaldson2014). For humans, political agency also exists on a spectrum of viability defined by the state, or more accurately the culture that underpins the state, and has been subjected to similar debates on “humanity.” This comparison is not intended to degrade the humans left out of liberal democracies, as a western perspective suggests, but to point to a fundamental ontological position on who has political agency as a consequence of who and what is animate, sentient, conscious, and capable of governance. Quoting Roland Chrisjohn, Mills and LeFrançois (Reference Mills and LeFrançois2018) reiterate that “… the concept of ‘children’ within the Iroquois Federation (of which the Hurons form part) is not the insult that it is from the Euro-western perspective. ‘Rather, our word (for children) merely implies someone who hasn’t been around as long as some other people…’” (519). Many (but not all) Indigenous nations refuse asymmetrical power relations amongst human kin to the extent of the settler-state “[a]s evidenced in the structure of Aboriginal languages” (Borrows Reference Borrows1999: 539 footnote 7), as well as the requirement of proof of a human-like consciousness to value the political agency and authority of plants, animals, elements, and objects (Beardy and Coutts Reference Beardy and Coutts2017: 74; Martín 2024; ‘Wii Muk’willixw Reference Sainte-marie1996).
Yet, instead of being recognized as an ontological difference, animism has been used as further justification for western societies to wield adultism as a tool of imperialism and white supremacy (Mills and LeFrançois Reference Mills and LeFrançois2018). The presumption that to become political, children will eventually speak to and through the democratic avenues offered by settler-states aligns with the developmentalist perspective on the belief in more-than-human sentience and agency. The narrative of animism as an indicator of a detachment from reality (513) and infant-like mentality is an inherited colonial justification for paternalism with Indigenous peoples, which infers that “[i]mperial children are … to eventually grow out of it, whereas Indigenous peoples are locked into permanent animism” (513).
Similar to the becoming attached to animism, western liberal democracies may focus on citizenship to ensure that human and animal rights are upheld. Kymlicka and Donaldson (Reference Kymlicka and Donaldson2014) assert that justice for bringing people and animals “into our society as a dominated cast … requires recognition of their full membership in society” (204). They argue that the tool for justice by means of membership is citizenship, which “is the tool of converting older relations of caste hierarchy into relations of equal membership” (205). Meanwhile, “…the argument that young people lack the cognitive, moral or experiential abilities needed to be citizens is frequently used to disqualify them from full participation in the formal political domain,” while experts simultaneously blame youth for lack of democratic participation (Bessant et al. Reference Bessant, Collin, Watts, O’keeffe, Bessant and Collin2024: 24). For Indigenous peoples, Canadian citizenship has historically been synonymous with assimilation—the trap of citizenship—which is one of the most documented elimination strategies spanning over a century of Indian policy in Canada.
While I take issue with the unwillingness of settler-states to uphold rights in equitable ways, the more significant issue is that rights-based frameworks lean state-centric and thus refuse the concept of non-state authorities in holding rights, let alone defining those rights for themselves. Without placing rights in their legal, political, and cultural context—that is, understanding Indigenous rights as inherent and stemming from Indigenous peoples’ embeddedness and relations within their place-based knowledge systems—“rights” implementations serve to reify state power over Indigenous peoples. A rights-based approach to justice for any group is inadequate wherever asymmetrical power dynamics remain unchanged.
Take the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for example, which has been critiqued for prioritizing states’ territorial sovereignty over Indigenous self-determination (Lightfoot Reference Lightfoot2016), and risks the interpretation of Indigenous rights as universal rights or Indigenous rights as a threat to individual human rights (Nagy Reference Nagy2022: 200). As critics predicted, Indigenous rights have already clashed with concerns about individual rights to private property, and this is presenting playing out in British Columbia, where Premier David Eby has pledged to amend the province’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act after corporate- and settler-backlash over the recent Cowichan Tribes ruling that recognized title over an urban area that included private property (Hunter and Bula Reference Hunter and Bula2025). This outcome was painfully predictable and reflects a century of statecraft positioning Canadians’ individual rights against the rights of Indigenous peoples (Mackey Reference Mackey2014).
Canada’s triad of rights-based paradoxes
I am ashamed to admit that I did not fully grasp the hatred that is directed toward children as a group in Canada until I became a parent myself. State and society hatred toward children in my experience was inextricable from the extreme Indigenous-specific violence on children, which I came to know through my late dad’s adoption in the 60s scoop; my late grandpa, uncle, and other relatives’ Indian Residential School (IRS) and day school experiences; the impact of the violence of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People (MMIWG2S) on my family and friends; and the current Indigenous-child scoop. Initially, I read those laws and policies that terrorized our families as solely a part of Canada’s overarching genocide of Indigenous peoples, which they were and are. But settler-states also require dehumanization of their own children, to a lesser degree, as a result of ontological (in consideration of who and what is animate, sentient, and conscious) and epistemological (in consideration of how knowledge is produced and validated) difference.
My critique of adultism and choice to center the democratic alternatives built into certain Indigenous institutions in this article emerges from a triad of settler-state paradoxes. Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples has never been cut and dry. To disrupt Indigenous authority and resistance to the state, Canada’s governance must be reflexive and often contradicts itself in response to Indigenous resistance. The three issues that I present below are paradoxical; they appear to contradict Canada’s overarching approach to Indigenous peoples while plainly contributing to the larger project of elimination of Indigenous peoples. The first is Canada’s tendency to violate Indigenous peoples’ rights to then utilize the process of “making things right” again to evade meaningful justice and simultaneously improve its image domestically and internationally (Lightfoot Reference Lightfoot2008)—often via comparison to the performance of other settler-states. The second is the ever-shifting characterization of Indigenous children depending on the specific needs of the state, ranging from children in need of protection, to adults eligible for prosecution, to political agents in need of state intervention. The third is the work of characterizing Indigenous adults as children against the backdrop of decades of efforts by Canada for Indigenous peoples to become citizens, assimilate, and participate in state politics; a process that can only be justified by a government which deems both Indigenous peoples and children as less-than-human.
Human rights guaranteed by settler-states are embedded with contradiction in practice. Both human and animal rights theorists have argued, “[i]nviolable rights are first and foremost for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, not some sort of prize awarded to the most rational or cognitively complex” (Kymlicka and Donaldson Reference Kymlicka and Donaldson2014). But those on the receiving end of state violence know that social vulnerability is not innate but is produced and maintained through structural and systemic oppression. The inalienable or inviolable rights that liberal democracies protect, in many cases, are formulated in response to state-sanctioned “procedural vulnerability,” which states may wield as a coercive force either to shift public discourse or to turn a profit (Hsu et al. Reference Hsu, Howitt and Miller2015; Rivera et al. Reference Rivera, Jenkins and Randolph2022). Put otherwise, the state produces conditions of vulnerability and the need to champion certain rights through its own violence and subsequently commissions its own agents to respond to the outcomes of that violence in ways that serve the state’s agenda.
Consequently, the treatment of Indigenous children is unique in the scheme of oppression of children in and by Canada because their existence remains a barrier to Canada securing its territorial sovereignty. However, racism, ableism, and classism also intersect with the savage-child trope for any child who deviates from the “ideal” settler. Indigenous children are broadly considered without political agency, as are all children in Canada, and at the same time are branded (at least quietly) as political agents due to their role within Indigenous political structures and become targets precisely because of their political agency within their own cultural context. In other words, Indigenous children are considered political agents to the state to the extent that they may be used toward eliminating all forms of Indigenous political self-determination, in the same way that Canada recognizes Indigenous sovereignty in limited ways solely for the purpose of domesticating it, eliminating it, or co-opting it for its own purposes.
For Canada, this framing justifies the IRS system and the 60s scoop (now incarceration and the 2020s scoop), which sought to disrupt domestic life and the broader governing systems of Indigenous nations. Dian Million (Reference Million2013) expands this, “[w]hile residential schools’ stated goals were to Christianize and civilize children and communities, in practice this meant preventing Indian communities and families from modelling their own domestic relations to their children” (44). It was in these institutions that children were primed for a lifetime of vulnerability through exploitation, via hard labor and physical, sexual, and psychological abuse to the end that the “…child who has no opportunity to experience control over his or her body cannot learn very easily how to make other boundaries that can be acted from” (45).
The alternative to a child with agency is an exploitable child. Neither a patriarchal nor neoliberal society (if they can be untangled) can center children. By their nature, they require hierarchy and exploitation. This results in a push-and-pull politics relating to children’s rights to ensure a class of adult elite is maintained. Most commonly, children’s universal rights are violated either on the margins of society (racialized, Indigenous, disabled, queer and trans, and/or children experiencing poverty) or upon children existing beyond Canada’s borders (see examples in Alberga Reference Alberga2023; Amnesty 2025; Hwang Reference Hwang2022; and more), but all children are treated as pre- or non-political from an adultist perspective.
Finally, perhaps the primary of the triad is the attempted dehumanization of Indigenous adults through their categorization as children. This is part and parcel to Canada’s assertions of territorial sovereignty, which require an implied understanding of terra nullius, not empty land in this case, but land void of humans capable of governance,
The dual colonial mandates of dispossession and pacification were advanced by modelling Indigenous peoples – legally and politically – according to the only existing class of people in Western thought for whom there existed a moral obligation to provide assistance but for whom political claims were impossible: children (Rollo Reference Rollo2018: 62).
This approach to colonization is consistent across the globe and throughout history. Adultism informs an internal western norm through which children can (and should) be exploited, if not for labor, to play a role as a manufactured “other” to an adult elite.
The oppression of children in western democracies varies from outright physical violence to structural and systemic barriers that limit children and youth’s freedom, deny their autonomy, and restrict their participation in formal politics. Non-Indigenous children do not evade adultism in liberal democracies but are subject to different animations. Indigenous children, racialized children, children in poverty, and disabled children face the harshest consequences of adultist politics, “[y]et, the kind of childhood that the West has set as the gold standard is one where children are denigrated, which is in striking opposition to the ways in which children are valued within many Indigenous cultures within the Fourth World.” (Mills and LeFrançois Reference Mills and LeFrançois2018: 518).
Indigenous democracies
In this article, I argue that the oppression of children is an overlooked distinction between Indigenous and western democracies and that the centering of children in human governance demonstrates an ontological alternative that provokes new possibilities for emergent non-state democracies. Children’s political agency in Indigenous democracies is not just practiced in intimate and domestic spheres where children assert their intrinsic right to shape the environment, but in public governance and institutions as imbricated with the private, where families and kinship are considered governance institutions in and of themselves. Governance with accountability, intimacy, and care are guiding principles in the examples I offer below (Hunt and Holmes Reference Hunt and Holmes2015).
While democracy is not the first concept I use as a descriptor of traditional governance, it is a redeemable concept; it remains relevant to non-electoral and non-representative politics, and it is a term with political weight in settler-states. Democracy in its arguably initial forms, embedded within diverse applications of Indigenous sovereignty, constitutes a way of being that rejects extractive hierarchies and fosters care-centric world-building. Indigenous legal and political structures rooted in relational accountability and relationship to place (articulations of their sovereignties) inherently refuse the pillars of violence that underpin settler-colonial democracies, including racism, sexism, and ableism, but a less commonly recognized feature is their refusal to oppress children. Many Indigenous governing frameworks are designed with efforts to circumvent forms of structural oppression, though this is something that has been built through errors, not despite them (Napoleon Reference Napoleon2022). Consequently, this is less about democracy, per se, and more about the ontological chasm that becomes visible in contemporary debates over best practices in governance when those practices are shoehorned into a liberal democratic framework.
To demonstrate that “Indigenous” and “democratic” are not mutually exclusive terms, I look to the Gitxsan, the nation to which I belong, which is notable in the work “…to clarify the sense in which people understand that a government is theirs,” the marker of a true democracy (Webber Reference Webber, Tully, Cherry, Forman, Morefield, Nichols, Ouziel, Owen and Schmidtke2022: 295). Napoleon characterizes the Gitxsan as “… a nonstate, decentralized society wherein political and legal authorities are distributed and acted on horizontally between matrilineal kinship groups of extended families – the House – within which there are reciprocal legal obligations” (Napoleon Reference Napoleon2022: 209). Gitxsan society is formulated through webs of relational accountability,
Each individual legal agent has responsibilities to their kinship network, and they have the ability to exercise choice and accountability in how they align themselves and contribute to the collective. This kind of relational accountability, operating at individual and collective levels, constitutes a form of intense democracy, or what Christine Keating calls ‘fullest democracy’ (210).
Children have a role in Gitxsan society from birth; their place in the nation is not contingent on meeting a threshold of cognitive ability, but they are educated on the politics of their nation from a young age. Napoleon (Reference Napoleon2022) points out that, ironically, it was the imposition of the state’s representative democracy that was utilized in efforts to destroy Gitxsan democracy.
Furthermore, the value of Indigenous children in child-centric democracies should not be understood through a lens of vulnerability. Children are not individuals to simply protect, though those situations may arise, but they are critical political actors within a society that, when functioning in alignment with laws of respect and accountability, does not put children in a structural need for protection. Respect and accountability are the primary movers for many Indigenous societies that center children, not as wards of the nation, but as political agents from birth.
Some of the failures to accurately conceptualize Indigenous democracy are due to a misunderstanding of “traditional” governance structures. Scholarship on matriarchal societies has rightfully critiqued the idea that matriarchy is the reverse of patriarchy, that is, women holding and exercising power over others through exploitation within defined hierarchies. Despite its designation, patriarchy is not considered “father-centered,” and the role of the father (rather than his absence) is of little significance. In fact, the absence of the father or the practice of refusing to father as an authoritarian who by nature rejects care and reciprocity with children better describes contemporary interpretations of patriarchal governance in practice. In response, critiques of—and alternatives to—patriarchy have rejected authoritarianism and instead articulated matriarchies as mother-centered societies (Defriend and Cook Reference Defriend and Cook2023), with many positioning the role of the mother as central, rather than the role of women. While this critique may get us closer to articulating a care-centered governance structure, it is one that scholars should be wary of, as it can easily slip into gender essentialisms, forwarding a trans-exclusionary feminism (not feminism at all).
In matriarchies, mothers are held up as critical to the nation, as understanding the intimacies of parenting, and in many cases occupying positions as chiefs, advisors, spokespeople, or other important roles in a nation. Matriarchs who have lines of generations beneath them and lifetimes of experience between them are, indeed, core leaders of matrilineal and matriarchal societies. And at the same time, aunts, uncles, auncles, uncties, cousins, extended family members, honorable family members, and more hold roles of varying importance in raising children. Many Northwest Coast nations have strict laws governing the complex but holistically designed approach to raising children (Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, Sarah 2025; Klukas Reference Klukas2021; Mills Reference Mills1988). They are arguably mother-led and child-centric, though the role of children has been de-emphasized in western interpretations of Indigenous governance despite the clarity of their importance in the design of Indigenous political institutions (sometimes referred to as social structures).
The mental and domestic labor that primary parents carry (most often mothers), the work of imagining, organizing, and executing family and community life, is aggressively downplayed in western democratic configurations, but is recognized in other societies as legitimate political leadership. Matriarchies require recognition of leadership of family, child-rearing, and organization of kinship and community as public governance and an institution in and of itself. There is ample evidence of this in Indigenous governance within British Columbia. Citing Roy (Reference Roy2019), Tłaliłila’ogwa explains that in the Tahltan Nation, for example,
Women not only made decisions about access and use of traplines, passing on specialized knowledge from one generation to the next, but they trapped alongside other family members, holding key roles in the social, cultural, spiritual, and economic life of the community, with senior women organizing the labor of other family members (Hunt Reference Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa2025: 2137).
In contrast to the pseudo-empowerment narratives of matriarchy as bounding the mother’s role to keeping the nation afloat through literal and ideological reproduction while supporting those (often male) leaders working exclusively outside of the home, matriarchal societies practice a sense of political holism that is infeasible for the settler-state.
Children as political agents—children as respected people
Questions of children’s political agency reflect two of the central rights debates that I presented in the introduction: who and what is animate, sentient, conscious, and of those, who has the capacity to participate—not just on issues relating to their identity—but in the governance of all things. Put otherwise, it is not solely an issue of who might hold inherent universal rights in a given society, but also who has the agency to participate, and how might they participate. I focus on two elements of that dilemma, the first being agency, the second interpretation.
Evidence of Indigenous children’s political agency can be found globally. Muir and Bohr (Reference Muir and Bohr2019) name Indigenous children’s agency as a key element of Indigenous approaches to parenting worldwide, citing Indigenous nations within Canada as particularly supportive of children’s independence. Their study on Indigenous child-rearing further highlights that “[t]he prevalent focus on child autonomy was tied in with the Aboriginal preference for non-interference which can be expressed by Aboriginal people through a resistance to giving instruction, correcting, coercing, or trying to persuade another to do something” (Muir and Bohr Reference Muir and Bohr2019: 158).
Regarding the Anishinaabeg, Simpson (Reference Simpson2011) affirms that “[c]hildren were respected as people, they were encouraged to follow their visions and to realize their full potential while living up to the responsibilities of their families, communities and nations” (108). Their agency included consideration of the more-than-human world as well: “In the pre-colonial Nishnaabeg nation, children were highly respected people, valued for their insights, their humour, and their contributions to families and communities at each stage of their lives” with a “spiritual power” as a result of their proximity to the star world, as such, “[a]dults had a lot to learn from these small children” (Simpson Reference Simpson2011: 122). A child in this context would not be considered a “…[partial] human being who must be guided into maturity through education,” but one who both received and offered teachings (Rollo Reference Rollo2018: 63).
Communication offers key insights into Indigenous adult-child relations. Gitxsan infant agency and interpretation is evidenced by Mills (Reference Mills1988) overview of reincarnation, quoting a Gitxsan Elder in Adams and Kasakoff (Reference Adams and Kasakoff1973), who asserted that in the old days “[w]hen a new baby was born, those who knew that language would listen to the babies talk. They would offer them some of their property: ax, bow, arrow or a club. The baby would be happy to have some of his property again” (32). Belief in reincarnation aligns with the belief that children enter this world with knowledge, though sources of that knowledge may vary. Similarly, Bird (Reference Bird2020) explains from an Anishinaabe perspective that Indigenous children bring knowledge with them and that it is up to parents and those raising children to be ready to speak their language: “[o]ur children bring these bundles with them, and they carry with them all that we have been given as a people. Get ready. Do your work so that you can receive them. So that you can speak the same language as they do. So that they will be received with love, warmth, kindness; so, they will remember” (170). Muir and Bohr’s (Reference Muir and Bohr2019) global review of child-rearing found that while Indigenous parents were reported as speaking less to their children, “there is evidence that there is more unspoken body language being used between child and adults” (162). Indigenous languages hold a key to Indigenous governance, while the dialect of infants and children offers deeper insights into good governance.
In recent affirmations of Indigenous child and youth political agency, the Haida Nation (2010) asserts a “child-centered” approach and outlines children and youth’s social and political roles in the nation. While a 2021 application of Gitxsan authority against Ministry of Child and Family Development (MCFD) was explained by Kolin Sutherland-Wilson as an act of reciprocity, not protection, noting that “[f]or us, it’s very straightforward. This young person belongs to our family, has a place within our community, has a role within our governance society, and is an absolutely cherished human being who carries on our legacy from ancient times” (Klukas Reference Klukas2021). Napoleon (Reference Napoleon2022) reiterates this democratic design, “[e]ach individual Gitxsan person is a legal agent within her or his House [political groupings within clans]” (209).
Elsewhere, it is implied—child-rearing roles and the design of the nation center around establishing a sense of belonging and well-being in young people, and the placement of children and youth within a broader governance system solidifies their political position. Placing children’s roles in envisioning and shaping governance, Bird (Reference Bird2020) explains,
Working with our children, teaching them about who they are, ensuring they are connected to their ancestors and creating a space where our children can critically envision and enact a future beyond colonization. It is the antithesis to colonization and it guarantees Indigenous futurity (167).
Indigenous children’s roles in these nations are not limited to their physical reproduction of the nation, as essentialist takes might suggest, but expand into shaping their own nations as active political agents.
Conclusion
Oppression via social vulnerability creates conditions for both a sense of superiority by the ruling class, in this case adults, as well as a justification for intervention, or exploitation, of those made vulnerable. In the process of producing vulnerability, the people made vulnerable become discursively sub-human. Responsibility of care for the so-called vulnerable cannot be separated from the process of dehumanization with is often made through association with a perceived “undeveloped” childlike nature. The dehumanization of children is used as a tool of colonization, through which the sub-human status of children in western democracies becomes associated with anyone the state deems non-political, and who is consequently denied a full spectrum of human and democratic rights (Mills and LeFrançois Reference Mills and LeFrançois2018). This is a political choice that emerges from an ontological position that demands exploitation.
Indigenous democracies illustrate ontological variances, particularly relating to the political agency of children, which provoke alternative possibilities for emergent non-state democracies. Shifting our view of Indigenous governance and Indigenous legal orders beyond “cultural artefacts,” while expanding our understanding of democracy, opens doors for conversations about how we address justice and equity for humans and beings who have been denied political agency—not solely from an angle of citizenship—but from a point of influence and legitimacy in governance (Napoleon Reference Napoleon2025).
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