In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French colonial government in Indochina and the settler colonial nations of the United States, Australia, and Canada all engaged in the systematic removal of Indigenous and/or mixed-race children from their families. All four governments placed the children in institutions that were meant to sever ties to their home communities, re-educate and assimilate them, and then slot them into particular roles in the colonial social order. By comparing child removal programs in these four colonial contexts, we contend that diverse colonial administrations used child removal as a key strategy of governance to address various political and demographic problems. In the settler colonial nations, child removal functioned primarily as a means of eliminating Indigenous identities, cultures, and land claims. In Indochina, the French carried out child removal to create a French colonial elite that would reside permanently in the colony. This comparative approach reveals significant insight into colonial practices, including authorities' preoccupation with intimate family lives and children's upbringing, how officials and reformers turned to benevolent discourses to describe violent and coercive practices, how Indigenous women suffered from particular vilification, and how authorities removed Indigenous and/or mixed-race children to manage racial dynamics. The article particularly demonstrates the value of collaborative and comparative scholarship.

在十九世纪末和二十世纪初，印度支那的法国殖民政府以及美国、澳大利亚和加拿大的殖民者殖民国家都参与了系统地将土著和/或混血儿童从其家庭中驱逐的活动。所有四个政府都将这些儿童安置在旨在切断与家乡社区联系的机构中，对他们进行再教育和同化，然后将他们分配到殖民社会秩序中的特定角色。通过比较这四种殖民背景下的儿童迁移计划，我们认为不同的殖民政府将儿童迁移作为解决各种政治和人口问题的关键治理策略。在殖民者殖民国家，驱逐儿童的主要目的是消除原住民身份、文化和土地所有权。在印度支那，法国人通过驱逐儿童来创建法国殖民精英，并永久居住在该殖民地。这种比较方法揭示了对殖民实践的重要洞察，包括当局对亲密家庭生活和儿童成长的关注，官员和改革者如何转向仁慈的话语来描述暴力和胁迫行为，土著妇女如何遭受特殊的诽谤，以及当局如何驱逐土著妇女。和/或混血儿童来管理种族动态。这篇文章特别论证了合作和比较学术的价值。