In this book, I examine the settler-colonial invasion of childhood, the targeting of children by settlers and their state, and the ways children survive colonial dispossession. Critical investigations of colonial and settler-colonial projects reveal a set of narratives and justifying ideologies that are mediated by and vacillate between two seemingly polarized ideologies. At one end, we find the “civilizing” narrative of that ideology, which justifies the (ostensibly humanist) attempts to “save” Native children from their communities. Within this ideology children and their families are assumed to be victims of their own (inferior/uncivilized) pathologies.