This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention.