Maternal Colonialism and Turkish Woman’s Burden in Dersim: Educating the “Mountain Flowers” of Dersim

Abstract

This article focuses on Sıdıka Avar, principal at the Elazığ Girls' Institute, a boarding school established to civilize "rebellious," non-Turkish, and non-Sunni daughters of Dersim as a part of genocidal military operations in 1937–38. Inspired by the American Protestant model, Avar presented herself as a Turkish missionary, devoting her life to being a proper mother to the "savage girls" of Dersim—whom she called "Mountain Flowers." By examining Sıdıka Avar's unique role in the articulation and implementation of a republican solution to the Dersim question, this article challenges the dichotomy of peaceful and passive homemaker women and mothers versus violent and state-making military men. This article, instead, demonstrates how she partook in this internal colonization project by claiming a gendered specific "women's work for the nation" over the forcefully removed girls and their mothers of Dersim. Sıdıka Avar was an archetype of now-forgotten "national heroines" who co-opted the premeditated, violence-ridden, disciplinary education policies for Dersim and transformed them into an "affectionately" carried out, gendered, and only "symbolically" violent project of maternal colonialism.