Drawing from post-colonial theories, the article begins by asserting that Aboriginal youth work follows the cognitive progress of colonization; one moment Aboriginal youth are viewed as objects of concern and pity, while at the same time they are feared and viewed as objects of scorn. This type of tension is inherent in Aboriginal youth work and disrupts the work, subtly transforming youth work practice. Through a series of ethnographic studies on Aboriginal youth workers in the early 1990’s, the author examines how the tension within Aboriginal youth work shapes practice and molds the way youths feels about themselves. Longstanding conceptions of youth within literature and society are reviewed to illustrate the historical view of youth as both enviable and fearful. This type of competing discourse has influenced the way in which individual actors and subcultural groups have responded to Aboriginal youth in need of treatment services. Likewise, formal governmental responses to Aboriginal youth also reflect the tension between the desire to care for these youth versus the desire to punish them. The author sites literature that asserts the very existence of youth work rose out of ambivalent aspirations for groups such as Aboriginal youth. The ethnographic studies reveal that a great deal of youth workers’ discourse about Aboriginal youth is negative, even to the point of viewing these youth as a social problem in and of themselves. This type of discourse among those charged with treating Aboriginal youth acts to disturb the language and practice of youth work and shapes, in part, how Aboriginal youths feel about themselves. One of the effects of negative discourse about Aboriginal youth and the subsequent failure to properly serve this group is that youth workers are forced to turn to Aboriginal groups to help solve Aboriginal youth problems. Thus, in the end, the ambivalence toward Aboriginal youth within youth work services produced ineffective social and treatment policy, thus setting up the situation so that native interventions must be relied on to intervene with native youth, which turns out to be the most effective treatment policy to date. References