Les questions que nous avons posées à quarante parents autochtones dont les enfants avaient été pris en charge par la Société d'aide à l'enfance (SAE) entre 2000 et 2018 se situaient sur deux axes : 1) la manière dont l'intervention de la SAE prenait en compte la difficulté d'être à la fois parent et autochtone dans un contexte traumatique colonial et 2) la façon dont les cultures autochtones étaient ou non intégrées dans le processus de réajustement parental qu'entreprend la SAE. Pour aborder ces deux axes, nous sommes partie du principe que les Indigenous Studies constituaient un cadre à la fois incontournable et indépassable pour étudier toute une série de thématiques liées au domaine institutionnel de la protection de l'enfance : définition de la famille, approche de la parentalité, conception de l'intérêt de l'enfant, hiérarchie des savoirs et de leurs valeurs respectives, régulation de la précarité, etc. Malgré diverses stratégies de diversification, nous avons eu devant nous quarante expériences quasi similaires en ce qu'elles témoignaient toutes d'une impossibilité pour les parents d'être reconnus institutionnellement comme partie prenante de décisions impliquant pourtant directement leurs propres enfants. Faisant fi de l'histoire coloniale et de ses diverses conséquences désastreuses notamment sur les plans affectif, parental et économique, les intervenants apparaissent pris dans une socialisation professionnelle qui ne reconnait ni le contexte (colonial), ni leurs cultures, ni leurs points de vue, ni leurs souffrances. Pas plus que leurs efforts pour (enfin) devenir des parents. Faisant comme si rien ne s'était passé, les intervenants de la SAE imposent alors aux parents des décisions aussi absurdes qu'injustes comme seule possibilité de gagner leurs galons de bon parent. Mais l'analyse montre encore autre chose : il ne s'agirait en effet pas seulement pour les parents de se désoler du fait que les intervenants perdent de vue ce qu'être un parent aux multiples vulnérabilités veut dire. Il ne leur serait pas seulement demandé de penser, d'agir et de réagir comme un parent blanc. Leur serait également communiquée, dans une forme d'injonction contradictoire, l'impossibilité de remplir le statut et le rôle que le SAE leur demande pourtant d'endosser.

In this dissertation, I explore how, in Canada, Indigenous people’s relationships with culturally-significant plant species are an expression of Aboriginal rights, and I ask how these rights can be affirmed and exercised using a form of intersocietal law within and between First Nations and state governments. I examine how my own and others’ ethnobotanical and ethnoecological research can help to decolonize the Crown legal systems that limit Indigenous peoples in regenerating their relationships with native plant species and the ecosystems within which they are situated. In order to explore how Indigenous people’s relationships with native plant species can be expressed in law, my dissertation is grounded in a case study, developed and carried out in collaboration with the T’Sou-ke Nation, members of which have lived on southern Vancouver Island since time immemorial as part of the Straits Salish language group. Using the T’Sou-ke case study as an example, I explain how this evidence of knowledge and use of plants helps to root contemporary First Nations’ rights throughout their territories, which is essential to establishing the basis of land and resource rights that have legal force to be claimed today.I indicate current challenges faced by T’Sou-ke Nation in exercising plant-associated rights throughout their territory and outline how the current legal test for proving Aboriginal rights is problematic. The T’Sou-ke have an abundance of rich evidence of their use of 100 native plant species and of Indigenous laws and governance associated with the same. I contend that the obvious and long-standing Indigenous management of these plant species and various ecosystems on southern Vancouver Island supports a very significant claim of legal rights and I believe that my research is broadly applicable to other First Nations in BC and beyond. The T’Sou-ke Nation, historically and today, are norm creating, generating and interpreting people as reflected in their distinct social organization adapted and adjusted by their members through many changing social and ecological variables over centuries. The re-examination of the values, rules, protocols, customs and practices associated with markers of Indigenous plant use throughout Straits Salish landscapes, specifically with the assistance of Indigenous knowledge holders, as well as ethnohistorical, ethnobotanical, and traditional ecological knowledge, re-frames how evidence of land use and occupancy is presented, and, ultimately, how we might all govern these resources together. For the T’Sou-ke, laws around plants are not limited to certain traditional practices, or to specific sites or places; law also rests in species and in the long-term relationships that people have with culturally important plant species. As such, the normative ordering of T’Sou-ke laws relating to their plant use and management must be judged on T’Sou-ke terms, not by Canadian legal terms. My hope is that this research contributes to the larger discussion of acknowledging Indigenous peoples’ distinct and culturally relative rights and principles with respect to native plants, while strengthening and growing the ties that bind all British Columbians together. / Graduate / 2023-09-07

The aim of this project is to investigate howdecolonial research can be conducted in practice whenthe researcher is a member of the majority population.I ask: what does it mean to be an ally as well as anacademic? Through autoethnography and ParticipatoryAction Research (PAR) I am attempting to “decolonisemy mind” in order to unlearn oppressive systems ofknowledge and I am using academic disobedience asan intentional strategy to disrupt colonial epistemichegemonies. Following feminist and other criticaltheory traditions and using decolonial and indigenousresearch ethics I am criticising the remnants of positivistresearch structures that exists within the social sciencesand the colonising, racialised, gendered and classed wayin which knowledge is traditionally constructed.I am also attempting to position PAR as adecolonising research methodology. Because a PARanimator does not have an automatic right to writeup and disseminate the knowledge that has beencollectively constructed by the co-researchers, however,I am inserting myself into the narrative in order toAbstractdisrupt the traditional academic voice. I attempt toquestion critically how I (auto) act in relation to myown culture and Sámi culture (ethno) through theprocess of reflective writing and analysis (graphy) – inother words, autoethnograpy.I set out to conduct a PAR project within a Sámiorganisation in Stockholm but despite my efforts theproject never really got off the ground. So apart fromexploring my own positionality relative to the Sámi,and apart from constructing an argument for decolonialresearch and allyship, this essay also offers my thoughtson why the project didn’t happen and my journey intolearning how to be a better academic ally. / <p>Student thesis MA in Culture, Diaspora and Ethnicity at Birkbeck, University of London. Presented as a seminar in "Kunskapsproduktion bortom normerna". May-Britt Öhman was supervisor to the thesis.</p>

Approximately 15 years ago the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) were signed, with 144 in favour, 11 abstentions and 4 rejections. The UNDRIP was ground-breaking, but the rejection from 4 powerful states (Canada, USA, New Zealand and Australia), and the subsequent lack of implementation decreased the expectations. This study sets out to investigate three states, Canada, Colombia, and Bolivia, and how they have implemented the declaration. Each state has cast a different vote on the declaration, which constructed a dissimilar stance on the UNDRIP. With a comparative research analysis, cases from each state will be reviewed through key-concepts from post-colonialism, such as hegemony, environmentalism, and place. Data is collected from national constitutions, court rulings and articles on the contrasting priorities of the government and the indigenous peoples. To measure the realization, three articles have been selected from the declaration. This paper concludes that even though the states have made substantial progress in legally adopting the declaration, practical realization lacks. This is due to the countries concern of losing political power were the indigenous peoples to gain self-determination or the inability to conduct extractive projects on indigenous territory which would increase national income.

This dissertation explores the importance of tourism and tourability to contemporary global politics. I argue that the global movement of tourists (declared by the UN World Tourism Organization as a ‘right to tour’) is made possible in part through what I call the production of tourability – the capacity of particular places, bodies, or experiences to be toured and to be seen as worthy of touring. Rather than a natural result of difference, tourability is a political process that involves contestations over what and who counts, how space should be organized, and how and what histories are told. I show that touristic movement is based on a specifically neoliberal mobility – a form of free movement that lays claim to ‘borderlessness’ and infinite access along lines eerily familiar to those claimed by contemporary capital – and use this to argue that the work of making places tourable is also designed in specific ways to facilitate this kind of movement. Thus, being tourable is part of the transnational politics of contemporary governance and is useful to constructing the boundaries of (in)appropriate movement. At the same time, the continual expansion of tourism across the Global South has given ‘being tourable’ important economic and political stakes for life, subjectivity, and land. To understand the interweaving of these stakes and the transnational mobility being produced, I examine two sites where tourability has been thrown into question by those whose work produces it. The first is situated at the tri-border region of the Colombian Amazon on the shores between Brazil and Peru that has, in recent years, seen a boom of tourism development and visitors. This boom has largely operated on the neoliberal designs of movement and contemporary development that promote access to tourable places as an enactment of freedom. Against this backdrop, a story circulating in early 2011 highlighted the decision by members of Nazaret, an indigenous community along the river, to refuse tourists and tour companies entry. Taking up this small and messy act, I interrogate around this refusal to examine how touristic mobility is being made (im)possible in this small corner of the Amazon. The second site is a tour designed by the indigenous Hñähñu community of El Alberto, Mexico, that takes participants on a simulated border-crossing to experience, as so many of these community members have, what it is like to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as an undocumented migrant. Impressive, provocative, complex, and controversial, this tour throws into question both how mobilities are addressed within touristic sites and the creative potential of those who are toured to make use of its practices in ways that further other aims. Using concepts of work, landscapes, circulation, and friction, I explore both production and refusal to elaborate on the transnational politics of tourism as neither a panacea nor as an afterthought, but as a sticky, messy, and significant part of global political life. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Since the 1970s, Colombia’s indigenous communities have been the beneficiaries of state-sanctioned cultural and territorial rights. They have also been extensively impacted by the drug trade in their territories. This dissertation examines how drug crop cultivation in indigenous territories has impacted the struggle for indigenous rights in Colombia. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out primarily with the Nasa indigenous community in the southwestern department of Cauca, Colombia. I argue that the drug trade has contributed to the accelerated transition of indigenous agricultural communities from a primarily subsistence-based economy to a cash-based economy that is dependent on the circulation of global commodities. I also argue that drug control policies have contributed to neoliberal multiculturalism in that they have helped to undermine the political autonomy of indigenous communities. Finally, state-regulated institutions such as schools and child welfare circulate moral narratives that emphasize family structure as a cause for social problems rather than political and historical conditions. I conclude with an assessment of how identity may be used for indigenous communities who continue to struggle for cultural and territorial rights in Colombia’s post-conflict era. / Anthropology

The objectives of this research were to (a) explore nursing educators' experiences of integrating cultural safety in nursing education, (b) describe the strategies that nurse educators use, and (c) identify the barriers and possible solutions to facilitate the integration of cultural safety into nursing education. Indigenous Research Methodology was used to gain insight into nurse educators' experiences of integrating cultural safety in nursing education. Conducted in Ontario with 15 participants from 11 of the 14 accredited SON across Ontario. Conversing and listening to personal stories was the primary knowledge-seeking method. A harmonized narrative and thematic approach were used to analyze the conversations and stories from nurse educators. The results demonstrated the current colonial structure of nursing education is incompatible with and a barrier to the integration of cultural safety. As a consequence, this study reveals more barriers than strategies for integration, which demonstrates the substantial need for leadership, resources, and institutional support to integrate cultural safety. Current approaches have amplified forms of structural violence experienced by Indigenous nurse educators. This form of violence has been labeled a sophisticated type of racism that manifests in ways such as tokenism and othering of Indigenous nurse educators. Information about barriers, challenges and successes experienced by study participants supports recommendations for the dismantling of colonial discourses that are pervasive in nursing education and a barrier to integration of cultural safety. This study of integrating cultural safety supported the problematic nature of decolonization and Indigenization approaches as solutions to ensure cultural safety. Micro-reconciliation was identified as a possible solution to promote successful integration of cultural safety in nursing education. / Thesis / Master of Science in Nursing (MSN)

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

Introduction. This thesis is set in the field of critical knowledge organization and indigenous knowledge organi- zation. Building on the theory of domain analysis I chose the Saami Library in Sweden as the domain for this thesis. The purpose was to identify the structures of power affecting how the lives and experiences of the Saami people are represented in the library catalogue and in the classification systems used, and to examine the views on knowledge expressed in the classification systems. Theory and method. This thesis builds upon the writings on deconstruction. I seek to deconstruct the cata- logue and the classification system using tools derived from the writings of Jacques Derrida. Analysis. Nine posts from the catalogue, and the classification codes entered there were analysed. Emphasis was put on analysing the DDC classification as this is the primary classification system used. Results. From analysing the classifications and the catalogue posts I found that the representations of the Saami experiences varied depending on which subject class the book belonged to. A majority of the posts analysed were classified as social sciences in DDC whereas the classifications were more varied in the Swedish SAB- system. Conclusion. Two structures have been identified. The first structure places the Saami experiences as some- thing that is other, in relation to which the mainstream is defined. The second structure places the Saami experi- ences as part of a diversity, separate from the unity of the mainstream society. This structure only acknowledges the existence of diversity if this means that the position of the unity is strengthened. Concerning the second purpose of the thesis I find that a western knowledge perspective has got a hegemonic position in the DDC, which means that other knowledge systems such as indigenous knowledge is not seen as such but as something only related to a specific group. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

This thesis examines the relationship between the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Amazonian communities and their sustainable indigenous architecture. Over centuries, these communities have profoundly influenced the Amazon rainforests through their distinctive lifestyles, cultural practices, and ancestral knowledge. My research delves into their nomadic traditions, cultural significance, farming techniques, and understanding of life cycles. By exploring these elements and advocating for the restoration of their traditional ways of living, we can foster forest regrowth and biodiversity, ultimately enhancing the health and purpose of our forested areas. This study seeks to identify commonalities among different communities and understand how their ecological knowledge can aid the modern world in addressing deforestation and maintaining ecological balance. By integrating this traditional wisdom with contemporary practices, we can develop strategies to combat environmental degradation and support sustainable development. The insights gained from this research can contribute to more effective conservation efforts and promote a deeper appreciation of the invaluable role that indigenous knowledge plays in preserving our natural environment. / Master of Architecture / Every minute on our planet, approximately 2,800 trees are lost. This alarming rate of deforestation has serious consequences for our environment. Forests play a crucial role in maintaining the water cycle, storing carbon, and providing habitats for countless species. If we don't address deforestation, we could lose all the trees on Earth within the next 50 to 60 years. Among the deforested land around the globe, the amazon region has the highest percentage of destruction. The factors include illegal mining, logging, poaching, commercial plantation etc. Over centuries, the Amazonian Indigenous communities have shaped the Amazon rainforests through their unique lifestyles, cultural practices, and ancestral knowledge. My research aims to delve into various aspects of their lives and the connection, role between the communities and the ecosystem around them. By gaining insight into these aspects and working to restore their traditional ways of living, we can promote forest regrowth and biodiversity, ultimately improving the overall health and purpose of our forests. There is also scientific evidence explaining the phenomenon of cloud formation in the Amazon basin, referred to as the "Flying River." The indigenous communities of amazon created a type of soil which is dark, anthropogenic soil which is called Black soil. The black soil or Terra Preta is the most fertile soil on the planet today and surprisingly it is man made. Similarly, researchers believe that TPA of amazon region is achieved by the intervention of indigenous communities rather than natural agents like insects and birds that would help in formation of forest lands. This thesis talks about the correlation between different environmental phenomenon that occurs in the forest and the communities protecting them.