The aim of this thesis is to unfold the multilayered intersubjective experience of the author himself, a Chinese pastor. The author postulates himself as the subject in whom the said experience was evident, so that it can be analyzed and interpreted. The author argues for a cultural-linguistic experience of shì勢 as the locus at which the intersubjective experience takes place. He then shows that such experience embodies a Chinese Christian’s ‘two texts’ inheritance, and argues that it is through unfolding or revealing of such experience that the nature of his relationship with them can be demonstrated. The author will show that his relationship to these “two texts” is a continuing appropriation of them. The appropriation is not done through arbitrary readings of the texts, but careful exegetical study of both biblical and Chinese classic. The subjective appropriation will be studied by paying attention to the texts with their literary and historical contexts considered, not simply for the sake of reconstruction but for their relevancy to what the subject experiences. To unfold this experience, the author identifies five key texts that are found in his intersubjective experience: Text A1: Shì勢, Text A2: Yìzhuàn易傳, Text B1: Pauline notion of principalities and powers, Text B2: Pauline Texts I and II: Galatians and 1 Corinthians, and Text 0 (zero), his initial or seminal experience of shì. The author provides the hermeneutical rationale in dialogue with Michael Polanyi and Hans Georg Gadamer, and proposes that a double vision hermeneutic will help interpret the multilayered intersubjective relationships between texts and the subject. The thesis will reveal, through the double vision hermeneutic, a unique way of conceiving Chinese Christian self that embodies fusion, intermingling and layers of understanding of texts and notions from the Bible and Chinese tradition. The author argues that study of this intersubjective experience reveals a vital facet of Chinese Christian self, and significantly enhances the study of Chinese theology. The author also hopes that the double vision hermeneutic as demonstrated will contribute to the understanding of a facet of Chinese Christian way of being.

The 1585 Relación Geográfica Map of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala gives scholars a rare glimpse of sixteenth- century southern Guatemala. The map displays the use of Spanish, Nahua, and Maya perspectives. The coexistence of indigenous Nahua versus Spanish or European iconographies and narratives is a theme constantly explored in the studies of the Relaciones Geográficas maps. However, the opposition of two different indigenous narratives and iconographies, as well as Spanish, is not. This project examines the convergences and conflicts among these narratives and iconographies as evidenced on the map and in the accompanying text. The individual discussion of each narrative is followed by a critical discussion to provide theoretical and authorial contexts for the map. In effect, this study complicates the view of sixteenth-century Mesoamerican Relaciones Geográficas maps.

Mainstream institutions have, historically, dismissed Indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and research approaches (Bowman-Farrell, 2015; Harrington & Pavel, 2013). However, in recent years, a literature has emerged articulating Indigenous research methodologies (IRMs), and their distinctiveness from Western, Eurocentric perspectives on inquiry (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; Kovach, 2009; Smith, 1999 & 2012; Wilson, 2008). This has coincided with increased need for IRM scholars and practitioners to secure extramural funds to support their activities. But questions remain as to how the U.S. federal grant making enterprise has accommodated Indigenous frameworks. This research explores synergies in the ways that grantees, grant makers, and other related stakeholders understand and navigate the federal funding enterprise in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEM-H) fields; and the impact of how, and to what extent, this space is successfully navigated. To align with Indigenous worldviews, I use triple theoretical lenses of Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2005), Storytelling, and Interstitial Spaces (Cram & Philips, 2011), and an indigenized case study design. Eleven participants from Tribal Colleges and Universities and tribal communities, federal funding agencies, and consulting firms participated in unstructured interviews to tell their views about Indigenous approaches in the federal funding environment. Coupled with document review, the analysis showed that perceptions of risk, evidence, and expertise were sources of tension, although there were also areas of real and lasting success. I suggest that despite policies to diversify STEM-H grant making, Indigenous perspectives have largely been excluded from these discourses. This may have the effect of compromising the integrity of the validity construct as used in the dominant research methodology literature. I offer a model, called Fifth Paradigm Grantsmanship, as one means to usher transformative change in grant making.

This doctoral dissertation revisits the horse in Blackfoot culture in order to explore how its adoption altered Blackfoot hunting practices and landscape uses during the Contact Period in the Northwestern Plains of North America. The Blackfoot provide one of the best avenues for research into the horse's impact on big-game hunters because of their pre-contact trajectory, history of interaction with other groups, detailed ethnographic record, and continued investment in equestrianism. While the socio-economic consequences of the horse's introduction have been studied from a historical perspective, the archaeology of this transition remains ambiguous. This project presents a new, archaeological dimension to the dynamics of the Blackfoot equestrian transition by incorporating material culture with traditional knowledge, historic accounts, and geospatial data into a multi-scalar, transnational interpretation of the horse's impact on both Blackfoot social, economic, religious, and spiritual life, as well as the way in which Blackfoot peoples used and understood their landscape. The results of this study show how these changes may be best understood as a transition in modes of production from hunting and gathering to nomadic pastoralism. In this endeavor, this project contributes new theoretical and methodological approaches as well as substantive new data to our understanding of hunting and pastoralism among people of the Northwestern Plains.

The 21st century has been designated the Urban Century given that over fifty percent of the world's population is reported to be living in cities. Indigenous populations are not alien to this demographic trend. In Mexico, an underestimated 35 percent of the indigenous population lives in cities. Over the last decade, the global demographic transition towards urbanization coupled with city-based indigenous activism has drawn scholars to systematically study indigenous urban experiences as forms of cultural resilience and innovation. Yet, little attention has been paid to the intersection between indigenous populations and the political ecology of urbanization as a dynamic process. This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the intersection between indigeneity and urbanization by taking a political ecology approach to study the relationship between the Yaqui people and the city of Hermosillo in Sonora, Mexico. The Yaqui people--Yoemem--locate their ancestral homeland along the Yaqui River, about 220 kilometers south of Hermosillo. In the last century, however, they established diasporic communities across the Greater Southwest, including in Hermosillo. This dissertation specifically addresses three overarching questions. First, it asks how urbanization plays a role within indigenous Yaqui struggles over resource governance in a context where people have little political and economic power. Second, it asks how indigenous communities have adapted the cultural practices of their ancestors to marginal urban environments and specifically how they deal with the environmental and legal challenges imposed by the process of urbanization. Finally, it asks how analytical attention to urban indigenous struggles and indigenous accounts of those struggles present a more nuanced history of the urbanization of nature. These research questions were addressed through a mixed-methods approach that integrated twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, comparative analysis of museum collections, and review of legal materials and documentary sources associated with indigenous rights and urban development at the municipal, state, and national levels. At its core, this dissertation integrates two related but yet-to-be-engaged theoretical discussions: anthropological critiques of the myth of the noble savage who belongs to nature, and political ecology deconstruction of the myth of the modern city that exists outside nature. Research findings indicate that situated urban indigenous experiences constitute an extension of indigenous territories into new areas. In articulating their indigenous identities the Yaquis of Hermosillo incorporate the city into their indigenous homeland, and in turn transform the political ecology of the city.

This thesis, or storytelling journey, examines the stories of four First Nations adults who survived cross-cultural adoption into non-First Nations families and reunification with their birth families and/or communities. The methodology utilized for this research is Storytelling. The purpose and passion for storytelling in First Nations traditions are acknowledged and explained, helping to outline why storytelling methodology is a logical choice to honour and respect the storytellers’ messages included in this thesis. An overview of the traditional First Nations family system and the impacts of genocidal government policies on such traditional family systems are explicated, specifically in relation to First Nations children adopted out of community in a cross cultural manner. -Tákem nsnek’wnúk’w7a (All my relations) / Graduate

Anishinabeg are not strangers to photography. Like many Indigenous communities in North America and elsewhere, Anishinabeg have a history of being pictured by governments, artists, and researchers working within the confines of colonial thought and practice. Not surprisingly, much of this colonial artwork has drawn considerable scholarly critique, calling attention to issues including misuse of power, cultural appropriation, assimilation, and misrepresentation. While this work continues to be significant in contributing understanding of how colonialism played out visually and materially, it may also unintentionally generate the misconception that Indigenous Peoples were only the subjects of the camera or had little or no authority over the photographic experience. Indeed, photography has its own history and place within the creative practices and traditions of many Indigenous Peoples. This research project explores the role of Anishinabe photography in the reclamation and continuance of Anishinabe stories, memories, and knowledge among Anishinabe families with ancestral and present day ties to Anishinabe lands in the northwest region of Ontario. As a result of imposed colonial legislation, Anishinabeg in this region have been displaced from their traditional lands, which has had direct consequences on their ability to retain their language, culture, and life skills. Today, Anishinabeg live in the aftermath of colonial violence perpetuated against their ancestors. The severing of land and kin connections has left many Anishinabeg struggling with issues including loss of identity and sense of belonging. Despite of these ongoing challenges, Anishinabeg have struggled to recover and maintain their knowledge, language, sovereignty, and spirituality through various personal and shared activities and initiatives. This research incorporates a research framework that integrates visual, narrative, and material strategies to directly confront the aforementioned colonial legacies of erasure and disappearance of Anishinabeg. It seeks to explore and privilege Anishinabe experiences and stories by weaving together various theoretical and methodological threads of decolonization, photography, place, visuality, materiality and memory. Through processual and creative ways of bringing together and experiencing photographs, it contributes to understandings of the significance of photography to Indigenous-led efforts directed towards decolonization, including cultural revival and continuity, sense of belongingness, identity, and caring for relationships among person, place and land. This research intervenes in Anishinabe lands, stories, and experiences that fall outside the jurisdiction of the Indian Act or “official” dominant versions of history and therefore provides a powerful counter narrative that seeks to both destabilize widely accepted colonial myths and contribute to Anishinabe sovereignty. Major findings of this research position Anishinabe photographs as highly relational and social things that may help configure and congeal a host of relationships between people, the land, and their ancestral past. It introduces new ways of working with and through historical family photographs—ways that are grounded in existing Anishinabe material and embodied practices. Through these practices it contributes knowledges about the past that can be acquired through these practices. As such, it offers new sets of relationships that strengthen individual ties to the ancestral past in ways that both honour our responsibilities to our ancestors and their teachings as well as our commitments to generations ahead of us. / Graduate

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Access to knowledge and information is found to be the cornerstone in the road to knowledge economy transformation whereby the utilization of knowledge is the key engine of economic growth, where knowledge is acquired, created, disseminated and used effectively to enhance economic and social development. This means that the more people acquire knowledge, the more they will begin producing new products or improving systems and existing products, thus adding value to local products and improving the GDP of the country, as well as improving their social livelihood. Therefore, the primary role public libraries have is being the knowledge hubs, to make provision of higher quality knowledge and to make information accessible to the public to equally contribute to all NDPs towards achieving the Namibia Vision 2030 for a knowledge economy. This research study discusses “The contribution of the Public Library services towards a knowledge economy transformation readiness which is envisaged by the Namibia Vision 2030. In achieving that, the study has investigated the state of the Namibia legislative and policy framework reflections of access to knowledge and information as provided by libraries. The study further examines the availability and accessibility of knowledge and information resources, including ICT infrastructure at public libraries in remote rural areas. Moreover, it discusses the types of education and training programmes conducted by public libraries in ensuring that users have the necessary information and retrieval searching competencies and skills for accessing and navigating available information infrastructural resources. Finally, it explores innovation systems, technologically and non-technologically initiated by librarians for library services enhancement, and how library users have tapped into the growing stock of knowledge and information, and adapted them to local needs for economic and social development. The study has employed the four pillars of the World Bank Knowledge Economy Framework, namely an economic and institutional regime; information, knowledge and ICT infrastructure; education and training, and an innovation system as the lenses through which to investigate the research questions understudied.

ABSTRACT Within the National Curriculum Statement, Principle 8 refers to the value of indigenous knowledge systems. This represents the move towards a culturally appropriate curriculum as part of South Africa’s post-Apartheid changes to the education system, in line with the Constitution. Neither environmental education nor indigenous knowledge exist as independent learning areas within the National Curriculum Statement. However, given that indigenous knowledge systems has been included as a principle underpinning the entire National Curriculum Statement, this study examined its potential in contributing to environmental education and the development of environmentally responsible citizens. What has emerged is a plethora of challenges associated with policy translation, South Africa’s colonial legacy, teacher training and the dearth of resource materials, among others, that are effectively coalescing to militate against the effective implementation of Principle 8. Consequently, not only is the country faced with the continued devaluing and loss of indigenous knowledge systems but also with missed opportunities for its enrichment of environmental education and environmental management.

The participation of indigenous communities and use of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in environmental governance is provided for in several international and national environmental legislation and policies. In South Africa, the National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998 (NEMA) in Chapter 1, Principle 4g requires that decisions must take into account the interests, needs and values of all interested and affected parties, and this includes recognising all forms of knowledge, including traditional and ordinary knowledge. This study investigated the Environmental Impact Assessment process (EIA) in mining developments in three rural communities in Limpopo Province, South Africa with regards to the effectiveness of public participation in fostering the incorporation of IKS. The qualitative research design used in this study employed several research methods through the utilisation of 3 villages as a case study. Semi-structured interviews, a focus group discussion and document analysis were used to collect information regarding the public participation process and the integration of IKS into EIAs. This report illustrates that IKS exists in rural communities and some of it is relevant to be incorporated in EIAs. This research study has shown that while expert knowledge dominates the EIA process, there is no indication that this is done deliberately to exclude IKS. This study has also revealed that the public participation process has a number of weaknesses such as in the selection and composition of community stakeholders and communication procedures. Suspicions also developed amongst the villagers of community representatives being bribed by the mine, and infighting started within community committees resulting in some community members losing trust in the committees. The disagreements with regards to the integrity of community committees created divisions and this negatively impacted on the public participation process. However, despite these weaknesses, if capacity building for both EIA experts and rural communities is done, the public participation process has potential as a tool to aid the integration of IKS into EIAs.