In June of 1844, James D. Saules, a black sailor turned farmer living in Oregon's Willamette Valley, was arrested and convicted for allegedly inciting Indians to violence against a settler named Charles E. Pickett. Three years earlier, Saules had deserted the United States Exploring Expedition, married a Chinookan woman, and started a freight business on the Columbia River. Less than two months following Saules' arrest, Oregon's Provisional Government passed its infamous "Lash Law," banning the immigration of free black people to the region. While the government repealed the law in 1845, Oregon passed a territorial black exclusion law in 1849 and included a black exclusion clause in its 1857 state constitution. Oregon's territorial delegate also convinced the U.S. Congress to exclude black people from the 1850 Donation Land Act. In each case, Oregon politicians suggested the legacy of the Saules case by stressing the need to prevent black men, particularly sailors, from coming to Oregon and collaborating with local indigenous groups to commit acts of violence against white settlers. This thesis explains the unusual persistence of black exclusion laws in Oregon by focusing on the life of Saules, both before and after white American settlers came to the region in large numbers. Black exclusion in Oregon was neither an anomalous byproduct of American expansion nor a means to prevent slavery from taking root in the region. Instead, racial exclusion was central to the land-centered settler colonial project in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to the Americanization of the Pacific Northwest, the region was home to a cosmopolitan and increasingly fluid culture that incorporated various local Native groups, exogenous fur industry workers, and missionaries. This was a milieu made possible by colonialism and the rise of merchant capitalism during the Age of Sail, a period which lasted from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This was also likely a world very familiar to Saules, who had spent his entire adult life aboard ships and in various seaports. However, the American immigrants who began arriving in Oregon in the early 1840s sought to dismantle this multiethnic social order, privatize land, and create a homogenous settler society based on classical republican principles. And although Saules was born in the United States, American settlers, emboldened by a racialist ideology, denied most non-whites a place in their settler society. Furthermore, during the early decades of resettlement, white American settlers often felt vulnerable to attacks from the preexisting population. Therefore, many settlers viewed free black men like Saules, a worldly sailor with connections among Native people, as potential threats to the security of their nascent communities.

The thesis was originally done for the Center for Intercultural & Folk Studies which no longer exists.

Disparity in sentencing felons based on racial considerations has long has been considered a problem for civil libertarians and scholars alike. Examining data gathered in Kentucky, this thesis addresses this issue through the application of recently developed methodological techniques. Utilizing an index of sentencing equality, this study shows that while differences do exist in black and white offender offense characteristics, these differences do not account for the variations in sentences rendered in cases of white as opposed to black felons. This exploratory research reviews and critiques previous research and provides evidence which should prove useful in resolving the problem of racial-based sentencing disparity.

Wandering Sagebrush is a collection of eight unified short stories. The main themes of the thesis include: the struggle of identity and how one finds the people and places to call family and home. The stories focus on family we make, family we lose, family we choose, and the decisions one makes in the name of family.

This thesis examines enclaves of oppression and discrimination, which continue to subject indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andean society to the pernicious legacies of a racist past. As an interpretive framework this interdisciplinary study draws from theoretical approaches to power, which analyse the reproduction of social injustice in post-colonial societies. This research demonstrates how resistance in post-colonial contexts does not always function as a subversive force. Especially when the variable of racism is taken into account, it becomes clearer how acts of opposition end up fostering a tyrannical domination. Examples from Peruvian history, as well as my fieldwork data, will illustrate how resistances and revolutions in the Peruvian Andes have paradoxically reinstated an oppressive and subjugating social system founded in disavowal of the indigenous Other. In dismantling the ramifications of a violent racist legacy, this study explores those social practices and attitudes which in the course of history have resulted in the subjugation of indigenous peoples. These include paternalism, the commodification of indigenous identity and the phenomenon of incanismo. Ultimately, the very negotiation of identities and the making of Peruvian ethnicity will highlight the reasons why, since the 1970s, the pursuit of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) in the Peruvian Andes has been a challenging and uncertain endeavour. By comparison with bordering Andean regions of Ecuador and Bolivia, IBE is not in the hands of indigenous peoples. This thesis will demonstrate that this is in part due to an underpinning racism, which keeps disrupting a sense of belonging to an ethnic identity.

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity. The scant amounts of primary source data in regard to these leaders’ lives before the war, the destruction of many documents in regard to their leadership following the Reconstruction Era, and the treatment of these figures by historians prior to the Revisionist movement have left this body of extremely important political figures largely unexplored. This dissertation will examine the life of one of Louisiana’s foremost leaders, Lt. Governor Oscar James Dunn, the United States’ first African American executive officeholder. Using previously overlooked papers, Masonic records, Senate journals, newspaper articles and government documents, the dissertation explores Dunn’s role in Louisiana politics and chronicles the factionalization of the Republican Party in Reconstruction New Orleans. Born a slave and released from bondage at an early age, Oscar J. Dunn was able to transcend the stigma which was often attached to those who had been held in slavery. A native of New Orleans, born to Anglo-African parents, he was also able to transcend the language barrier that often excluded Anglo-Africans from social acceptability in Afro-Creole society. Although illiterate, Dunn’s parents made critical strides in securing his social mobility by providing him with both a formal education and a trade apprenticeship. Those skills propelled Dunn forward within his Anglo-African community wherein he became a key figure in the community’s two most important institutions, the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church. This dissertation argues that Dunn’s political ascent was linked to the political enfranchisement of antebellum Anglo-Africans in Louisiana, Dunn’s involvement in Anglo-African institutions (particularly the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church) and Dunn’s ability to find middle ground in the racially charged arguments that engulfed Reconstruction New Orleans’s political arena. Keywords: Oscar Dunn, Reconstruction, New Orleans, Republican, Louisiana, African American, Politics

Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux représentations de la sorcière dans la littérature d’inspiration historique à partir des années 1970. Nous analysons la construction de cette figure protéiforme et les métamorphoses qu’elle connaît dans l’imaginaire social lors des dernières décennies du XXe siècle. Plus précisément, nous examinons les différentes facettes de la sorcière, telles qu’elles apparaissent dans quatre romans francophones d’inspiration historique, en relation avec les discours historiques, féministes et postcoloniaux, et les autres productions culturelles de la même période. En étudiant les interactions entre les représentations de la sorcière et d’autres œuvres, travaux et tendances de l’époque, notre thèse met en lumière les problématiques abordées à travers cette figure dans les textes littéraires. La figure de la sorcière reprend notamment des enjeux qui marquent les dernières décennies du XXe siècle, tels la place des femmes et des cultures minoritaires dans la société, la représentation du corps féminin, le recul des religions traditionnelles et l’écriture de l’Histoire. Au moyen des approches sociocritique et intertextuelle, nous explorons ces enjeux et analysons la façon dont les œuvres développent ou prolongent ces réflexions en abordant la figure de la sorcière. De manière à pouvoir tracer l’évolution de la figure et des questions qui lui sont liées, la thèse est divisée en trois parties, représentant chacune une décennie distincte. Après un préambule brossant un tableau de l’imaginaire de la sorcière au début des années 1970, une première partie se concentre sur la construction de la figure de la sorcière dans les romans Les Enfants du sabbat d’Anne Hébert et La Fontaine obscure de Raymond Jean, parus lors de la décennie 1970. Une deuxième partie, centrée sur la décennie 1980, se penche sur le roman Moi, Tituba sorcière... de Maryse Condé. Enfin, une troisième partie s’intéresse au roman Instruments des ténèbres de Nancy Huston, publié pendant les années 1990. En combinant différentes approches, cette thèse tend à mieux comprendre la fonction de la sorcière dans la littérature et les idées qui lui sont associées dans l’imaginaire social à partir de 1970.

The effects of the colonial project in Kenya created multi-faceted damages to the land and indigenous people-groups. Using the lens of ecofeminism, this study examines the undergirding structures that produce systems such as colonization that oppress and destroy land, people, and other beings. By highlighting the experience of the Kikuyu people within the Kenyan colonial program, the innovative and ingenious response of Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement proves to be a relevant and effective counter to women's disempowerment and environmental devastation in a post-colonial nation. The approach of the Green Belt Movement offers a unique and accessible method for empowering women, restoring the land, and addressing loss of cultural identity, while also contributing a theoretical template for addressing climate change.

This study documents the lifestyle on a small, prosperous black farmstead in the Richland community of Butler County, Kentucky. It is based on extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted with Percy Beeson, owner of the farm for aver fifty years. The result of the fieldwork and interviews was the documentation of how this farmstead, maintained without mechanical farm equipment, worked as a functional unit on a year-round basis. As a functional unit, the Beeson farmstead is described in terms of the Beeson family and their ownership of the farm and the breakdown of the property into two dependent units. In the first area, the Family Unit, the food supply and home industries were prepared and supervised by the women of the household. These activities are discussed according to the seasons of the year, beginning with spring and ending with winter. The second area, the Farm Unit, was run by the Beeson men and contained the major crops and farm animals. This area is also described according to the seasons of the year. The results of this study clearly portray this non-mechanized, small black farmstead as a functional and traditional economic enterprise for Percy Beeson.

This study was initiated to demonstrate how declining neighborhoods can be revitalized through the cooperation and Partnership of local residents, financial institutions, and local government. The Neighborhood II Conservation Plan assumes that interested and informed residents can plan their own environment just as they plan their own family affairs and budget their incomes. The plan further assumes that residents working together as a team can revitalize their neighborhood at the point of decline. This study pursues various approaches to neighborhood preservation which may be useful to other cities.