This dissertation is the product of both lifework and a 2007-2010 research study. Working, living and parenting in the largest First Nation community in Canada, the Six Nations Grand River Territory, I believe it imperative that any body of work I produce be of direct use to my community as well fill a needed area of research within the field of Ogweho:weh (Original/Indigenous) Education. In order to design a study that would yield results to both these ends, I spent a significant portion of this dissertation explaining Indigenous Theory and Praxis. Subsequent to the expansion of literature on Indigenous theory and Indigenous methodology is the primary document analysis and dialogues which were intended to answer the two research questions of: (1) What changes has the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) made to Ogweho:weh education in Canada; and (2) How does the community understand success at Six Nations? One hundred seventy-three documents (international, national, provincial, and local) and 52 dialogues with community advocates, educators and parents were analyzed using an original policy discourse web entitled Social Particle Webbing. Based on a sociological perspective of particle theory, Social Particle Webbing is a metaphor for identifying areas where marginalized groups can be platformed to enhance their ability to create social change. Social Particle Webbing is comprised of two-tailed threads, similar to a candle burning at both ends. The two competing themes of each thread may run polar or complimentary to each other, but are the embodiment of the written and oral documents which shape the discourse. The Discourse of Ogweho:weh Education was identified to have fourteen companion themes making up the seven threads of: (1)“Real” Self-Determinants; (2 Responsibility; (3)In the Spirit of Equity; (4)Choice in Education; (5)Rationale for Inaction; (6)Societal Opinion of Ogweho:weh; and (7)Success. Although Social Particle Webbing was created to answer the needs of Ogweho:weh education by creating an enculturated metaphorical image of Ogweho:weh Education, it is appropriately applied to all arenas of social change where a people are marginalized and not readily able to make change due to a lack of space, resources, or power.

This dissertation is the product of both lifework and a 2007-2010 research study. Working, living and parenting in the largest First Nation community in Canada, the Six Nations Grand River Territory, I believe it imperative that any body of work I produce be of direct use to my community as well fill a needed area of research within the field of Ogweho:weh (Original/Indigenous) Education. In order to design a study that would yield results to both these ends, I spent a significant portion of this dissertation explaining Indigenous Theory and Praxis. Subsequent to the expansion of literature on Indigenous theory and Indigenous methodology is the primary document analysis and dialogues which were intended to answer the two research questions of: (1) What changes has the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) made to Ogweho:weh education in Canada; and (2) How does the community understand success at Six Nations? One hundred seventy-three documents (international, national, provincial, and local) and 52 dialogues with community advocates, educators and parents were analyzed using an original policy discourse web entitled Social Particle Webbing. Based on a sociological perspective of particle theory, Social Particle Webbing is a metaphor for identifying areas where marginalized groups can be platformed to enhance their ability to create social change. Social Particle Webbing is comprised of two-tailed threads, similar to a candle burning at both ends. The two competing themes of each thread may run polar or complimentary to each other, but are the embodiment of the written and oral documents which shape the discourse. The Discourse of Ogweho:weh Education was identified to have fourteen companion themes making up the seven threads of: (1)“Real” Self-Determinants; (2 Responsibility; (3)In the Spirit of Equity; (4)Choice in Education; (5)Rationale for Inaction; (6)Societal Opinion of Ogweho:weh; and (7)Success. Although Social Particle Webbing was created to answer the needs of Ogweho:weh education by creating an enculturated metaphorical image of Ogweho:weh Education, it is appropriately applied to all arenas of social change where a people are marginalized and not readily able to make change due to a lack of space, resources, or power.

“American Impotence” investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Couples, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joan Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of “imperilled masculinity” that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word “potency,” I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison’s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike’s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion’s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity.

“American Impotence” investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Couples, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joan Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of “imperilled masculinity” that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word “potency,” I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison’s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike’s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion’s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Düsseldorf, 1979-1980. / Bibliogr. p. 198-208.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / This work examines Maxwell M. Rabb's role in the area of civil rights and race relations from January 1953 through May 1958 during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Rabb was the first Secretary to the Cabinet, a position created by Eisenhower. In his lesser known duty, Max Rabb quietly developed many aspects of President Eisenhower's civil rights program. Chapter One describes Rabb's pivotal role in ending segregation in the military establishment to include the Navy and the Veterans Administration. In this chapter Rabb is a lone operator, personally meeting with principal actors in the Eisenhower Administration and U.S. Congress to end segregation. Chapter Two examines how Rabb participated in and helped to develop the various organizations of the White House. As the organizations within the Eisenhower White House matured, Rabb was able to use them as roads into the problem of civil rights and to use their power to advance civil rights. The final chapter focuses on the confluence of race relations and human rights on the one hand with U.S. domestic and foreign policy on the other. The chapter uses four cases studies to illustrate the growing importance of American race relations in world affairs after World War II. Max Rabb's participation in each case serves as a reminder that the American domestic sphere had become a cause of international concern and could damage the credibility of U.S democratic values in the a world where racial sensitivity was on the rise and increasingly a factor in international relations. This work ends by concluding that Rabb's effectiveness was severely limited by President Eisenhower's narrow understanding of the limits of government. Rabb was a New Deal Republican serving in the administration of a man who rejected the activism required by New Deal Liberalism. Though Rabb served Eisenhower well, it was Eisenhower who failed to sense the full scope of the problems in U.S. civil rights and race relations.

Ce mémoire explore comment Edward Albee peut être perçu comme un postmoderniste, s’appuyant sur une compréhension du postmodernisme formulée par Linda Hutcheon et le contexte américain pendant les longues années 1960 pour examiner de façon critique deux des premières pièces d’Albee. Les pièces en question, The Zoo Story (1959) et Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), dépeignent des personnages qui ne peuvent supporter la ligne floue entre les faits et la fiction de la condition postmoderne, où il n’y a pas de motifs ou de vérités incontestables. Le besoin désespéré de vivre dans la certitude absolue et l’assurance fait que les personnages nient la condition postmoderne, et s’engagent dans un processus d’oubli forcé de leur appréhension de la condition postmoderne et des différents événements qui les ont amenés à elle. Les personnages des deux pièces utilisent différents métarécits pour créer un sens et vivre leur vie avec l’illusion de la certitude complète. Le processus de l’oubli forcé sera déduit à travers les théories de la mémoire et de l’oubli tel que compris et expliqué par Jonathan K. Foster. Le mémoire démontre comment, en raison de leur cartographie de toute leur vie sur la base de différentes métanarrations, les personnages finissent par vivre d’une manière aliénée et inauthentique. L’état apathique et émasculé de leurs identités les font se livrer à des actes extrêmes de violence et de rage. Albee montre comment les identités de ses personnages sont compromises de différentes façons en subissant leur mort sociale. / This thesis explores how Edward Albee can be perceived as a postmodernist, relying on an understanding of postmodernism formulated by Linda Hutcheon and the American context during the long 1960s to critically scrutinize two of Albee’s early plays. The plays in question, The Zoo Story (1959) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), portray characters who cannot bear the blurred line between fact and fiction of the postmodern condition, wherein there are no unquestionable grounds or truths. The desperate need to live in absolute certainty and assurance makes characters deny the postmodern condition, and engage in a process of forced forgetfulness to forget about their apprehension of the postmodern condition and different events which brought them to it. The characters in both plays use different metanarratives to create meaning and live their lives with the illusion of complete certainty. The process of forced forgetfulness will be deduced through theories of memory and forgetting as understood and explained by Jonathan K. Foster. The thesis demonstrates how, due to them charting their entire lives on the basis of different metanarratives, characters end up living in an alienated and inauthentic manner. The apathetic and emasculated state of their identities make them indulge in extreme acts of violence and rage. Albee shows how identities of his characters get compromised in different ways by suffering their social death.

Dans la période de l’après-guerre, le gouvernement fédéral canadien ressent une nécessité de retravailler sa relation avec les Premières Nations. La tâche s’avère plus difficile que prévu, puisque le leadership autochtone refuse de coopérer avec le Canada, proposant même l’idée de l’indépendance des Nations autochtones du pays. Le gouvernement refuse donc de travailler avec un leadership si radical. Ainsi naît l’idée de faire la promotion d’un leadership plus coopératif dans les écoles résidentielles, déjà bien implantées au Canada. Cette initiative se concrétisera, avec l’aide des Oblats de Marie immaculée et des Premières Nations manitobaines, et l’école résidentielle Assiniboia High-School ouvrira ses portes en 1958 dans la banlieue cossue de River Heights à Winnipeg. Cette école mobilisera toutes sortes d’activités parascolaires pour apprendre aux étudiants en son sein un leadership coopératif visant à l’amélioration des conditions de vie des Premières Nations dans un Canada uni. Cette étude analyse les moyens mis de l’avant par le gouvernement canadien et les pères oblats à Assiniboia pour inculquer un rôle de meneur aux étudiants doués de l’école résidentielle. L’association étudiante, l’organisation missionnaire de Marie immaculée, des conférences, ainsi que des discours sur le leadership autochtone seront offerts aux étudiants afin qu’ils s’imprègnent de l’idée d’un leadership autochtone coopératif. De plus, le sport d’élite sera l’une des activités les plus productives afin de former de futurs chefs coopératifs. / In the post-war period, the Canadian federal government felt a need to rework its relationship with the First Nations. The task turned out to be more difficult than expected, since the Indigenous leadership refused to cooperate with Canada, even suggesting the idea of independence for the Indigenous nations in the country. The government therefore refused to work with such radical leadership. Thus was born the idea of teaching more cooperative leadership in residential schools, which were already well established in Canada. This initiative came to fruition with the help of the Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate and the Manitoba First Nations, and the Assiniboia High-School residential school opened in 1958 in the wealthy suburb of River Heights in Winnipeg. This school mobilized multiple extracurricular activities to teach students cooperative leadership aimed at improving the living conditions of First Nations in a united Canada. This study analyzes the means put forward by the Canadian government and the Oblate Fathers in Assiniboia to instill a leadership role in the gifted students of the residential school. The Student Union, the Missionary Organization of Mary Immaculate, lectures and talks on Indigenous leadership offered to students immersed them in the idea of cooperative Indigenous leadership. In addition, elite sport were one of the most productive activities to train future cooperative leaders.

This study explores the struggle of the Catholic Church to be true to itself and its mission in the midst of other religions, in the context of the non-Catholic American culture, and in relation to the modern world and its discontents. As milestones of the global interfaith movement, American religious freedom and pluralism, and of the relation of religion to modernity, the Chicago Parliaments of Religions offer a unique window through which to view this Catholic struggle at work in the religious public square created by the Parliaments and the evolution of that struggle over the course of the century framed by the two Chicago events. In relation to other religions, the Catholic Church stretched itself from an exclusivist position of being the only true and good religion to an inclusivist position of recognizing that truth and good can be present in other religions. Uniquely, Catholic involvement in the centennial Parliament made the Church stretch itself even further, beyond the exclusivist-inclusivist spectrum into a pluralist framework in which the Church acted humbly as one religion among many. In relation to American culture, the Catholic Church stretched itself from a Eurocentric and monarchic worldview with claims of Catholic supremacy to the American alternative of democracy, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. In relation to modernity, the Church stretched itself from viewing the modern world as an enemy to be fought and conquered to befriending modernity and designing some specific accommodations to it. In these three relationships, there was indeed a shift, but not at all a clean break. Instead a stretch occurred, acknowledging a lived intra-Catholic tension between religious exclusivism and inclusivism, between a universal Catholic identity and Catholic inculturation in America (and in other cultures), and between the immutability of Catholic eternal truths and their translatability into the new languages offered by the modern world. In all this the Second Vatican Council was the major catalyst. For all three cases the Chicago Parliaments of Religions serve as environments conducive to the raising of important questions about Catholic identity, the Catholic understanding of non-Catholics, and Catholic interfaith relations.

This study explores the struggle of the Catholic Church to be true to itself and its mission in the midst of other religions, in the context of the non-Catholic American culture, and in relation to the modern world and its discontents. As milestones of the global interfaith movement, American religious freedom and pluralism, and of the relation of religion to modernity, the Chicago Parliaments of Religions offer a unique window through which to view this Catholic struggle at work in the religious public square created by the Parliaments and the evolution of that struggle over the course of the century framed by the two Chicago events. In relation to other religions, the Catholic Church stretched itself from an exclusivist position of being the only true and good religion to an inclusivist position of recognizing that truth and good can be present in other religions. Uniquely, Catholic involvement in the centennial Parliament made the Church stretch itself even further, beyond the exclusivist-inclusivist spectrum into a pluralist framework in which the Church acted humbly as one religion among many. In relation to American culture, the Catholic Church stretched itself from a Eurocentric and monarchic worldview with claims of Catholic supremacy to the American alternative of democracy, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. In relation to modernity, the Church stretched itself from viewing the modern world as an enemy to be fought and conquered to befriending modernity and designing some specific accommodations to it. In these three relationships, there was indeed a shift, but not at all a clean break. Instead a stretch occurred, acknowledging a lived intra-Catholic tension between religious exclusivism and inclusivism, between a universal Catholic identity and Catholic inculturation in America (and in other cultures), and between the immutability of Catholic eternal truths and their translatability into the new languages offered by the modern world. In all this the Second Vatican Council was the major catalyst. For all three cases the Chicago Parliaments of Religions serve as environments conducive to the raising of important questions about Catholic identity, the Catholic understanding of non-Catholics, and Catholic interfaith relations.