This thesis looks at ways of Anishinaabe cultural resurgence for Indigenous youth through our current education systems. / Three Anishinaabe elders who had experience in Anishinaabe on-reserve schools and in community Indigenous education programs were interviewed to learn their views on what had worked and not worked in past attempts to integrate Anishinaabe language and cultural knowledge into curriculum and programming. Their views on curriculum content, pedagogical methods, and education policy were solicited to gain a better understanding of how to decolonize the current Eurocentric school system and provide more successful learning experiences for Anishinaabe children and youth. The key findings were: 1) language and spiritual education must be at the core of the curriculum; 2) elders’ knowledge and their oral stories and oral history had to be the key means of transferring knowledge to the younger generation; 3) land-based, hands-on experiential learning experiences that utilized the knowledge and skills of community members were essential to successfully engaging students in the learning process; 4) teachers needed to take responsibility for identifying and nurturing the learning spirit in each child; and 5) commitment from the government for adequate funding, support resources and class time was essential for the successful integration of Anishinaabe language and cultural knowledge into on-reserve school systems. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis examines the insights of three Anishinaabe elders (knowledge holders) who had extensive experience in Anishinaabe on-reserve schools or in community Indigenous education programs. They were interviewed to learn their views on what had and had not worked in past attempts to integrate Anishinaabe language and cultural knowledge into on-reserve schools and programming. Their insights inform recommendations for five strategies to improve the engagement of Anishinaabe students through culture-based teachings.

From first contact, Europeans and Euro-Americans have been representing North American indigenous peoples in literature. Non-Indian authors colonized American Indian stories and re-presented them through a Western worldview, which distorted and misrepresented Indian peoples. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?s piece, Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855 is an early example of this, and Ann Rinaldi?s children?s book, My Heart Is on the Ground, is a contemporary example. However, Indian peoples are not mere victims. Using story as a weapon for ?decolonization,? American Indian authors have self-re-presented and, through literature, have fought for a more accurate, tribal specific presentation of self to the dominant culture. Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) authored decolonizing, autobiographical articles and short stories as early as 1901 and collected and published these in her text American Indian Stories in 1920. James Welch continued a legacy of tribal specific, American Indian authored literature with his 1986 publication, Fools Crow. Both texts work as weapons in the decolonization of American literature. / Master of Arts

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Cooking is mind, body, spirit work. What’s possible when we ‘drop in’ to our bodies when cooking? We begin noticing what we are energetically bringing to the food we make. This creative project practices a pedagogy that works with food to create healing space. Healing, as it is defined here, is not void of discomfort nor is it happiness all the time. Who haunts your domestic space? Who is at your back when you cook? This project finds information and sacred knowledge in the food we cook and eat; it reflects back to us deeply buried truths regarding our traumas, joys, and subjectivity. This pedagogy holds the potential for participants to bring “new meanings” to food, and thereby, be activated as cultural producers cooking up the next chapter in our peoples’ creation stories (Anzaldúa 103). This project is documented as an auto-ethnographic tale from the perspective of the practitioner, using erotic storytelling to keep fire in the pages and a methodology of refusal to “determine the length of the [academy’s] gaze” (Tuck and Ree 640).

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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Collaborating with communities has become an increasingly popular practice in archaeological projects all over the world. However, the strategies used for engaging communities have broad applications that are greatly determined by the social, economic and political climates of each region. How, then, are archaeologists supposed to ethically and professionally engage the communities their research impacts across these various contexts? Should there be a universal scale in which to measure and gauge community collaboration, and how can we assess that impact? My research uses strategies for assessing collaboration from various regions and disciplines, and applies them to an international context. Two archaeological projects in Greece and Jordan serve as the case study subjects for a formal assessment that measures levels of collaboration in five different categories and in two separate community groups. In conjunction with self-assessments taken by the archaeologists and students associated with each project, the results form a tool that comprehensively represents the needs and goals of all stakeholders associated. Ideally, this tool can be utilized to enhance our understandings on how the communities we work with perceive our projects and what must be done in order to understand how the goals of archaeologists and communities intersect each other.

Student Number : 0204500X - PhD Thesis - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This thesis is a study of the Sasa Sema’s Lion Series of biographies written for young readers. The Sasa Sema project is concerned with archiving the stories of famous historical figures and contemporary heroes. The research examines the shifts or the trends these biographies take as compared to what has been in existence in discourses on children’s writing in Kenya in the past. I argue that the issues that these biographies are concerned with are a novelty in Kenyan children’s literature. By writing biographies of historical figures in Kenya, the authors are not only making an intervention by creating new models for children’s literature, but they also show that the story of the nation cannot be enacted outside the heroic struggles of its peoples. I further argue that the Sasa Sema project is significant because many writers of children’s literature in Kenya, and in East Africa in general, write mostly about childhood stories rather than historical figures. Also, the characters used in the biographies are adult characters rather than young fictional animal and human characters that have characterized children’s literature in the past. I conclude that these changes broaden the scope of children’s literature in Kenya. The changes in writing for children in Kenya, evident in the biographies under study are examined across the chapters that make up this thesis. Chapter One attempts to locate the biographies under study within Kenya’s children’s literary tradition by looking at the trajectory this literature has taken from pre-colonial time to the present. Chapter Two examines how orality as a stylistic device is used in the texts under study first, to create literary appreciation and secondly, as a means of summoning literature from different cultural backgrounds in which the texts are based. The chapter argues that the use of oral art forms evokes identity and signals cultural diversity in the Kenyan society. Chapter Three addresses the question of female heroism and gender stereotypes in children’s literature. This chapter intimates that biographies, whose narratives draw from real life situations, help in revising the representation of the female character in children’s literature. Chapter Four examines how individual stories are used to narrate Kenya’s history of decolonization for the children. This chapter also avows that the process of colonization created heroes through colonialist institutions such as schools and prisons. Chapter Five examines how the Sasa Sema project argues for the recognition of minority groups that have been marginalized in narratives of nation formation, while Chapter Six discusses the biography of Dedan Kimathi a Mau Mau freedom fighter. The female narrator in Kimathi’s biography, who is also positioned as a participant in the war portrays children’s literature as a vehicle for paying homage to women’s role in the Mau Mau war. In Chapter Seven, I attempt to harmonize the conclusions reached in the previous chapters.

Thesis advisor: Julian Bourg / The social and cultural aftershocks of the end of French empire in Algeria reverberated throughout the former colony and metropole long after independence in 1962. This dissertation illustrates the process of decolonization between the start of the Algerian war in 1954 and the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency in 1981. Rather than “forgetting Algeria” after 1962, French administrators, social aid workers, and the public were constantly confronted by traces of empire, and especially by the presence of Algerian migrant workers and families on metropolitan soil. I trace the evolution of a group of private social aid associations that were created to help integrate newly arrived families in the colonial era, and that continued their work even after it ended. These social aid associations acted as mediating bodies between Algerians and the French welfare state. They offered services to a growing population of Algerian workers and families to help them become more at home in France. As the number of Algerian families grew in the post-independence era, the colonial modernizing mission justified social aid associations’ interventions to “emancipate” Algerian women through social aid and education. The “slow end to empire” demonstrated by the growth of social aid for Algerians even after they were no longer citizens highlights the importance of studying not just the empire and the colony in a single analytic field, but also the post-empire and the post-colony. Furthermore, this dissertation reveals the social logic behind increasingly restrictive immigration protocols toward Algerians. Historians have argued that colonial and ex-colonial subjects created the potential for France’s economic growth during the Thirty Glorious Years. It would not have been possible without access to this cheap labor. Though the availability of employment helped to pave the way for migration initially, family and worker migration far surpassed this threshold in the 1960s and 70s. The perceived inability of Algerian families to integrate, which had allowed for the growth of social aid also led to its downfall. Paradoxically, the failures of social aid associations justified contracting Algerian family migration in the 1970s. Attention to integration alongside immigration reveals how the perceived social burden of welcoming Algerian families also conditioned their ability to resettle there. Against the backdrop of a faltering global economy and disintegrating Franco-Algerian relations, support for the specialized social welfare network for Algerians began to collapse in the late 1970s. As a result, the network reoriented its services to the whole body of migrants arriving in France. This “universalizing” republican approach to welfare conceived of social aid as a structural problem without regard to nationality. This approach, I argue, served the purpose of helping the French forget their colonial past in the years immediately preceding its supposed “resurgence.” The winnowing of the specialized social welfare network provided support for this revival, but not because France had yet to reckon with its colonial past. Rather, the French administration had litigated this past since Algerian independence in the context of social aid for Algerian families. The powerful return of “neo-republicanism” in the 1980s thus occurred as a result of the long process of decolonization.

After World War II East and West Germans alike contributed to the maintenance and dismantling of European colonialism, whether by means of direct participation or state policy. At the same time, Germans in both states fashioned a variety of narratives about Germany's own colonial period, selectively including and interpreting facts in order to support sweeping pronouncements on Germany's past, present, and future. In this regard Germans were not unique, as other Europeans after 1945 likewise struggled to find their way in a rapidly decolonizing world and to make sense of the history that had led them to this point. Yet, unlike other Europeans, Germans had been without a colonial empire of their own since World War I. In West and East Germany colonialism permeated political culture. German politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, and workers dealt with colonialism, its decline, and its aftermath on a regular basis. Colonies were objects of foreign policy-making; decolonization provided an important context for political and economic developments within, between, and beyond both German states; and Germany's colonial past offered redemption and reproach to those willing to find them there. These and other encounters with colonialism dot the historical record, appearing in government archives, political pamphlets, and popular culture ranging from periodicals to film and television. Colonialism's continued relevance for Germans--and indeed the continued relevance of Germans in Europe's waning overseas empires--naturally invites one to compare and contrast the German experience with that in France, or the United Kingdom. However, it also points to the importance such similarities or differences had for Germans. Colonialism certainly helped forge connections between Germans and non-Germans across Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, but more importantly it provided a language for defining Germans' relationships with the rest of the world, not to mention with each other.