Ally literature suggests processes and guidelines that non-Indigenous researchers can follow in order to establish respectful relationships (Battiste, 1998; Wilson, 2008; Edward, 2006; Margaret, 2010). It also states the importance of preparedness for engaging and sustaining long term alliances (Lang, 2010; Brophey, 2011); however specific training methods; modalities that support long-term relationships; practices to develop desired qualities; or self-care approaches for Allies have not been addressed in the literature. Through autoethnographic work I sought to explore this gap in literature. This study is situated within decolonizing methodologies looking to contribute to legitimizing traditional ways of knowing; and within Anzaldúas (1987) philosophical view of “Doing Mestizaje” (1987). My work is a personal account of the complicated and conflicted situation of working as an Ally, being both Mestiza and Buddhist in a culture of colonization/decolonization. Unique to this exploration are modalities I chose to help with a deeper understanding, and as possible approaches to address emotional stress and prevent burnout in Ally work: art, meditation, mindfulness practice, prayer, dream work, and narrative/poetry. My findings show that a Mestizo view of Allyhood presents differences with those of White Allies; that implementation of the Buddhist concepts of interdependence and selflessness can support Allies during a painful or stressful process of self-reflection, as well as through out the relationship; and that doing research as ceremony, and ceremony as research contributes to the revitalization of Indigenous traditional ways of knowing and its importance in Decolonizing work. / Graduate

Frente à necessidade emergente de se esclarecer os obscuros períodos de ditaduras e violência de Estado na América Latina ou de construir e manter versões que os neguem surge em diversos países um novo conflito entre os diferentes setores da sociedade, que agora disputam qual versão sobre o passado ascenderá ao status de verdade. A memória coletiva, como fenômeno construído a partir de relações sociais e constituidor dessas mesmas relações, ao ser transformada em memória histórica, aquela que é legitimada institucionalmente, parece ser um meio de determinar o que deve e o que não deve ser recordado, possibilitando o reconhecimento ou o apagamento de identidades. Muitos dos processos de reconstrução e recuperação de memória desenvolvidos nos últimos anos reproduzem modelos ocidentalocêntricos de pensar e fazer, excluindo o saber de grupos historicamente marginalizados. A produção de informes e publicações com dados sobre os eventos violentos do passado, ganha mais relevância que as vidas que relataram tais eventos. Estratégias para que se rompa o silêncio são elaboradas sem que se questione como fazer falar o silêncio sem que ele fale necessariamente a língua hegemônica que o pretende fazer falar. Muitas comunidades cansadas de esperar que se cumpram seus direitos por parte do governo, decidem levar a cabo suas próprias formas de reparação do tecido social, desenvolvendo processos de recuperação e reconstrução de memória particulares, destinados à reorganização e remotivação, a partir, sobretudo, das memórias de suas resistências. A Guatemala, como país tremendamente afetado por 36 anos de conflito armado interno, tem concentrado em seu pequeno território, uma imensidão de processos de memória. Sendo a população indígena a mais atingida pela violência do conflito armado, pelo racismo e pela discriminação até os dias de hoje, muitos destes processos não visam tratar causas estruturais da violência, e as próprias comunidades terminam por desenvolver estratégias para seguir resistindo. A partir das memórias destas resistências, lidas, escutadas e vividas ao longo da presente pesquisa, pretende-se refletir sobre os efeitos das políticas de recuperação e reconstrução de memória como modos de reparar os danos causados pela violência política. Para tal, serão propostas algumas relações entre racionalidade colonial e memória histórica, a partir do recente movimento descolonial latino americano; será traçado um caminho de leitura pela história da Guatemala, para chegar-se às contribuições que podem ser feitas ao campo, a partir de um caso específico de recuperação e reconstrução de memória histórica na Guatemala. / Regarding the emerging need to clarify the hazy periods of dictatorships and State violence in Latin America or the need to build and maintain versions that deny them in many countries a new conflict emerges, between the different sectors of society, which now dispute which version about the past will earn the status of truth. Collective memory, as a phenomenon built over social relationships and something which constitutes these very relationships, when transformed in historical memory, the one which is institutionally legitimated, seems like a mean to determine what should and what should not be remembered, allowing the recognition or the erasure of identities. Many of the processes of reconstruction and recuperation of memory developed in the last years reproduce Western-centric models of thinking and doing, ruling out the knowledge of historically marginalized groups. The production of reports and publications with data regarding violent events of the past gains more relevance than the lives that reported such events. Strategies to break the silence are elaborated without questioning how to make silence speak without it speaking necessarily the hegemonic language that intends to make it speak. Many communities, tired of waiting for their rights to be fulfilled by the government, decide to perform their own ways of repairing the social tissue, developing processes of recuperation and reconstruction of particular memories, aiming to the reorganization and remotivation, from, above all, the memories of their resistances. Guatemala, as a country tremendously affected by 36 years of internal armed conflict, has been concentrating in its small territory a huge amount of memory processes. Being the indigenous population the most affected by the violence of the armed conflict, by racism and discrimination until nowadays, many of these processes do not aim to treat the structural causes of violence, and communities themselves end up developing strategies to keep resisting. From the memories of these resistances, read, listened and lived throughout the present research, it is intended to reflect upon the effects of the policies of recuperation and reconstruction of memory as means to repair the damage caused by political violence. For such, some relations will be proposed between colonial rationality and historical memory, a reading scrip will be traced through the history of Guatemala aiming to reach out to the contributions that can be made to the field, from a specific case of recuperation and reconstruction of historical memory from Guatemala.

As the number of Indigenous children and youth in the care of Manitoba child welfare steadily increases, so do the questions and public debates. The loss of children from Indigenous communities due to residential schools and later on, to child welfare, has been occurring for well over a century and Indigenous people have been continuously grieving and protesting this forced removal of their children. In 1999, when the Manitoba government announced their intention to work with Indigenous peoples to expand off-reserve child welfare jurisdiction for First Nations, establish a provincial Métis mandate and restructure the existing child care system through legislative and other changes, Indigenous people across the province celebrated it as an opportunity for meaningful change for families and communities. The restructuring was to be accomplished through the Aboriginal Justice Initiative-Child Welfare Initiative (AJI-CWI). Undoubtedly, more than a decade later, many changes have been made to the child welfare system but children are still been taken into care at even higher rates than before the changes brought about by the AJI-CWI. In order to develop an understanding of what has occurred as a result of the AJI-CWI process, this study reached out to child welfare workers who had worked in the system before, during and after the process was put in place. Using a storytelling approach based in an Indigenous methodology, twenty-seven child welfare workers shared how they perceived the benefits, the deficits, the need for improvement and how they observed the role of Indigenous culture within the child welfare context. The stories provide a unique insight into how the changes were implemented and how the storytellers experienced the process, as well as their insights into barriers, disappointments, benefits and recommendations for systemic change. / Graduate

This thesis explores the phenomenon of Indigenous/non-Indigenous allyship. In this thesis, Indigenous child welfare leaders were interviewed regarding their perspectives on allyship and were asked to identify non-Indigenous leaders whom they consider allies. Through a storytelling methodology, these non-Indigenous leaders were interviewed regarding their journeys to allyship. As the researcher I employed thematic analysis of the interviews conducted to determine if there are patterns that suggest a process through which a non-Indigenous person becomes an ally. Analysis of the literature and the interviews conducted suggest critical processes that non-Indigenous leaders have undergone, and comprise a series of steps, in the journey to allyship. The research questions addressed in this thesis are: (1) Are there process patterns or themes that emerge with the phenomenon of allyship? (2) Is there a framework that can be identified that can inform a settler leader’s journey to becoming an ally? The research findings suggest that there are essential process patterns that emerge with the phenomenon of allyship. Further, the findings suggest there is danger in suggesting a sequential or linear process for this journey of head, heart and spirit. / Graduate / 2020-12-19

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

In collaboration with Elders, this study explores the great need for their meaningful partnership in STBBI (sexually transmitted and/or bloodborne infections) research. / Indigenous Elders are highly regarded as community leaders, traditional healers, and experts of Indigenous cultures and knowledges (Clark & Wylie 2021; Hadjipavlou et al., 2018; Lessard et al., 2021). The meaningful partnership of Elders in Indigenous STBBI (sexually transmitted and/or bloodborne infections) research has become increasingly recognized as an integral part of developing decolonial research processes, ensuring the implementation of Indigenous methods in STBBI research, and increasing the sexual health and wellbeing of Inuit, Métis, and First Nations communities through the development of culturally and ethically responsive research (Flicker et al., 2015; Hillier 2020; O’Brien et al., 2020). This study sought to expand upon and connect current literature with the expertise and guidance of Indigenous Elders who have been involved in STBBI research. Thirteen Elders were recruited nationwide to participate in three virtual Talking Circles to explore their meaningful partnership in Indigenous STBBI research and to offer guidance to researchers on how to strengthen these research partnerships in the future. Five overarching themes emerged from the thematic analysis of these Talking Circles: (1) Understanding the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism and the need to decolonize STBBI research; (2) Prioritizing the knowledge and lived experience of Elders and Indigenous people living with STBBI throughout the research process; (3) Centering spirituality and ceremony in Indigenous STBBI research; (4) The importance of implementing Indigenous methodologies in STBBI research; and (5) Foregrounding Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing in STBBI research. This study offers future Indigenous STBBI researchers a robust foundation to build meaningful research partnerships with Elders to improve STBBI research and benefit the sexual health and wellbeing of Métis, Inuit, and First Nations communities. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

No description available.

Over the last few decades, yoga has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in the West. This industry is typically represented by glossy photographs of thin white women in physical postures. Given its religious origins in South Asia, this mass marketing of yoga has raised important questions about Western commodification and cultural appropriation. As a result, counter-movements have emerged to “Take Back Yoga” and “Honor the Cultural Roots of Yoga.” This thesis analyzes a range of critical-constructive responses to the commodification and colonization of yoga. It focuses on two case studies: Susanna Barkataki, an American yoga teacher of Indian descent, and Kallie Schut, a British yoga teacher of Indian descent, both of whom combine yoga within wider decolonial and social justice contexts. It argues that Barkataki and Schut are best framed within a decolonial framework distinct from both modern colonial and contemporary postcolonial approaches to yoga.

This study explores the effects of engaging with contemporary dual language texts, specifically Cree texts, as a non-Cree educator intent on using the literature classroom as a place in which to explore cross-cultural communication. It considers how the in/accessibility of meaning when reading across cultural boundaries may be read as a challenge or a bridge for non-Cree readers. An interdisciplinary approach was employed as a research methodology to explore the potential interstices and intersections of Aboriginal epistemologies, decolonizing pedagogies, literary theories, and contemporary dual language texts. In order to begin defining the manner in which one perceives the significance of the code-switching and the varied translation practices within dual language texts, a reader response theory was developed and termed construal inquiry. As a decolonizing pedagogy that employs dialogic engagement with a text, construal inquiry is undrepinned by a self-reflective approach to meaning-making that is grounded in Luis Urrieta, Jr.'s (2007) notion of figured worlds, Jerome Bruner's (1991) model of narrative inquiry, and Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) concept of heteroglossia. The research explores a collaborative approach to meaning-making with an awareness of how forms of subjectivities can affect reading practices. Texts that range from picture books to junior novels to autobiographical fiction are examined for the forms in which code-switching, culture, and identity can shape reader response and the dialogic discourse of cross-cultural communication. The research proposes experiential and contextual influences shape reading and interpretation and seeks to engage with how subjectivities affects pedagogical perspective, which negates a singular approach to linguistic and cultural representations and their interpretation. The research suggests that the complexities of negotiating meaning cross-culturally necessitiates relationship building with community members of the culture represented in a text and that engaging with code-switching in dual language texts using construal inquiry as a decolonizing pedagogy offers an opportunity to transform one's own subjectivity.

This study focuses on a girl-centered, anti-racist, feminist PAR program with Indigenous and racialized girls in Victoria, a smaller, predominantly white city in British Columbia, Canada. As a partnership among antidote: Multiracial and Indigenous Girls and Women’s Network, and an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers who are also members of antidote, this project defies typical insider-outsider dynamics. In this thesis, I intend to speak back to mainstream Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) literature, contesting the notion that this methodology provides an easy escape from the research engine and underlying colonial formations. Practices of YPAR are continuously (re)colonized, producing new forms of colonialism and imperialism. Our process can be described as an ongoing rhythm of disruptions and recolonizations that are not simple opposites, but are mutually reliant and constitutive within neocolonial formations. In other words, our practice involved creatively disrupting new forms of colonialism and imperialism as they emerged, while recognizing that our responses were not outside of these formations. I seek to make our roles as researchers visible, rather than hidden by hegemonic equalizing claims of PAR, and will explore some of the ways that white noise infiltrated our ongoing efforts of decolonizing YPAR practices. / Graduate