This thesis is a study of the lives of two missionaries – Stanley Eaton Higgs and Jean-Marie Raphael Le Jeune – who worked closely with Nlha7kápmx and Secwepemc peoples in the south central Interior of British Columbia (BC), Canada, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a study of the networks of power and identity that swirled around these colonial actors on the ‘edge of empire,’ in the midst of a burgeoning settler colonial society, during a time of rapid change and incredible challenge for the Indigenous communities in which these missionaries lived and worked. The crux of this thesis is a methodological intervention into knowledge production in the academy: an attempt to employ Indigenous research methodologies as a non-indigenous researcher working primarily on the archive-informed histories of non-indigenous individuals in Canada. This effort involves an exploration of the processes, results, and impacts of taking up Indigenous research methodologies in these non-traditional domains. Framed around Indigenous knowledge principles of place, language, story, and relationship, and a spatial and temporal ‘spiral’ of ontological movement, this research project challenges commonly perceived positions and responsibilities of Settler Canadian researchers, and opens up new possibilities for ethical and relational research.

This study offers a contribution to the fields of Canadian cultural studies, media studies and surveillance studies, introducing the concept of “screen stories” as a framework for thinking about representations of Vancouver’s contested inner city neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, in the contemporary era of heightened visibility as a result of media coverage and widespread state, corporate and self-surveillance. Analysing diverse media forms through the lens of screen stories enables a critique of the complexities of representation and its intersections with surveillance in a neighbourhood that might be regarded as overexposed. Through examination of a unique combination of novels, television drama, documentary and digital media, I show that representation is often complicit in facilitating the scrutiny of the Downtown Eastside and its residents: negative representations are frequently used to justify calls for increased surveillance and security rather than cultivating a better understanding of the neighbourhood. At the same time, I identify strategies of resistance and stories that encourage a multitude of perspectives on the Downtown Eastside, challenging stereotypes and limited assumptions. My development of the concept of “screen stories” emphasises the potential of storytelling through, and about, screen media as a means of balancing or countering surveillant, simulacral or voyeuristic images of the neighbourhood with meaningful, embodied narratives. Situated screen stories provide a means of starting conversations and fostering community, in contrast to the often-divisive effects of surveillance and scrutiny.

In 2008, Stephen Harper, then Prime Minister of Canada, delivered an official apology for the Indian Residential School system (1883 to 1996). This was the first formal apology from a prime minister to the generations of Indigenous peoples who suffered and continue to be impacted by the traumatic legacies of this federal policy. Little more than a year later, however, Harper announced to reporters at a G20 summit in Philadelphia that Canada has “no history of colonialism” (qtd. in Wherry). The dissertation takes Harper’s claim of colonial denial as its theoretical springboard, asking: What does it mean for Canada to apologise for the residential school system, whilst simultaneously denying the country’s history of colonialism? Investigating this question through a performance studies analytic, I ultimately conclude that Harper’s 2009 statement is indicative of how national identity is constructed by the state; that is, through settler colonial performances of selective forgetting, which serve strategically to undermine Indigenous sovereignty. The doctoral project unfolds thematically through analysing three principal events between 2008 and 2015: the War of 1812 commemorations; the ‘Idle No More’ protest movement; and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. I have identified two main tasks for this study. First, to query the dominant story/stories of Canada animated in the colonial present. Second, to investigate Indigenous interventions that destabilise mythologies of settler benevolence through a ‘re-storying’ of Canada; a term I use to denote counter-narratives and embodied practices unsettling the country’s past that are, by definition, separate from those stories that reify narratives of national innocence. By exploring both official stories and re-stories through a performance studies framework, moored in a self-reflexive methodology informed by my fieldwork, the dissertation offers a critical investigation of Canada’s refusal to reckon with its uncomfortable histories in an age of ostensible reconciliation.

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of large scale emigration between Scotland and the British colony of Upper Canada. In any migration there are a number of factors which act as obstacles to the migration flow and a number of agencies (factors) which operate to overcome these obstacles. This study examines in turn those factors that assisted and directed Scottish emigration to Upper Canada between 1815 and 1855. Its focus is on a dynamic aspect of population - migration - and it examines in detail the spatial distribution of a variety of factors, influencing and directing the movements of large numbers of people. Eight major factors are evaluated as to their influence over time on the character, volume and direction of this emigration. These eight factors are qualitatively ranked on the basis of the factors' role in overcoming various obstacles and the number of emigrants who were assisted and influenced. The three factors in the first order are friends and relatives; periodicals, newspapers and books; and Scottish ports, shipping and emigration agents. These three factors were all of critical importance by acting as positive and continuing links in the migration process, through the provision of information, encouragement and an organizational structure. The three factors in the second order - government; emigration societies and trade unions; and landlords were in some ways less significant in the overall emigration. These factors generally tended to act as positive links in the migration process during limited time periods and in specific areas. The two factors in the third order - land companies and land speculators in Upper Canada and churches were relatively the least significant. They often related to small groups and individual personalities and tended to be of more significance when the emigrants began to settle in their new environment. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change and development both in Scotland and in Upper Canada. This study examines a significant yet often neglected aspect of this process of change.

To mark the 300th anniversary of the event in question, this thesis analyses the first British attempt to conquer the French colonial city of Quebec. The expedition was a product of the turbulent political environment that was evident towards the end of the reign of Queen Anne. Its failure has consequently proven to be detrimental to the reputations of the expedition’s commanders, in particular Rear-Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker who was actually a competent and effective naval officer. True blame should lie with his political master, Secretary of State Henry St John, who ensured the expedition’s failure by maintaining absolute control over it because of his obsession with keeping its objective a secret. After recently celebrating a succession of tercentenaries concerning the War of the Spanish Succession, this thesis hopes to draw attention away from the famous military commander, the Duke of Marlborough, and instead focus upon a little known combined operation. The expedition helped to alter British strategy by renewing an interest in ‘blue-water’ operations that would see huge success later in the century, ultimately resulting in the eventual conquest of French North America in the Seven Years War.

This thesis stems from a questioning of the instability of the state's discourse in the cultural domain. In effect, since the appearance in the Western world of the first explicit cultural policies, arguments justifying the state intervention in this domain have ceaselessly changed over time, appealing sometimes to notions such as that of 'democratisation of culture', 'cultural democracy', or to notions of 'cultural development', 'cultural economy', or 'cultural diversity'. The inconsistencies that characterise the state's rationales in this domain notably reflect a continuous quest for legitimacy that is worth analysing. Like elsewhere, the consensus over the legitimacy and the purpose of a cultural policy was not easily reached in the Canadian French province, Quebec. Several policy statements have indeed been formulated before the adoption, in 1992, of Quebec's official cultural policy. To understand the evolution of the justifications for state intervention in this field, we analyse three policy statements that were key in the history of Quebec's cultural policy: Pour une politique (1959); La politique quebecoise du developpement cultureI (1979); and La politique culturelle du Quebec: Notre culture, notre avenir (1992). In a first phase, we examine the politico-historical context from which these policy statements emerge. Secondly, we recount the origins of the most important ideas that we find at the core of these statements and which were rooted in the work of intellectuals (such as Edmond de Nevers, Edouard Montpetit, Marcel Rioux, Fernand Dumont) as well as in governmental reports that predated their elaboration. We then analyse the argumentation of each cultural policy statement as well as the critiques they raised at the moment of their publication. These critiques were formulated as much by journalists as by politicians, artists and other professionals working in the field of culture. The analysis of the argumentation is carried out with a theoretical model that has been developed by French sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist Laurent Thevenot, the Economies of Worth. We explore more particularly the concept of 'compromise' such as it was designed in the model. This concept enables us to understand why cultural policies have difficulty achieving consensus. The application of this model to cultural policy has not been attempted before, so this is one of the original aspects of this thesis.

This research explores the link between New Right ideology and the making of public policy. Taking the Thatcher and Mulroney Governments as examples of the New Right in government this research considers the areas of policy convergence and divergence between them using health as a case study. This study concludes that these 1990s variants of Conservativism differed both in terms of their rhetoric and their ability to chart new public policies. This study finds that the Thatcher Government was a more effective agent of change than the Mulroney Government with institutional differences as the main explanatory variable. Other research themes raised in this research include: The applicability of the incremental policy making model to the study of Canadian and British health policies; the role of interest groups in the development of health policies; and the thesis of the irreversibility of the welfare state. It was found that the incremental model could not account for the rapid and large changes in British health policy but could serve as a theoretical framework to explain health policy developments in Canada. Interest groups for their part were found to have reacted in differing ways to the challenges posed to them by New Right government, seeking to form advocacy coalitions in Canada while remaining resolutely independent in Britain. Finally, this research concludes that the irreversibility of the welfare state thesis as presented by Therborn and Roebroek remains valid. that is that the political popUlarity of national health insurance continue to isolate this sector of social policy from dramatic rollback.

In Canada, national ethnocultural advocacy groups are highly visible and are consulted by government officials in areas of multiculturalism policy as well as other areas of social policy and constitutional reform. Unlike local ‘ethnic’ associations that arise for a myriad of community specific purposes, national level ‘ethnic’ umbrella associations occupy a wholly different political space. One implication of this national level of representation is that who and what the group is becomes re-configured from a form of social organisation to a form of broad representation. At the national level, the organisation not only comes to represent the concrete aspirations of group members, but also becomes a guardian and advocate of a vision of ‘the group’. The process through which the ‘group’ boundaries are socially and politically constructed is the subject of this thesis. Writers tend to explain the proliferation of national ‘ethnic’ umbrella organisations through one of four therapies: interest group theory, social movement theory, theories of ethnic mobilisation, and state intervention. There is relative agreement that demographic changes resulting from the liberalisation of Canada’s immigration policy in 1967 led to larger and more politically active ethnocultural communities. Also, writers argue that the policy of Multiculturalism established in 1971 created opportunity for ethnocultural political participation as never before. There are strengths and weaknesses to each of these approaches, and they are analysed in the thesis. However, none of the existing theories explain how and why organisations formed at the national level at given periods of time, and how the substantive delineations of representation (i.e. in terms of ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ identities) were determined.

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between the understanding of the past and the practice of theology. It is built around three major case studies: the history of interpretation of the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), the commemoration of the First World War in Canada, and the development of post-Holocaust theology. Linking these cases are issues of theological response to (or justification for) violence, and tensions between individual and collective identity. Part I focuses on Deuteronomy 25:17-19, and the internal contradiction between the commandments to remember and blot out the memory of Amalek. The passage is analysed both in terms of language and reception history, with special attention paid to Rabbinic interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries (sermons and commentaries generated during or immediately after the German Reform movement, the American Civil War, and the Nazi occupation of Poland). This reading prompts two further strands of analysis, which are pursued separately: the distinction between the remembering commanded in the passage and concepts of memory active in the Western philosophical tradition prior to the 20th century, and the place this passage has in a larger tradition of religious and secular discourse on acceptable justifications for violence, again in both Jewish and more broadly Western thought. Part II takes up these themes, beginning with an historically contextualised reading of two versions of Antigone—one written by Sophocles in the early days of the Athenian Empire, and the other by Jean Anouilh during the Second World War. Both of these focus on a dead body as the site of ideological contestation between divergent identity narratives—a conflict that is also apparent in negotiations over the memorialisation of the First World War, which is the main focus of this part. A close reading of novels from L. M. Montgomery‘s Anne of Green Gables series, published before, during, and just after the war reveals that the First World War partly destabilised the individual-focused structures of memorialisation that were in place prior to its beginning, in favour of structures which enforced the collective identity of the soldiers who died in the war; while much of this instability could be (and was) addressed in existing theological language, the war nevertheless left a mark on Canadian society and religious practice. This part concludes with an examination of the Canadian National Monument at Vimy, conducted via archival documentation of the monument‘s design and construction and then through a reading of The Stone Carvers, a recent novel which re-imagines the circumstances documented in the archives through the eyes of one war veteran and his family. This dual reading also demonstrates the instability of memorials, the tendency of their meaning to shift over time. Part III commences with a discussion of the shift in memorial forms precipitated by the Holocaust. I contend that the tendency to memorialise the Holocaust with complex museum narratives betrays an anxiety about the intended audience of these memorials, which points in turn to the degree to which the Holocaust upset previous cultural and religious worldviews. This section focuses on theological and literary attempts to record and respond to the ruptures caused by the Holocaust, with specific reference to two recent novels by Jewish Candian women which, taken together, provide a constructive interruption to overly tidy narratives of national and religious identity.

The empirical focus for this thesis research is Toronto, Canada where four case study sites are investigated and fifty-seven semi-structured interviews conducted with a range of actors both directly and indirectly involved in the creation of New Urbanist-inspired development projects. Two of the sample projects are situated in greenfield locations outside the administrative boundary of the City of Toronto, and two are situated in brownfield locations on formerly developed lands, both within the urban core of the City of Toronto. The contrasting contexts of the study units have been purposefully selected to explore the possibility of multi-factor causality involving contrasts of place, process, time, and social interaction. Underpinning this empirical research is the contention that the structures of provision model provides a useful approach for framing housing production research. However, it is argued that the evaluative power of this approach is limited by its inability to adequately account for how and why the New Urbanist form of provision has emerged, been legitimised, and normalised as 'best practice' within Toronto. In an unorthodox move, the final chapter of this thesis takes the level of theorisation enabled via the empirical framework of the structures of provision a step further to address this shortcoming. This is done by applying a 'rationalities' perspective to the investigation of how and why New Urbanism has become such a powerful force within Toronto's development cultures.