The development of and changes in human social organization have been a concern of anthropological research since the inception of the discipline. A perspective that focuses on the interaction between exogenous (ecological and historical) variables and social organization is argued for herein. This study tests the idea that inheritance patterns reflect both land use and sociohistorical factors. Further, it is suggested that after their move into the American Southwest, the inheritance of agricultural land was influential in the development, although not necessarily the origins, of matrilineality among the Navajo. Data were obtained on land tenure practices in Canyon de Chelly and its major tributary, Canyon del Muerto, historically important centers of Navajo agriculture. Detailed interviews with 93% of the Navajo families owning land in the canyons provided information on land use and inheritance patterns since the 1880s. Data from over 400 cases of land transfers were analyzed. Historical documents and archaeological studies also provided information on Navajo settlement patterns, changes in farming practices and environmental fluctuations since the mid-1700s. Within the past fifty years, and probably longer, topographic and physiographic differences between Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto have contributed to variations in land use within the canyon system. Ditch irrigated feed crops are now only grown in Canyon del Muerto, and they are commonly used by families involved in market oriented cattle ranching. Further, as a result of erosion problems, the production potential of some canyon areas, as well as the quantity of arable land, is declining. Not all families are able to meet the increasing need for labor and capital intensive practices that could maximize agricultural production on their canyon land, but it remains a highly valued resource. This research indicates that since the 1880s agricultural land in Canyon de Chelly has been transferred more frequently along matrilineal lines, and the explanations for the differences in land tenure patterns between the canyons over time relate both to ecological and socio-historical variables. In conclusion, it is argued that the complexity found within this canyon system reflects a heterogeneity common to any culture, but which anthropologists tend to overlook.

This study is about the Burns Lake Indian Band's Indian Reserve No. 18 located in northwestern British Columbia. It is a case study that spans the 20th century. Through an analysis of archival documents pertaining to land loss I investigate the long term process that facilitated the alienation of land from this Indian reserve. This thesis is about borders, spatial marginality and social geography and it focuses on power and inequality. Historical records reveal the genesis of growing polarization and deteriorating social relationships evident in the clearly demarcated communities which establish the Indian reserve and the Village of Burns Lake. Theoretical perspectives informing my analysis include social construction, standpoint theory, and the sociology of storytelling. It includes postmodernist concepts of authority and power. The storytelling process sets the stage for contested history.

This study is about the Burns Lake Indian Band's Indian Reserve No. 18 located in northwestern British Columbia. It is a case study that spans the 20th century. Through an analysis of archival documents pertaining to land loss I investigate the long term process that facilitated the alienation of land from this Indian reserve. This thesis is about borders, spatial marginality and social geography and it focuses on power and inequality. Historical records reveal the genesis of growing polarization and deteriorating social relationships evident in the clearly demarcated communities which establish the Indian reserve and the Village of Burns Lake. Theoretical perspectives informing my analysis include social construction, standpoint theory, and the sociology of storytelling. It includes postmodernist concepts of authority and power. The storytelling process sets the stage for contested history. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation proceeds from the Algonquins of Barriere Lake’s enactments of Indigenous law as a praxis of care against colonial systems that commoditize Anishnabe children and land. It emerges from a co-designed nation and community-specific ethnographic and archival study with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake to analyze the Youth Protection system, and a co-designed ethnographic and archival project with the Ottawa-based Sixties Scoop Network on healing, displacement, and reparations for the 60s Scoop. Through using the land, Barriere Lake maintain their sacred connections to animals, ancestors and water. This dissertation thinks care in three registers: as Anishnabe ‘physical, emotional and spiritual’ relations of care on land, as daily assertions of Indigenous legal praxis, and as critiques of settler political economy. In November 2015, members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake rallied at the offices of the CISSSO, a Quebec Youth Protection agency in Maniwaki, Quebec that has placed 147 children from their 792-person First Nation into out of home care since 1990. Barriere Lake mothers held signs asserting “Our children are not commodities.” Throughout the fall of 2015, the community held a camp to protect their lands from exploratory drilling by the junior mining company Copper One; a sign declaring ‘This land is not for sale.’ As CISSSO (2019) secures nearly $2 million annually by taking Barriere Lake children from their kin settler industries extract over $100 million in resources from Barriere Lake’s territories. Canada’s genocidal church-run, state-mandated Residential Schools system was instituted as the nascent nation began to create its wealth and home from Native lands and resources. Between 1951-1991 (the Sixties Scoop), over 22 500 Indigenous children were removed from their kin into predominantly non-native homes (Brown v Canada 2017). In 2016, Canada’s national resources sector accounted for $216 billion; while in 2018 the child welfare system generated $2.5 billion and billions more in family stipends and allowances from a system in which over 52.5% of children are Indigenous (StatsCan 2016, 2018). The gendered fiscal and libidinal economies of Canadian colonialism incentivize the apprehension of Indigenous children and criminalize Indigenous caregivers, especially mothers (2016 CHRT 2). By examining how present systems reproduce the gendered violence of child-taking and abuse systematized in Residential Schools, this dissertation argues that Canada securitizes its economy of extraction from Indigenous lands through the mass abduction of Indigenous children into the child welfare system. Algonquin Anishnabeg jurisdiction is asserted as a praxis of care which, waged daily along with Sixties Scoop survivor struggles for justice, unwinds the fabric of a system of child-taking and land-theft.

Is it possible to redefine Aboriginal title? This study intends to answer this question through the construction of an integral doctrine of aboriginal title based on a detailed analysis of its criticisms. The author uses international law to show a possible way to redefine this part of Canadian law. After a careful review of the most important aspects of aboriginal land in international law, the author chooses the law of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights as its framework. Using the decisions of this Court he produces an internationalized redefinition of Aboriginal title.

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On March 10, 1957, the United States Army Corps of Engineers completed The Dalles Dam and inundated Celilo Falls, the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America and a cultural and economic hub for Indigenous people. In the negotiation of treaties between the United States, nearly one hundred years earlier, Indigenous leaders reserved access to Columbia River fishing sites as they ceded territory and retained smaller reservations. In the years before the dam's completion, leaders, many of who were the descendants of earlier treaty signatories, attempted to stop the dam and protect both fishing sites from the encroachment of state and federal regulations and archaeological sites from destruction. This study traces the work of Wilson Charley, a Native fisherman, a member of the Yakama Nation's Tribal Council, and great-grandson of one of the 1855 treaty signatories. More broadly, this study places Indigenous actors on a twentieth-century Columbia River while demonstrating that they played active roles in the protest and management of areas affected by The Dalles Dam. Using previously untapped archival sources--a substantial cache of letters--my analysis illustrates that Charley articulated multiple strategies to fight The Dalles Dam and regulations to curtail Native's treaty fishing rights. Aiming to protect the 1855 treaty and stop The Dalles Dam, Charley created Native-centered regulatory agencies. He worked directly with politicians and supported political candidates, like Richard Neuberger, that favored Native concerns. He attempted to build partnerships with archaeologists and landscape preservationists concerned about losing the area's rich cultural sites. Even after the dam's completion, he conceptualized multiple tribal economic development plans that would allow for Natives' cultural and economic survival. Given the national rise of technological optimism and the willingness for the federal government to terminate its relationship with federally recognized tribes, Charley realized that taking the 1855 treaty to court was too risky for the political climate of the 1950s. Instead, he framed his strategies in the language of twentieth-century conservation, specifically to garner support from a national audience of non-natives interested in protecting landscapes from industrial development. While many of these non-native partners ultimately failed him, his strategies are noteworthy for three reasons. First, he cast the fight to uphold Native treaty rights in terms that were relevant to non-natives, demonstrating his complex understanding of the times in which he lived. Second, his strategies continued an ongoing struggle for Natives to fish at their treaty-protected sites, thereby documenting an overlooked period between the fishing rights cases of the turn of the twentieth century and the 1960s and 1970s. Charley left a lasting legacy that scholars have not recognized because many of his visionary ideas came to fruition decades later. Finally, my analysis of Charley's letters also documents personal details that afford readers the unique perspective of one Indigenous person navigated through a tumultuous period in the Pacific Northwest and Native American history.