This dissertation examines the construction and evolution of categories of indigeneity within the context of the Oblate (Roman Catholic) apostolate at Île-à-Crosse in present-day north-western Saskatchewan between 1845 and 1898. While focusing on one central mission station, this study illuminates broad historical processes that informed Oblate perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate concepts of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of missionary correspondence, mission records and published reports. In the process, this dissertation challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, this dissertation contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

abstract: This study explores positivist and Indigenous research paradigms as they relate to Indigenous language reclamation. Paradigms, as defined by Kuhn (2012) describe verifiable epistemological approaches that can be utilized in providing solutions for researchers and practitioners. Moreover, in the modern realm of academia, research paradigms are the keystones of research. Nevertheless, when a Eurocentric paradigm such as positivism is utilized in an Indigenous space, it can lead to further colonial trauma. Thus, through an analysis of the philosophical components from the two paradigms this study proposes a paradigmatic pivot in how linguistic students approach research. The purpose of recommending this pedagogical shift is to encourage the academy to normalize the use of Indigenous research paradigms which are intrinsically infused with Indigenous epistemologies and intercultural best practices. Furthermore, to exhibit the expediency and validity of Indigenous research paradigms, this study utilizes Walker’s (2001) Medicine Wheel paradigm to create a self-assessment tool which seeks to assist linguistic students in achieving a more relationally accountable sense of cultural awareness. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 2019

In the last 20 years, international donors have made efforts to increase the participation of minorities into development programmes. Despite these efforts, development actors continues to receive critique from postcolonial theorists for continuing to reinforce neocolonial and Western-centered tendencies onto minorities. Given this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate how indigenous peoples in Latin America and their issues are represented and allowed to participate in and challenge the development agenda. This is done by analysing how ‘indigeneity’ and indigenous peoples’ issues are portrayed in reports by international donors. Through a discourse analysis of two reports from the World Bank and ECLAC, this study finds that indigenous peoples are still not allowed to challenge the standard development agenda. Even though improvements have been made concerning explicit representations of indigenous peoples knowledges and values as inferior, the findings of this study show that indigenous peoples’ issues are often represented to be legitimate only when its moved to Western frameworks. These findings suggest that postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples are still integrated in development programmes. This study however encourages further research of postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples within international donors, and how international donors can improve in these aspects.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is threaded together with sken:nen, the radical practice of peacemaking. As a Kanien’keha:ka woman, I am responsible for finding ways of bringing our peace-full teachings, gifts and intellect into the future. This thesis braids together a resurgent ethic of sken:nen with Haudenosaunee knowledges, Indigenous feminisms and decolonial futurities by taking up the question: Oh nisa’taro:ten? (What is the contour of your clay?), posed in Kanien’keha to situate me in relation to the lands I come from. I am taking this ancestral question seriously by exploring the relationships that make up the ‘clay’ of my contemporary Haudenosaunee Indigeneity as it is shaped by life in an active settler colonial state. Tracing the rhythmic gestures of my grandmothers’ hands, I have created a patchworking star quilt methodology to gather fragments of my decolonial curiosities, weaving them into layered story-maps that capture constellations of my movements through settler occupied places. Through the assimilative policies of the Indian Act, quilting simultaneously became an act of survivance and resistance for my grandmothers; by picking up an intergenerational practice of patchworking as methodology, I am jumping into the ruptures of my contemporary Haundenosaunee identity, roles and responsibilities. Patchworking story-maps involves tracing genealogies of intergenerational trauma, rupturing geographies of lateral violence, overflowing either/or binary cuts of identity (non)belonging, and navigating the urbanized displacements of Indigenous peoples from lands, communities and relationships. In an effort to mobilize the knowledges and practices of sken:nen, and to ensure that my work is accessible to a wider audience, my story-maps have been shared in a digital format using Instagram to stitch moments of Indigenous presence, memory and language (back) into the fabric of cityscapes that are riddled with the logics of settler colonialism. This thesis aims to create generative spaces to explore, transform and (re)imagine futurities of peacemaking that move towards more accountable and inclusive webs of relationality rooted in fluid traditions and (star)world building. / Graduate

In the current globalisation of the planet, Indigenous peoples are attempting to reclaim their lands from extraction and natural disruptions due to new sustainable energy projects and dam constructions. This study is exploring how choreography and dance are addressing the issue of exploitation of land and bodies, directly weaving together ideas of ancestry and indigeneity through gathered testimonies from three Indigenous choreographers. The work allows for activist ideas to shift the perspective on humans’ relationship to soil and its emancipation from coloniality by acknowledging the ancestral body as an intrinsic, lived experience within the Indigenous choreographer. Positioning the study in relation to critical artistic practice, the text is proposing an opportunity for the reader to explore the link between bodily rights, minority politics and soil, thus revealing how the reconstruction of ancestral memories and movement can remind us how to repatriate our dismantled and dislocated history. By finding ways of connecting choreography to agency over body and indigeneity, this work is exploring how dance can constitute Indigenous connectedness and how testimonies by these choreographers are passed on through their embodied experiences of indigeneity, ritual, repatriation and recognition of the Indigenous body. / <p>Presentationerna av examensarbetet 31 Maj 2021 skedde på Zoom, online på grund av covid-19</p>

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Answering the call to decenter whiteness and coloniality within communication studies (#RhetoricSoWhite), this project attempts to reclaim space for indigenous knowledge and to serve decolonial struggles. Written as a project of love for my fellow indigenous scholars and peoples, I expand upon Tiara Na'puti's conceptualization of "Indigeneity as Analytic" and chart how indigenous Pacific Island decolonial resistance operates through a paradigm of decolonial futurity. By recognizing Guåhan (Guam), as well as Chamoru, bodies as (de)colonial borderlands, I demonstrate the radical potential of indigeneity through three different case studies. First, I name indigenous feminine style as a strategic mode of public address adopted by Governor Lou Leon Guerero to resist the spread of COVID-19 by US military personnel on the island of Guåhan. Second, I showcase how the process and practice of indigenous Pacific Island tattooing delinks away from coloniality. Finally, I demonstrate how the celebration of a Chamoru saint, Santa Marian Kamalen, provides a spatial-temporal intervention that articulates an indigenous religion and enacts a decolonial futurity.

This dissertation examines representations of Native peoples during the British Imperial Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates specifically on diplomatic Go-Between figures, individuals who performed a mediating role between their own indigenous communities and the colonizers. The dissertation examines images and objects within a postcolonial framework, engaging notions of hybridity and mimicry in order to interrogate more traditional readings of colonial power and representation. The images of Native peoples that appeared in ethnographic studies, paintings, and prints, as well as in objects of material culture such as games, books, and toys, reveal a dislocating indigenous agency within their colonial contexts. By offering new considerations of artistic process and the role of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatrical culture, the dissertation suggests that these Native figures were mediated by the tropes and conventions of contemporary theater through pose, gesture, and other dramaturgical allusions. In its exploration of the theatrical dimensions of imperial diplomacy and Go-Between representation, including evidence of performative mimicry by Go-Betweens themselves, my dissertation reveals an even more subtle interplay of identities in the context of colonial image-making than art historians have hitherto recognized. In addition to using theater history and performance theory to situate Go-Between images in relation to the contemporary English stage, the study also implicates the creative process and resulting artifacts themselves in the Go-Between status, affording the material object itself a hybridity that can become the site of ideological dislocation. / Art History

In an attempt to narrow a perceived gap between two literary fields, this thesis provides a comparative analysis of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Humminbird’s Daughter, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I explore and critique the ways in which Luis Alberto Urrea mobilizes mestizaje and Chicana/o nationalist rhetoric. I argue that mestizaje stems from colonial representations that inscribe indigenous people into a narrative of erasure. Furthermore, I address Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of mestizaje within Almanac of the Dead. / text

This dissertation excavates the political economy and cultural politics of the "Vanishing Indian." While much of the scholarship situates this ubiquitous American trope as a rhetorical representation, I consider the ways in which the "Vanishing Indian" was necessarily rooted in the emerging capitalist and cultural economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By combining cultural history, Native studies, material culture, and public history, my project addresses a predicament peculiar to settler societies. Specifically, I address the dilemma faced by an immigrant people who attempted to make the transition from colonial to national without being indigenous. My investigation into the complex historical processes of a symbolic, material, and oftentimes-ambivalent reconfiguration of self seeks to broaden our understanding of a national identity not only rooted, but also deeply invested, in settler-colonialism. The ancient mummified remains of an early Woodland aboriginal woman disinterred in Kentucky in 1811, are the axis around which this dissertation revolves. The history of her disinterment links American national identity formation with capitalist imperatives for natural resource extraction, the exploitation of slave labor, settler expansion, and the development of another form of "Indian Removal" – practiced below ground, as it were. The plunder of ancient ruins, disinterment of Indian graves, and the correlated development of early American archaeology became part of a larger national project. While Native remains were not in and of themselves economic resources, increasingly, speculators in science and antiquities came to regard them as both natural and national resources. Their disinterment was certainly as much a byproduct of scientific speculation as of speculation in lands "opened up" by western expansion. The appropriation of Native remains became a locus of power through which Americans sought to add the length and breadth of an historic past to the promise of a national future. Ultimately, I seek to interrogate one of the many aims of colonization through settlement—the appropriation of indigenous status—and situate a history of science, curiosity, and the appropriation of American Indian land and bodies at the center of this development.