<p>Indigenous populations have experienced vast travesties due to the impacts of colonialism. Colonialism continues to be perpetuated through the services, programs and policies that Indigenous people encounter. This research thesis tackles the question of how non-Indigenous social workers, professionals and interested parties can work with Indigenous people in appropriate and respectful ways. It also reviews how non-Indigenous people can work and think across difference. This research represents my journey towards decolonizing myself to find new ways of being White that are compatible with Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing. Autoethnography, relevant literature and interviews were used to explore ways of working with Indigenous populations. Three participants who had been identified by an Indigenous academic as people who had worked with Indigenous populations in appropriate and respectful ways were interviewed in Canada. An analysis of the three semi in-depth interviews produced several recommendations for non-Indigenous people in working with Indigenous populations. Results acknowledge the complexity of working and thinking across difference. Suggestions for working with Indigenous populations are highlighted and include such themes as acknowledging tensions and privilege, understanding that there is a large diversity within Indigenous populations, recognizing that there are aspects of dominant ways of knowing that are compatible with Indigenous ways of knowing, the importance of not being afraid to take risks and of trying not to make assumptions. Decolonization is an uneasy pursuit that is fraught with tension and this research hopes to encourage other social workers, professionals and interested parties to engage in similar processes.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This interdisciplinary study devised a Blues Methodology to investigate how a historically marginalized Black community conceives, practices and theorizes about citizenship in community-based pedagogical spaces (Douglas & Peck, 2013). Guiding questions were 1) How does a historically marginalized Black community conceive and practice citizenship? 2) How does the community’s conception and citizenship praxis compare to the dominant society’s conception? And 3) How can both conceptions inform citizenship education and citizenship research? To conduct this qualitative cultural study, I extended Clyde Woods’ Blues Epistemology and Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical construct of alterity into a methodology capable of illuminating the community’s culturally indigenous knowledge (ways of knowing) using cultural tools meaningful to them. Blues Methodology is a community-based inquiry approach employing a reflective researcher strategy that positions researcher in dialogue with community members to uncover culturally indigenous ways of knowing as well as hegemonic perspectives and community agency. The historically marginalized Black community of focus is located in “The South” where inhumane violence was routinely practiced against Africans and African Americans during and after enslavement. Terrorism was particularly brutal due to the intense labor required by the agrarian economy. Marginalization is a lasting legacy of enslavement, Jim Crow and structurally other forms of embedded racism. Twelve long term multigenerational community residents ranging in age from 17 to 80 years old, participated in this study. Two types of data were collected: oral and written. Oral data were collected from conversations and interviews with participants, written introspective data were collected from journaling. Researcher reflections also consisted of conversations with fictional characters who were constructed to protect my relationship with community participants and present childhood experiences that informed the research. Findings reveal that community conceptions of citizenship foster belonging and identity. Citizens theorized about their social economic historical political selves in the context of the local landscape. In contrast, the dominant society’s citizenship conception is an inclusion/exclusion dialectic that generically defines citizens selectively while excluding swaths of the U.S. population from curricula thus devaluing certain students and communities and relegating their knowledge to the margins at the expense of human freedom.

The Indian residential school (IRS) system is part of Canada’s colonial history; an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children attended IRS (Stout & Peters, 2011). Informed by Indigenous principles of respect, relevance, responsibility, reciprocity, and relationality (Deloria, 2004; Ermine 1995; Kirkness & Barnhardt, 2001; Wilson, 2008), this study uses classic grounded theory to explore how female IRS survivors or their female descendants are coping with the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Specifically, the general method of comparative analysis was used to generate theory and identify categories and conceptualizations. The emergent problem found that individual survivors and their descendants were dealing with kakwatakih-nipowatisiw, a Cree term used to identify learned colonial (sick) behaviours. These behaviours manifested first among the administrative staff of the schools, then eventually emerged as female generational violence between, for example, mothers and daughters. Indigenous women in this study aimed to resolve this, their ‘main concern’, in order to strengthen familial relations, especially between female family members. Analysis resulted in the identification of a theory derived from the social process of potentializing wellness, which was grounded in the real-world experiences of Indigenous women. Potentializing wellness involves three dimensions: building personal competencies, moral compassing, and fostering virtues. It was revealed that Indigenous women perceive the ongoing generational effects of IRS differently, and as a result, three behavioural typologies emerged: living the norm, between the norm, and escaping the norm. The “norm” refers to the belief that violence is accepted as a normal part of family life. The paradox, of course, is that this type of behaviour is not normal and Indigenous women in this study are looking for ways to eliminate aggressive behaviours between women. The discoveries made in this research, coupled with the final integrative literature review, suggest that Indigenous People’s cultural ways of knowing have a holistic component that addresses all wellness levels. Effective strategies to deal with intergenerational trauma can emerge when holistic health is followed by, or happens concordantly with, reclaiming cultural norms grounded in community and spiritual life. Indigenizing a Western intervention is not enough. Focusing on the spiritual as well as emotional, physical, intellectual, and social aspects of self is seemingly the best approach for Indigenous People who are dealing with the intergenerational effects of trauma.