This study will explore the texts created by individuals associated with Taíno Indigenous culture and which express aspects of Taíno Indigenous worldviews in Western mainstream contexts. The purpose is to highlight strategies to navigate Western mainstream worldviews to express non-Western worldviews that educators could explore with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students in secondary and tertiary educational settings. Strategies for CLD students to seriously engage with their cultural worldviews in academic settings can provide opportunities for them to have a voice in representing their knowledge systems and add yet unexplored perspectives on their worldviews as well as on the Western mainstream worldviews espoused in academic contexts, thus contributing to a pluralization of perspectives. The study is guided by the following research questions: 1) What specific strategies do participants use in their texts when expressing Taíno Indigenous worldviews in Western mainstream contexts? 2) How are these strategies situated in the larger Taíno Indigenous context in which participants affirm Taíno Indigenous worldviews? These questions will be explored through a qualitative analysis of participants’ texts, interviews with participants, and participant observation which will be organized into a collective case study with an instrumental purpose. The study uses a Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies Framework as conceptualized by Brayboy et al., (2012) and is guided by borderthinking as conceptualized by Mignolo (2011) as well as Interculturalidad Crítica as conceptualized by Walsh (2010). This dissertation will use the Multiliteracies concept of a metalanguage to focus on identifying intercultural strategies that participants used in their texts to present non-Western worldviews in Western mainstream contexts. The concept of intertextuality is used as the unit of analysis to explore how participants' texts draw upon a variety of elements, including Western mainstream elements, to convey information about Taíno Indigenous worldviews.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation explores the promise of bail-oriented interventions vis-à-vis the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian prisons. While this research project argues that the bail system's underlying risk logic is inherently discriminatory against Indigenous peoples, it is proposed that specialized courts for Indigenous peoples - Gladue Courts - may be well-positioned to overcome systemic barriers to Indigenous peoples' release on bail. This research explores the extent to which two Toronto Gladue Courts have been able to produce equitable bail outcomes, as well as potential downstream effects of these outcomes, utilizing two unique and complementary longitudinal datasets from the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General which span from 2006 to 2017. Analyses examine i) bail case characteristics, ii) bail processing and court processing measures, and iii) final case outcomes and sentences for Indigenous peoples' bail cases which were processed in these Gladue Courts compared to (predominantly non-Indigenous people's) bail cases processed in the conventional bail courts of these same courthouses. Study findings suggest that while these two bail populations shared many similarities, charges against the administration of justice were particularly widespread among Gladue bail cases. While Gladue Courts appeared largely successful in producing substantively equitable bail outcomes, the impact of these courts is limited by Gladue bail cases' disproportionate early guilty pleas and waiving of the right to bail. Despite the apparent successes of Gladue Courts with regards to bail, Indigenous peoples in Gladue bail cases continued to be disproportionately convicted and sentenced to custody compared to their conventional bail counterparts. Study findings are considered within the wider context of settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples' overincarceration and possible targeted solutions to this phenomenon are discussed.

The term “reconciliation” has become ubiquitous in Canada, underpinning divergent commitments as much as leading to wide-ranging critiques. It has been used frequently in constitutional politics, in relation to both Canada’s relationship with Québec and Canada’s relationships with Indigenous peoples. Reconciliation’s discursive prevalence in Canada presents an intriguing phenomenon given that it means many different things, has varying uses outside of politics, and is widely contested when applied to political relations. To explore the ways these characteristics have shaped uses of reconciliation and the paths by which the term attained its contemporary omnipresence, this dissertation investigates when, how, and with what effects discourses of reconciliation emerged and developed in Canadian constitutional politics. The dissertation uses a genealogical approach to study the conceptual and contextual features of reconciliation discourses and the interplay between them, enabling assessment of different uses and of their operation in relation to each other and to the broad constellation of constitutional power dynamics in Canada. It draws on the insights of genealogical theorists, particularly William Connolly, Michel Foucault, Dalie Giroux, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully, to develop an approach that attends to the role of both actors and events as it explores the intersections of time, space, and power that shape the emergence and development of reconciliation discourses. Informed by Adrian Little’s work on contextualizing concepts and Norman Fairclough and Isabela Fairclough’s work on discourse analysis, the dissertation employs a series of distinctions put forward by Mark Walters, Bert van Roermund, Catherine Lu, and Sara Ahmed and Anna Carastathis to conceptualize different types of reconciliation and analyze a wide-ranging array of uses of the term covering three decades of constitutional politics, concluding with the House of Commons’s recognition of Québec as a nation and the provision to create the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2006. The analysis explores a mix of government documents, commission reports, court decisions, hearing transcripts, interviews, (auto)biographical accounts, news media, parliamentary debates, press releases, and other records to identify the points of emergence of different discourses and examine their development over time and across contexts as reconciliation came to be adopted in jurisprudence, government policy, and the creation of institutions. The dissertation advances a three-part set of propositions regarding the emergence and development of reconciliation discourses. When: Though there were occasional earlier uses, the term began to emerge in earnest in Canadian constitutional politics in the 1980s and early 1990s. Discourses of reconciliation relating to Québec largely faded after the late 1990s, though they have made periodic reappearances around key events such as the 2006 House of Commons motion, while those regarding relations with Indigenous peoples have continued to proliferate. How: Reconciliation discourses have been used, to differing degrees, in relations between Canada and Québec and between Canada and Indigenous peoples. Their emergence in both contexts was significantly, though not exclusively, shaped by the patriation of the constitution. In the period studied, the term was used both to promote state policy and existing constitutional structures and to challenge them or express doubt about their capacity to achieve reconciliation. Occasionally, the appropriateness of using the term in these constitutional contexts was called into question. Multiple meanings and types of application to politics, a lack of clarity and specificity, and the influence of power relations have marked the use of reconciliation discourses from the outset. These trends are visible in both cases. However, there is also variation between the cases, and uses of the term in relation to Québec did not become institutionalized as those pertaining to Canada and Indigenous peoples did. With what effects: All of these varying uses of reconciliation have the cumulative effect of risking conveying a misleading impression that parties using the term share a common commitment to an agreed-upon undertaking. Such an impression obscures how power relations shape the implications of differing discourses and the interactions between parties in which they are used. The genealogy presented in the dissertation counters this impression by taking stock of what kinds of political work is done by reconciliation discourses. Highlighting how they are marked by conceptual complexities and intertwined with relations of power, it reveals the tensions at the core of contemporary conversations about reconciliation in Canada.

Note:

This dissertation explores the importance of tourism and tourability to contemporary global politics. I argue that the global movement of tourists (declared by the UN World Tourism Organization as a ‘right to tour’) is made possible in part through what I call the production of tourability – the capacity of particular places, bodies, or experiences to be toured and to be seen as worthy of touring. Rather than a natural result of difference, tourability is a political process that involves contestations over what and who counts, how space should be organized, and how and what histories are told. I show that touristic movement is based on a specifically neoliberal mobility – a form of free movement that lays claim to ‘borderlessness’ and infinite access along lines eerily familiar to those claimed by contemporary capital – and use this to argue that the work of making places tourable is also designed in specific ways to facilitate this kind of movement. Thus, being tourable is part of the transnational politics of contemporary governance and is useful to constructing the boundaries of (in)appropriate movement. At the same time, the continual expansion of tourism across the Global South has given ‘being tourable’ important economic and political stakes for life, subjectivity, and land. To understand the interweaving of these stakes and the transnational mobility being produced, I examine two sites where tourability has been thrown into question by those whose work produces it. The first is situated at the tri-border region of the Colombian Amazon on the shores between Brazil and Peru that has, in recent years, seen a boom of tourism development and visitors. This boom has largely operated on the neoliberal designs of movement and contemporary development that promote access to tourable places as an enactment of freedom. Against this backdrop, a story circulating in early 2011 highlighted the decision by members of Nazaret, an indigenous community along the river, to refuse tourists and tour companies entry. Taking up this small and messy act, I interrogate around this refusal to examine how touristic mobility is being made (im)possible in this small corner of the Amazon. The second site is a tour designed by the indigenous Hñähñu community of El Alberto, Mexico, that takes participants on a simulated border-crossing to experience, as so many of these community members have, what it is like to cross the U.S.-Mexico border as an undocumented migrant. Impressive, provocative, complex, and controversial, this tour throws into question both how mobilities are addressed within touristic sites and the creative potential of those who are toured to make use of its practices in ways that further other aims. Using concepts of work, landscapes, circulation, and friction, I explore both production and refusal to elaborate on the transnational politics of tourism as neither a panacea nor as an afterthought, but as a sticky, messy, and significant part of global political life. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”