Evo Morales became Latin Americas first indigenous president in 2005. Morales praised the indigenous peoples, the indigenous movements and aimed at ending their political marginalization in Bolivia. However, this politicization and framing of indigenous identity and rights was later turned into his disadvantage. In 2011, Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) decided to mobilize against the government's decision to build a highway through Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), where three of the indigenous groups represented by CIDOB lives. The decision was taken without consolidation with the population living in the area. In this study Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow's theoretical framework concerning framing processes and social movements are used to analyze CIDOBs collective action framing of their indigenous identity and rights in their mobilization in the TIPNIS conflict. In the result, it became evident that CIDOB used their indigenous identity and rights in different framing strategies including master frames, frame alignment processes, diagnostic, and prognostic framing.

The Sámi people are an indigenous people that live in the northern region of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (O’Dowd 2015, 187). They have been subjects of oppression and abuse by the majority culture for centuries. The sámi people were recognized as an indigenous people by the Swedish government in 1977 (Kvarfordt et al. 2004, 11). In Norway, they were recognized in 1989 whereas in Finland that year was 1995 (Förenta Nationerna u.å; O’Dowd 2015, 202). Therefore, the national governments of Sweden, Norway and Finland are obliged to follow a range of international treaties regarding the sámi peoples’ rights as an indigenous people (FN 2021). Nevertheless, the UN and EU have criticized the same governments for un-dermining sámi rights. This paper intends to investigate the cultural rights of the Sámi people in school with a comparison between Norway, Sweden, and Finland’s educational system. More specifically, the paper examines how the school system of Norway, Sweden, and Finland can help preserve sámi culture. In doing so, the essay explores three different cultural aspects from a sámi perspective, namely: the possibility to learn a sámi language in school, to learn sámi handicraft, and to learn about reindeer husbandry. Furthermore, the essay explores how these aspects are approached in the different nations by analyzing national school law and regulation. The material is then analyzed through the concepts of enculturation and socialization. In short, enculturation deals with different processes that aims to preserve and appropriate one’s own culture whereas socialization deals with processes that aims to assimilate people into the main culture. The results of the study show that all three nations have tendencies of preserving sami culture depending on which aspect that is studied. For instance, all countries support sámi language education but to what degree, varies between the nations. In contrast, only the Swedish educational system explicitly supports education in sámi handicraft and reindeer husbandry. Even though the results indicate differences between the countries’ educational system they also in-dicate that their national law on the matter of sámi rights are mostly similar in writing. Finally,

This dissertation demonstrates novel holistic approaches on how to link policy, clean energy innovations, and robust energy modeling techniques to help build more resilient and cost-effective energy systems for the Canadian Arctic region and remote communities in general. In spite of the diversity among Arctic jurisdictions, various energy issues and challenges are shared pan-territorially in the North. For instance, 53 out of 80 remote communities in the Northern territories rely exclusively on diesel-based infrastructures to generate electricity, with heating oil as their primary source of heat. This critical dependence on fossil fuels exposes the Indigenous peoples and other Canadians living in the North to high energy costs and environmental vulnerabilities which is exacerbated by the local and global catastrophic effects of climate change in the Arctic. Aside from being strong point sources of greenhouse gases and other airborne pollutants, this reliance on carbon-intensive sources of energy elevates risk of oils spills during fuel transport and storage. Further, conventional transportation mode via ice roads is now increasingly unreliable because of the rising Arctic temperatures which is twice the global average rate. As a result, most fuels are being transported by small planes which contribute to high energy costs and fuel poverty rates, or via boats which also increases the risk of oil spills in the Arctic waters. Methodologically, this thesis presents a multi-domain perspective on how to accelerate energy transitions among Northern remote communities. In particular, a multi-objective optimization energy model was developed in order to capture complex trade-offs in designing integrated electrical and thermal energy systems. In comparison with traditional single-objective optimization approach, this technique offers diversity of solutions to represent multiple energy solution philosophies from various stakeholders and practitioners in the North. A case study in the Northernmost community of the Northwest Territories demonstrates the applicability of this framework - from modeling a range of energy solutions (supply and demand side aspects) to exploring insights and recommendations while taking into account uncertainties. Overall, this dissertation makes a set of contributions, including: (i) Development of a robust energy modeling framework that integrates complex trade-offs and multiple overlapping uncertainties in designing energy systems for the Arctic and remote communities in general; (ii) Extension of previous Arctic studies - where focused has solely been on the electricity sector - by integrating heating technology options in the proposed modeling framework in conjunction with methods on obtaining `high performance' buildings in the North; (iii) Overall energy system performance evaluation when integrating heat and electricity sectors, as well as the role of battery storage systems and diesel generator on facilitating variable renewable energy generation among isolated communities; (iv) Formulation of a community-scale energy trilemma index model which helps design policies that are accelerating (or hindering) energy transitions among remote communities by assessing quantitatively challenges relating to energy security, affordability, and environmental sustainability; (v) Synthesized holistic insights and recommendations on how to create opportunities for Indigenous peoples-led energy projects while discussing interwoven links between energy system operations, relationship building and stakeholders engagement, policy design, and research (energy modeling and analysis). Collectively, the new methods and recommendations demonstrated herein offer evidence-based decision making and innovative solutions for policy makers, utility companies, Indigenous peoples, and other stakeholders in the Arctic and beyond. / Graduate

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Reservation was established in 1876, the same year as the transcontinental Southern Pacific Railroad completed a station in Palm Springs. These overlapping events would both enable and problematize the settler colonization of the Agua Caliente’s land, creating a checkerboard pattern of “fragmented jurisdiction” that was fundamental for its transformation into one of the wealthiest resorts in the United States. The territorial conflict between the Tribe and the U.S. would only begin to be legally resolved in 1977, when the Agua Caliente won the right to zone and plan their own lands. This dissertation examines how architecture, urbanism, and infrastructure mediated the technical, legal, and ideological struggles that took place in this period; sometimes enabling Imperial dispossession, other times structuring Tribal assimilation and decolonization. The dissertation historicizes and theorizes these processes by examining the modern architecture and urbanism of Palm Springs as a specific settler-colonial, “post-industrial” mode of development which was made possible by the particular territorial configuration that emerged out of nineteenth century Imperialism. It posits a correlation between settler colonialism and the settler imaginaries and material processes of technological progress, capitalist accumulation, natural resource extraction, and cultures of leisure that were uniquely developed in Palm Springs through modern architecture. Critically dismantling the connections between modern architecture, “post-industrial society,” and settler colonialism, this dissertation argues, is a necessary condition for the development of decolonial epistemologies and strategies of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist resistance.

Cultural traditions in indigenous peoples about maternity, childbirth and puerperium are fundamental bases to their history and knowledge for the well-being of the community. However, government and private health services in general only offer Western birthing practices, making pregnant indigenous women fall between two systems: one based on their traditions and beliefs but weakened by poor resourcing and inefficiencies, and the other by policies of acculturation. With the objective of studying the perspective and voice of indigenous women on maternal healthcare in Veracruz, Mexico, this research was carried out between December 2022 and February 2023 in a health organization which is implementing an intercultural maternal care system. The study subjects were made up of pregnant indigenous women and health providers who shared their perspective and experience on the topic through a process of individual interviews and surveys. As a result, this research opens space for Non-Western standpoints: indigenous voices, focused on the well-being and dialogue to draw on the strengths of different cultures.

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Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights in Latin America Indigenous peoples' cultures are known for their collective, spiritual, intergenerational relationship to their ancestral lands. Indigenous peoples not only depend on their territories with their subsistence but also with the preservation of their distinct cultures. Lands are, however, a significant factor in the vast human rights violations to which they subject. They are often faced with the dispossession of their traditional lands and the disruption of the ecological integrity of their territories. This also affects their traditional way of life and leads to the loss of their cultures. From the 1980s, indigenous peoples have started reclaiming their rights, which has also been reflected in their position under international law. In 1989, the International Labour Organisation Convention No. 169, the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention was adopted. This Convention anchored significantly higher standards of protection of indigenous peoples' rights to their lands. Above all, it abandoned the patriarchal approach of the International Labour Organisation's Convention No. 107, the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention. Convention No. 169, moreover, addresses indigenous peoples as 'peoples' rather than 'populations', as was the case in its...

While accounting for less than 5 percent of the Canadian population, Indigenous peoples represent more than 30 percent of the federal prison population of Canada. In a prairie province like Manitoba the numbers are even more extreme, with over three-quarters of the prison population being Indigenous. This contemporary “Indian Problem” has been theorized in recent decades as an outcome of the colonial history of Canada. Indigenous Studies scholarship has critiqued the temporal political imaginary of the subsequent reconciliation discourse that locates colonial violence, and, thus, culpability and responsibility of the Canadian state, to an ‘event’ of history. Such national stories not only diminish the interrogation of ongoing structures of colonial violence but relegate any meaningful political processes of accountability and justice to the dustbin of history. This ‘legacy’ framework of historicizing colonial violence has created fecund conditions for (re)apprehending Indigenous bodies at the junctures of legal and medical reasoning, where questions of punishment, containment and rehabilitation for criminal actions become uneasily blurred with questions of healing and repair of damaged bodies and minds. The uptake of ‘Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder’ (FASD) in the Canadian justice system in recent decades operates precisely at this juncture of treating Indigenous peoples as uniquely medicalized, or disabled, criminals, and has created further capacities for deepening this ‘legacy’ framework for apprehending and containing Indigenous peoples as offenders, or even as potential offenders of a social and legal order. FASD is an umbrella term describing the range of lifelong physical, mental, behavioral and learning disabilities that can occur in an individual who was exposed to alcohol while in utero. It is typically thought of as a neurocognitive disability that affects memory, executive reasoning, and the ability to learn from or think consequentially about one’s actions. As such, it has become a broad institutional discourse for predicting criminal behaviors through a medicalized conception of risk of violence. FASD is typically raised as an ethical problem in the criminal justice system, provoking important questions as to whether we punish crimes (for which one is culpable) or disabilities (for which one is not). In addition, if FASD represents a permanent neurocognitive disability without any hope of cure, how should the rehabilitative and reintegrative tenets of the criminal code be imagined and implemented? These problems are compounded further by the regular speculation that Canada is in the midst of a hitherto unknown epidemic of this “invisible disorder” of FASD. Important as these ethical and political problems are, the dissertation argues that the specific institutional urgency surrounding the medicalization of criminal offenders with FASD has been enabled by diagnostic logics of deferral and certainty that pertains to the “Indian Problem.” These logics allow FASD to relocate and bury questions of colonial responsibility within the Indigenous body itself which is tragically doomed to permanent brain damage and cognitive disorder and an incorrigible lifestyle of dysfunction and crime. The ‘colonial legacy’ predicates a foreclosure on Indigenous futurity. This dissertation is based on 24 months of fieldwork in a non-profit community outreach program for justice-involved individuals with FASD in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As an FASD community outreach worker, my job was to assist individuals to navigate the complexities of criminal justice and social welfare systems that might pose challenges to those with cognitive disabilities associated with FASD. I learned very quickly, however, that actors as diverse as lawyers, probation officers, doctors, social workers, FASD researchers and even my community outreach colleagues and supervisors, operated within a diagnostic imaginary that quite often assumed without proof the presence of an FASD diagnosis for our almost exclusively Indigenous clientele. The dissertation analyzes the everyday procedures of FASD knowledge formation and circulation beginning with a basic ethnographic question: how does one know that another has FASD? This line of questioning was situated within the broad institutional apparatus of the criminal justice system in Canada, which I examine thematically and temporally as four separate stages of encounter: 1) the initial crime and related discourses of accusation; 2) the trial setting; 3) the sentencing trial; and, finally, 4) the post-carceral release phase. This temporal framework emerged naturally out of my experience of ethnographic work as a community outreach worker and innumerable casual and professional encounters with social workers, slum landlords, and my many hours spent in courts, probation offices, and jail visitations. In addition, I had a four-month placement with an assessment team at an FASD diagnostic clinic and did extensive work in the archive of legal cases and decisions pertaining to Indigenous offenders and the unique problematic of FASD in the legal system. Breaking down the minute social and legal details that attend to determinations of FASD at these various stages unmasks the ways in which FASD comes to explain Indigenous criminality as a congenital condition that is an expression of biological and cultural dysfunction, while strategically ignoring any examination of ongoing structures of colonial violence.