This project presents an historical and sociological vision of indigenous Maya/Mam spirituality. The historical damage caused by the European invasion continues as modern exploitation that is causing a mass exodus towards the north. The project describes the survival of the Maya/Mam now living in the Metro District of The United Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, and attempting to combine their new Christian faith with their ancestral spirituality preserved for more than 500 years. To include the generation of indigenous people born in the Diaspora takes transformative leadership. Key words: indigenous, Maya/Mam, spirituality, leadership.

The history of the United States’ occupation in the Philippines requires an alternative archive that includes family stories, museums sites, and other memories to articulate the nearly inexplicable legacy of imperial trauma. My project foregrounds the intangible effects of American imperialism, traced in generational memories of Filipinos and Filipino Americans and their descendants. Addressing three key moments defining the Filipino and Filipino American experience: the Philippine-American War, World War II, and 21st century global capitalism, I look at how the under-the-surface, banal nature of imperial trauma’s legacy marks Filipino identity and creates blind spots in the Filipino imaginary. My dissertation examines sexual atrocities committed by American soldiers during the 1898-1902 Philippine-American War, revisits memories of World War II and the Japanese Occupation as represented in military museums in Fredericksburg, Texas and on Corregidor Island, Philippines, and concludes with the importance of the babaylan figure, from an ancient priestess tradition in the Philippines, for diasporic Filipinas to negotiate the contemporary challenges of everyday living. My dissertation examines the use of strategic storytelling to recover lost histories, heal from the past, and re-create the present. / text

Herbal medicines remain integral part of indigenous health care system in Ghana. Most conventional health medicines are directly or indirectly derived from plants or herbs. Despite its significant role in modern medicine indigenous herbal practices has been on the low light for some time due to perceived antagonistic relationship that exists between practitioners of herbal medicine and their counterpart in the conventional system. Using an indigenous knowledge discursive framework, the thesis examined the relevance of herbal medicine to the contemporary Ghanaian society. The thesis also examined the tension between the indigenous herbal practitioners and their orthodox counterparts. The thesis noted that for health care system in Ghana to be effective, there is a need for collaborate relations between these two practitioners. Also, it was noted that for health care system to be effective in Ghana, spirituality has to be central in the works of the herbal practitioners.

Herbal medicines remain integral part of indigenous health care system in Ghana. Most conventional health medicines are directly or indirectly derived from plants or herbs. Despite its significant role in modern medicine indigenous herbal practices has been on the low light for some time due to perceived antagonistic relationship that exists between practitioners of herbal medicine and their counterpart in the conventional system. Using an indigenous knowledge discursive framework, the thesis examined the relevance of herbal medicine to the contemporary Ghanaian society. The thesis also examined the tension between the indigenous herbal practitioners and their orthodox counterparts. The thesis noted that for health care system in Ghana to be effective, there is a need for collaborate relations between these two practitioners. Also, it was noted that for health care system to be effective in Ghana, spirituality has to be central in the works of the herbal practitioners.

Canada 150, or the sesquicentennial anniversary of Confederation, celebrates a nation-state that can be described as “settler colonial” in relation to Indigenous peoples. This thesis brings a Critical Religion and Critical Discourse Analysis methodology into conversation with Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies to ask: how is Canadian settler colonial sovereignty enacted, and how do Indigenous peoples perform challenges to that sovereignty? The parliamentary mace and the eagle feather are conceptualized as emblematic and condensed metaphors, or metonyms, that assert and represent Canadian and Indigenous sovereignties. As a settler colonial sovereignty, established and naturalized partially through discourses on religion, Canadian sovereignty requires the displacement of Indigenous sovereignty. In events from 1990 to 2017, Indigenous people wielding eagle feathers disrupt Canadian governance and challenge the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. Indigenous sovereignty is (re)asserted as identity-based, oppositional, and spiritualized. Discourses on Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality provide categories and concepts through which Indigenous resistance occurs within Canada.

This dissertation seeks to illuminate key aspects of Coast Salish legal sensibility. It draws on collaborative fieldwork carried out between 2007 and 2010 with Stó:lō communities from the Fraser Valley in southern British Columbia, and on the rich ethnohistorical record produced on, with, and by members of the Stó:lō polity and of the wider Coast Salish social world to which they belong. The preoccupation underlying this inquiry is to better understand how to approach an Indigenous legal tradition on its own terms, in a way respectful of its distinctiveness – especially in an ongoing colonial context, and from my position as an outsider to this tradition. As such, a main question drives the inquiry: What makes a legal tradition what it is? Two series of legal insights emerge from this work. The first are theoretical and methodological. The character of a legal tradition, I suggest, owes more to implicit norms than to explicit ones. In order to gain the kind of understanding that allows for respectful interactions with the principles and processes that inform decision-making within a given legal order, one must learn to decipher the norms that are not so much talked about as tacitly modelled by its members. Paying attention to pragmatic forms of communication – the mode of conveying meaning interactively and contextually, typically by showing rather than telling – reveals the hidden normative canvas upon which explicit norms are grafted. This deeper layer of normativity inflects peoples’ subjectivity and sense of their own agency – the distinctive fabric of their socialization. This lens on law – emerging from a reflection on the stories that Stó:lō friends shared with me, on the discussions had with them, and on the relational experience of Stó:lō / Coast Salish pedagogy, and further informed by scholarship on Indigenous and Western law, political philosophy and sociolinguistics – yields a second series of insights. Those are ethnographical, about Coast Salish legal sensibility itself. They attach to three central institutions of the Stó:lō legal order: the Transformer storycycle, longhouse governance practice and the figure of the witness, and ancestral names – corresponding to three sets of key relationships within the tradition: to the land, to the spirit, and to kin. Among those insights, a central one concerns the importance of interconnectedness as an organizing principle within Stó:lō / Coast Salish legal orders. Coast Salish people are not simply aware of the factual interdependence of people and things in the world, pay special attention to this, and happen to offer a description of the world as interconnected. There is a normative commitment at work here. Interconnectedness informs dominant interpretations of how the world should work. It is a source of explicit responsibilities and obligations – but more amorphously and pervasively yet, it structures legitimate discourse and appropriate behavior within contemporary Coast Salish societies. / Graduate / 2018-10-20