As many Indigenous voices and teachings reveal, individual practices of leadership are an everyday commitment to cultural resurgence and actualize within the personal spaces of the home, kitchen table, garden, birth-room and familial relations. Individual enactments of leadership are further determined by personal sense of agency derived from feelings of personal wellness, community well-being, relational balance and alignment of the mental, spiritual, emotional and physical selves. Healthy environments, including territories that encompass Land and Water, are essential for overall community wellness. This issertation examines emergent themes of Indigenous wellness, governance and gender to broaden current definitions of Indigenous governance and leadership towards a gendered, storied and embodied understanding. Countering the notion that governance and wellness are separate entities within the field of Indigenous Governance, this paper draws the Indigenous body into focus as a crucial site for self-determination in what I define as embodied governance. In doing so, we situate the Indigenous body within a self-determination framework that brings together critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous governance and culturally grounded wellness practices. Utilizing narrative inquiry, storytelling methods, relationship based models of accountability, this research project included the guided conversations of 17 self-identified Indigenous Womxn between 21-60 years of age from 10 different Nations, to explore: definitions of leadership in their everyday lives, the conditions for their personal wellness and community well-being, and finally, how these notions are predicated upon meaningful relationship to Land/Waters. My research defines wellness and well-being within the Cree-Michif framework of Miyo-Pimatisiwin (personal wellness, self-care, healing, internal balance) and Miyo-Wîchêtowin (care for others, accountability and belonging, kinship, relational governance, external balance). These concepts inform what I define as an embodied governance framework of self-determination to engage in ongoing efforts of personal, community, Land/Water-based healing for the purpose of protecting the future of generations to come. The final analysis celebrates and honours on-the-ground practices of embodied governance by focusing on rooted examples of creative resurgence, Land-Water based healing practices and a focus on an emergent theme of embodied birth and reproductive governance. These learnings support that determinants of individual leadership must be supported by a sense of personal wellness contained by relationship to Land and Waters. The dissertation begins with a critical examination of the colonial underpinnings that sabotage community healing, wellness and traditions of governance as derived by relationship to home Lands and Waters. In this way, I aim to interrupt the predominant trope of the Indigenous body or community as continuously in crisis. Instead, this paper situates Indigenous healing practices as radical sites of governance. This dissertation argues for the reconsideration of self-determination as embodied governance, which begins with the body as a site of regeneration, resurgence and renewal. / Graduate

Cette étude vise à montrer de quelles manières les récits de Francisco Coloane contribuent à la définition d’une identité régionale australe à travers la représentation d’un espace naturel exceptionnel et la peinture de sociétés humaines marginales dont le mode d’existence est déterminé par leur environnement. L’écriture portant cette représentation témoigne d’une volonté de lever le voile sur une réalité méconnue, isolée et fantasmée, de saisir l’essence du monde austral. L’espace exploré s'écrit d'abord à travers l’expérience personnelle de son auteur en Patagonie où il a découvert des hommes, mais surtout des lieux et une nature à part qui seront au fondement d’un univers poétique unique. En accord avec la nature du lieu où les récits sont ancrés, Coloane écrit l’aventure. Une lecture approfondie de ses romans révèle que celle-ci s’y confond avec l’apprentissage de soi : les héros australs sont confrontés à une quête identitaire dont le sens est également collectif dans la mesure où leur trajectoire romanesque est représentative du destin d’une communauté. Dans le même temps, au sein de l’espace marin, la littérature de Coloane prend une dimension universelle car l’aventure en mer, en imposant à l’homme une confrontation permanente avec la mort, devient l’occasion de questionnements métaphysiques. Les enjeux de l’aventure ne sont pas seulement ontologiques : les récits proposent une aventure intellectuelle pleinement ancrée dans le contexte physique et culturel australs, guidée par des narrateurs géographe, naturaliste et ethnologue, autant de figures de savants et d’enquêteurs sur le monde austral. Les textes se révèlent les médiums d’un vaste savoir sur la région australe, dont ils réalisent la transmission. Ils participent ainsi de la saisie d’un monde qui reste toutefois essentiellement mystérieux. Enfin, le souci de vérité qui sous-tend l’écriture de Coloane doit s’entendre aussi comme un désir de justice : ses textes s’attachent à rendre visibles les ouvriers oubliés de l’histoire officielle ainsi que les habitants originels du Grand Sud, les Indiens australs, décimés par les promoteurs de l’exploitation industrielle de la région. Dans cette double perspective heuristique et critique, Coloane dévoile une réalité tragique longtemps occultée par le voile d'une utopie qui a fait des confins chiliens une terre avant tout romantique. Pourtant, tout en se dégageant de ce mythe, Coloane pense la survie de l'identité australe dans la pérennité de liens intimes entre l'homme et son milieu. / This study aims to show how the narratives of Francisco Coloane contribute to the definition of a regional Austral identity through the representation of exceptional natural spaces and the description of maginalized human societies whose way of existence is determined by its natural milieu. Coloane’s writing testifies to a desire to lift the veil on an unknown, isolated and fantasized reality and to understand the essence of the Austral world. The space explored in Coloane’s stories and novels is first of all that of the author’s personal experiences in Patagonia, where he discovered men, but above all places, an otherworldly nature that would become the foundation of a unique poetic universe. In keeping with the settings of his narratives, Coloane’s novels are adventures. Close reading reveals, however, that adventure isalways confounded here with the quest for self-knowledge : Coloane’s Austral heroes are engaged in a pursuit for identity whose meaning is also collective, to the extent that their novelistic trajectory is representative of the destiny of a community. At the same time, maritime space, Coloane’s work takes on a universal dimension, for adventure at sea, imposing on man a permanent confrontation with death, becomes the occasion for metaphysical examinations. The stakes of this adventure are not only ontological: Coloane’s work is an intellectual adventure fully anchored in the physical and cultural context of Chile’s southern territories, navigated by erudite, investigative narrators—geographers, naturalists and ethnologists of the Austral world. Coloane’s texts are vehicules for the transmission of an encyclopedic range of knowledge about Chile’s southernmost regions. They participate in the understanding of a world that remains nevertheless essentially mysterious. Finally, the concern for truth which underlies Coloane’s writing must also be understood as a desire for justice : his texts make visible the workers forgotten by official history as well as the indigeneous inhabitants of the extreme southern territories, decimated by the promoters of industrial exploitation in the region. From this heuristic and critical perspective, Coloane unveils a tragic reality long obscured by the veil of a utopia that transformed Chile’s outermost regions into the stuff of romantic legend. Abandoning such myths, Coloane nevertheless imagines the survival of the Austral identity in the permanence of intimate connections between man and his milieu.

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