No description available.

While researchers have documented elite Indigenous hockey players' experiences when they leave home to play sports in the mainstream context, to date they have not examined how these experiences may vary based on sex and gender. By using Tribal Critical Race Theory, Indigenous feminisms, and reflexive thematic analysis, in this thesis, I examined the challenges and benefits that First Nations elite hockey players experienced when they left home to play in the mainstream context and how these challenges varied based on sex and gender. The 20 participants (10 female, 10 male) all had challenges with language and their new environments. Interestingly, while all the male participants reported experiencing racism, only two of the female participants reported such experiences, and they were of a less overt nature. The benefits that were experienced by both male and female athletes included athletic and personal growth, new experiences, and support from home. While both male and female athletes reported accruing benefits from leaving home, I found that the female athletes had to leave home to pursue hockey due to a lack of opportunities available to them, opportunities that were often available closer to home for male participants. I also found that both males and females reported receiving a great deal of support; this is particularly interesting given male hockey's higher profile. Taken together, these findings add nuance to the existing literature on Indigenous hockey players' experiences in the mainstream context.

Although Garrison Keillor is perhaps best known as the creator and host of Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion (1974-1987), the focus of this study is his literary career. Keillor's literary accomplishments include a successful career as a writer for The New Yorker and two best-selling books about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, entitled Lake Wobegon Days (1985) and Leaving Home (1987). His literary style incorporates elements from several traditions in American literature--the precise, sophisticated "New Yorker style" practiced by writers such as E. B. White and James Thurber; the oral tradition prominent in the works of Mark Twain and the nineteenth-century literary comedians; and the satiric realism associated with the small-town literature of writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.