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The Manitoba School Question is representative of a larger problem of possible tyranny by the majority. Mob rule is often less recognized when seemingly legitimized by legislative action. This long term event shows the danger resulting from assumptions that constitutional provisions provide adequate protection for a minority. When legislation is enacted which removes Constitutional rights, and there is no violent opposition, are assumed to be accepted by all. Once opposition develops decades later, it comes as an apparent surprise, even to individuals in prominent political positions. Language is clearly a major issue in the Manitoba School Question but all elements of culture including religion and ethnicity play important roles in the controversy. While other North American communities like Prairie du Chien and St. Louis have retained little to mark a distinctive French culture, aside from street names, in Manitoba, the language and other cultural elements continue in theater, literature, and education. Even as the minority language continues, there is virtually no one who claims French as their native language who is not fluent in English. As other locations in North America debate the question and propriety of imposing an official language, much could be learned from the experience of Manitoba. The primary sources utilized in this study were mainly documents generated by the Manitoba and Canadian governments and by the Manitoba Department of Education. Much information was also gleaned from the correspondence of Catholic missionaries and Archbishop Taché as well as from leadership in the Protestant school systems. Few of most important participants in this pageant lived to witness the Constitutional crisis resulting from the quick and easy legislative responses to popular sentiments.

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This dissertation uses the Icelandic-Canadian community to discuss alternate media and the production of “ethnoscapes,” or landscapes of ethnic identity, on the prairies from 1875 to the present. Drawing from larger historiographies of food, gender, material culture, oral history, and commemoration, it offers an investigation into power, acculturation, and representation using often-marginalized terrains of Canadian ethnic expression. Each of the project’s five chapters examines the cultural history of the community through a different medium. The first chapter uses clothing, one of the most intimate and immediate ways that migrants experienced transition in North America, to explore the impact of poverty, marginalization, disease, climate, and eventual access to Anglo commercial goods on migrant culture. Chapter two analyses the role of food and drink, specifically coffee, alcohol, and vínarterta (a festive layered torte) in everyday life and the development of migrant identity. The third chapter analyses the growth of conservatism and depictions of women in the Icelandic-Canadian community in the twentieth century, with a focus on the decline of radical Icelandic language publications and the rise of ethnic spectacles. Chapter four analyses the impact of centennial and multicultural heritage campaigns on Icelandic-Canadian life, popular narrative, and domestic space by tracing the emergence of the koffort (immigrant trunk) in intergenerational family commemorative practices. Chapter five continues the discussion of popular memory with an examination of the compelling hjátru (superstitious) narrative tradition in the community. It illustrates that Icelandic migrants imported and adapted this tradition to the North American context in a way that also reflected their understanding of colonial violence as an unresolved, disruptive, and damaging intergenerational inheritance. Providing an alternate view of the community beyond either cultural endurance or assimilation, this dissertation argues that the multiple material, visual, and oral conduits through which members have experienced life in the New World have been crucial to the construction of Icelandic-Canadian identity. It is through these terrains that community members have continually engaged with public expectations and demands for both ethnic performance and suppression. The fluidity of these forms and forums and their facilitation of members’ engagement with, adaptations to, and contestation of images of ethnicity and history have enabled the continual construction of Icelandic identities in North America 135 years after departure.

This dissertation uses the Icelandic-Canadian community to discuss alternate media and the production of “ethnoscapes,” or landscapes of ethnic identity, on the prairies from 1875 to the present. Drawing from larger historiographies of food, gender, material culture, oral history, and commemoration, it offers an investigation into power, acculturation, and representation using often-marginalized terrains of Canadian ethnic expression. Each of the project’s five chapters examines the cultural history of the community through a different medium. The first chapter uses clothing, one of the most intimate and immediate ways that migrants experienced transition in North America, to explore the impact of poverty, marginalization, disease, climate, and eventual access to Anglo commercial goods on migrant culture. Chapter two analyses the role of food and drink, specifically coffee, alcohol, and vínarterta (a festive layered torte) in everyday life and the development of migrant identity. The third chapter analyses the growth of conservatism and depictions of women in the Icelandic-Canadian community in the twentieth century, with a focus on the decline of radical Icelandic language publications and the rise of ethnic spectacles. Chapter four analyses the impact of centennial and multicultural heritage campaigns on Icelandic-Canadian life, popular narrative, and domestic space by tracing the emergence of the koffort (immigrant trunk) in intergenerational family commemorative practices. Chapter five continues the discussion of popular memory with an examination of the compelling hjátru (superstitious) narrative tradition in the community. It illustrates that Icelandic migrants imported and adapted this tradition to the North American context in a way that also reflected their understanding of colonial violence as an unresolved, disruptive, and damaging intergenerational inheritance. Providing an alternate view of the community beyond either cultural endurance or assimilation, this dissertation argues that the multiple material, visual, and oral conduits through which members have experienced life in the New World have been crucial to the construction of Icelandic-Canadian identity. It is through these terrains that community members have continually engaged with public expectations and demands for both ethnic performance and suppression. The fluidity of these forms and forums and their facilitation of members’ engagement with, adaptations to, and contestation of images of ethnicity and history have enabled the continual construction of Icelandic identities in North America 135 years after departure.

The Mennonites are a religious, social and ethnic group with origins in the time of the sixteenth century Reformation. The group was named after a Dutch Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, who provided the members with substantial theological leadership. Throughout the last four centuries, the Mennonites have migrated around the world and divided into over a hundred different sub-groups. In 1989, Canada was home to over 100,000 Mennonite members who belonged to 735 church congregations that were part of 30 separate groups. The two largest Mennonite groups in Canada are the Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (MB) and the Conference of Mennonites in Canada (CMC). These two groups, and the Colleges they own and operate, are the focus of this thesis topic - Mennonites and Higher Education in the 1960s. By 1960, the Mennonite Brethren Bible College (MBBC) and the Canadian Mennonite Bible College (CMBC) had become involved in the process of opening their communities to the professional and vocational opportunities available in Canada while selectively closing the community to secular influences. The Colleges made institutional decisions which allowed them to offer a university standard education in a parochial setting. These decisions created an active discussion within the two sponsoring Mennonite constituencies. Some members, within each group, were less inclined to embrace the influences of a growing urban, modern worldview because involvement in modern Canadian society would require the adaptation of their traditional, rural identity. The Colleges, on the other hand, encouraged changes while attempting to maintain continuity with essential community ideals. This process of change is the focus of this thesis.

The Mennonites are a religious, social and ethnic group with origins in the time of the sixteenth century Reformation. The group was named after a Dutch Anabaptist leader, Menno Simons, who provided the members with substantial theological leadership. Throughout the last four centuries, the Mennonites have migrated around the world and divided into over a hundred different sub-groups. In 1989, Canada was home to over 100,000 Mennonite members who belonged to 735 church congregations that were part of 30 separate groups. The two largest Mennonite groups in Canada are the Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches (MB) and the Conference of Mennonites in Canada (CMC). These two groups, and the Colleges they own and operate, are the focus of this thesis topic - Mennonites and Higher Education in the 1960s. By 1960, the Mennonite Brethren Bible College (MBBC) and the Canadian Mennonite Bible College (CMBC) had become involved in the process of opening their communities to the professional and vocational opportunities available in Canada while selectively closing the community to secular influences. The Colleges made institutional decisions which allowed them to offer a university standard education in a parochial setting. These decisions created an active discussion within the two sponsoring Mennonite constituencies. Some members, within each group, were less inclined to embrace the influences of a growing urban, modern worldview because involvement in modern Canadian society would require the adaptation of their traditional, rural identity. The Colleges, on the other hand, encouraged changes while attempting to maintain continuity with essential community ideals. This process of change is the focus of this thesis. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

Centred on the architecture of the Winnipeg Civic Auditorium, this thesis tangentially investigates the presence of Anglo-Saxon race mindedness in a place civic planners call the metropolitan centre of North America (Watt, 1932). The introduction situates the building tangentially in Manitoba's history. By thinking about the Civic Auditorium in a tangential manner I aim to attack the linear and sequential framework found in Eurocentric historical accounts. Doing this, my thesis criticises western architectural history and welcomes Indigenous reinterpretations of civic planning and urban aesthetics. I aim to philosophically attack the informational rhetoric of the cultural turn (Fabian, 1983). My thesis participates in the production of a material turn discourse, wherein the important philosophical relationship between objects and occidental culture is demonstrated (Otter, 2010; Bennett & Joyce, 2010; Hamilton, 2013). It utilises the Civic Auditorium as a touch stone to demonstrate the important ways that architecture has agency in the production of racism. / February 2016