Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Peter R. Kolchin, Dept. of History. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation is both an analytical life history of Stó:lō Elder Archie Charles (1922-2010) as well as an academic reflection on the process of collaborating to record and write this told-to narrative. Grand Chief Archie Charles left a profound social, political and cultural legacy within the Stó:lō community. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the community’s most respected modern leaders. My examination of the way Archie strategically accepted and rejected elements of the teachings of his ancestors and the lessons learned from newcomers serves to enrich a growing body of post-colonial scholarship that challenges long-standing assumptions about what it means to be Aboriginal. The agency revealed through his life experience alerts us to the dynamic way in which Archie and certain others of his generation balanced innovation with tradition. This study of Archie’s life therefore, contributes to an emerging scholarship that challenges still lingering racist myths and faulty dualisms that position Native people as either “assimilated” or “resisting”. Through Archie’s story, I reveal the way in which he applied knowledge and skills he gained via the acculturation process (and his lifelong reflections on this process) to foster particular cultural continuities within areas of Stó:lō life. Archie successfully did this by enacting his own personal ethos of “protection through inclusion and education”. This research chronicles and interprets the genesis and evolution of his leadership strategy by tracing it back to his adaptive interpretations of his ancestral and familial teachings and highlighting key times in Archie’s life history when he worked to find a balance between innovation and tradition. Thus it foregrounds his formative experience with Xwelítem (newcomers) and Stó:lō society and cosmology, particularly his adoption, time spent attending Kamloops Indian Residential School, and involvement as a soldier and veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. It highlights how he derived meaning out of these experiences, which in turn guided his actions in the public sphere and shaped his policies as a community leader –in particular as elected Chief of his community of Seabird Island British Columbia and as a Sia:teleq (a hereditary caretaker) of his family fishcamp in the Fraser Canyon. This research draws upon my own sustained dialogue with Archie Charles and his immediate family, secondary and primary sources, and previous oral history interviews conducted with Archie and his family members. It explicates Archie’s role as a man who was known more for his actions than his words and the ways in which silence may be interpreted and made meaningful in the told-to genre. In terms that reflect the subtleties of collaborative dynamics that play out in told-to narratives, it likewise examines his role as narrator and authority of his life experience and my role as chronicler, then interpreter. As such, it provides glimpses into specific time periods and aspects of Archie’s life, but does not seek to be fully chronologic and comprehensive. As a result, I seek to contribute to collaborative historiography by sharing the way in which my collaboration with Archie shifted from a dialogue, particularly following his death in 2010, to a “polylogue”: an engagement of multiple voices of family and extended community members to support this telling of his life narrative. Moving from hearing to a more engaged form of “listening” as we did – the kind which allows for silences to exist – reinforced for me that knowledge, expressed through words, gestures, actions as well as silences are not things we can go into a community or individual’s life and “get”. Rather, they are shared as gifts, and as such come with obligations of reciprocity. This dissertation aspires to reciprocate the sharing that Archie did with me by providing his community and my scholarly community with not only an account of his life, but with an assessment of what his life reveals about pertinent issues in Aboriginal and Native-Newcomer history – and through this process to hopefully contribute to the ongoing efforts at building reconciliation between settler and Indigenous societies.

The Kurdish Question, which dates back to the Ottoman Era, has been a constituent element of narratives of Turkish nationalism for the past 30 years. The Kurdish Question stands as the most prominent “other” of Turkish nationalism. The members of two groups, Kurds and Turks, became highly politicised throughout 30 years of internal conflict and through their daily encounters, giving way to a constant redefinition of the understanding of nationalism and ethnicity. The encounters and experiences of these two groups have facilitated the development of various narrative forms of personal nationalism in daily life. Accordingly, the daily manifestations of the Kurdish Question and Turkish nationalism have grown as an object of academic interest. The question of how ordinary people produce – and are produced in – personal narratives of nationalism is a subject that still needs to be addressed, and this thesis aims to fill this gap by examining the notion of “personal narratives”. Analysing nationalism through personal narratives enables us to see how hegemonic nationalist ideology is reproduced and practiced by individuals through various dynamics. The thesis finds that the determining theme in the personal narratives of Turks and Kurds follows fundamentally the official ideology of the state about the Kurds, which is based principally on „a strategy of denial‟. The macro political transformations of the 2000s and the increased potential of encountering the “other” in daily life underline the challenging nature of this ideological strategy of denial. Herein, while the Turkish participants define themselves as the benevolent party in their nationalist narratives, they mark Kurdish people as terrorists, separatists and primitives. In contrast, the narratives of the Kurdish participants are characterised by the adoption of a “self-defence” strategy against the dominant negative perceptions of Turkish society about their culture: they assert that they are in fact not ignorant; not terrorists; not disloyal citizens, and so on. The narratives of the Turkish participants about the ethnic “other”, the Kurds, generally follow a strategy of contempt and accusation; yet personal experiences give them the opportunity to politicise the problem on different grounds by empathising or humanising. On the Kurdish side, the subjects of the personal narratives are more often the state and the army than Turkish individuals, and again they construct a narrative that endeavours to reverse the dominant negative perceptions about Kurds. They attempt to negate the denial strategy through both collective and personal stories of the discrimination they have experienced over the years and generations. Vital questions such as through which mechanisms of resistance do ordinary people construct and practice their ethnic identities, again become visible through their personal narratives.

This thesis explores nine individuals’ personal experiences with sexual assault and rape. The project provides a platform for voices that have been historically silenced, striving to empower and support survivors while raising awareness on the pertinent issues surrounding sexual assault and rape. By engaging in the tension between the individual narratives and the collective dimension of the experience of sexual assault, this thesis reframes the relationship between the personal and the political.

The study of women in higher education has been compartmentalized from the overall history of higher education. Educational historians continue to influence future discovery on the higher education of women by continuing to reinforce the master narrative of women in history. Acknowledging and confronting the master narrative within the history of higher education provides a useful endeavor by uncovering a deeper understanding of the history of the United States and educational systems. The challenge of continuing to be open to new perspectives of history will allow educators, policymakers and the general public to contribute to a better understanding about how education contributes in the journey for discovery.

Dog adoption is a popular way for people to find pets in the United States. With dog adoption comes dog adoption narratives, ideologically about the dog, told by humans for humans. Dog adoption narratives, a genre of personal experience narrative, enact a series of formalized conventions that reveal societal binaries, tensions, and anxieties in the interspecies relationship. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, I highlight the way these narratives are performed, organized, and interpreted. By comparing the adoption narratives of two different groups, people who regularly visit dog parks and people who do dog rehabilitation work, I argue that these narratives yield insight about the way humans perceive dogs in the United States within the context of how humans themselves want to be perceived by other humans. Dogs become a form of cultural capital and dog adoption narratives a reflection of cultural attitudes towards, and informed interactions with, the human-dog relationship.

Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Este estudo tem como proposta pensar questões acerca das narrativas, das identidades e das produções de conhecimentos na afro-diáspora, tendo como foco os processos que se dão na prática cultural do jongo. Compreendo que as populações afrodiaspóricas historicamente sofreram e sofrem com as violências cometidas pelo empreendimento colonial. O colonialismo instaurou regimes de verdades propagando perspectiva única sobre a história. Assim, a narrativa que prevalece sobre as populações negras é as que os representam sobre a condição de subalternidade. Ao elegermos o jongo- prática cultural significada pelas populações afrodiaspóricas em diferentes tempos/espaços cotidianos- e ao nos colocarmos em um lugar de escuta atenta, visibilizamos outras narrativas, imagens e conhecimentos que confrontam e desestabilizam a perspectiva hegemônica divulgada pelo colonialismo. Este trabalho propõe pensar o jongo não como historicamente foi representado pelas tradições colonialista, mas busca ampliar a compressão sobre essa cultura como outras possibilidade de pensar o mundo, outras bases explicativas e epistemológicas. / This work has the proposal to think about issues of narratives, identities and knowledge production in afro-diaspora, focusing on the processes inside of Jongos cultural practice .I understand that African diasporics populations historically have suffered and are suffering from the violence committed by the colonial enterprise. Colonialism established schemes introduced unique insight into the story. Thus, the narrative predominant is the representation of black population on the condition of subalternity. To define the Jongo cultural practice that had meant by African diasporics populations in different space/time- and put ourselves in place of great attention listening, we can observation other narratives, images and knowledge that confront and destabilize the hegemonic perspective has spread by colonialism. This study proposes think jongo not as historically been represented by the colonial traditions, but seeks to increase the compression on this culture as other possibility of thinking about the world, other explanatory and epistemological bases.

According to a 2017 study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, roughly one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Despite how incredibly common of an experience it is, one almost never hears abortion talked about on an individual basis. This study seeks to find out why people who’ve had abortions do or don’t talk about them, and why, as well as what, if anything, can and needs to be done to change the conversational landscape around abortion. I used qualitative methods to conduct seven participant-led interviews with different people who have had abortions. My findings show that people don’t talk about their abortions for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to: fear of stigma, feeling there’s no non-“awkward” way to bring it up in conversation, and simply not really thinking about it that often. My participants also described a variety of ideas for fighting this stigma, primarily through connecting with, talking with, listening to, and being a source of mutual support for other people who have also had abortions. Because I used a participatory-action model of methods, my participants and I worked to put some of their ideas into action after the conclusion of our interviews.

Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Este estudo tem como proposta pensar questões acerca das narrativas, das identidades e das produções de conhecimentos na afro-diáspora, tendo como foco os processos que se dão na prática cultural do jongo. Compreendo que as populações afrodiaspóricas historicamente sofreram e sofrem com as violências cometidas pelo empreendimento colonial. O colonialismo instaurou regimes de verdades propagando perspectiva única sobre a história. Assim, a narrativa que prevalece sobre as populações negras é as que os representam sobre a condição de subalternidade. Ao elegermos o jongo- prática cultural significada pelas populações afrodiaspóricas em diferentes tempos/espaços cotidianos- e ao nos colocarmos em um lugar de escuta atenta, visibilizamos outras narrativas, imagens e conhecimentos que confrontam e desestabilizam a perspectiva hegemônica divulgada pelo colonialismo. Este trabalho propõe pensar o jongo não como historicamente foi representado pelas tradições colonialista, mas busca ampliar a compressão sobre essa cultura como outras possibilidade de pensar o mundo, outras bases explicativas e epistemológicas. / This work has the proposal to think about issues of narratives, identities and knowledge production in afro-diaspora, focusing on the processes inside of Jongos cultural practice .I understand that African diasporics populations historically have suffered and are suffering from the violence committed by the colonial enterprise. Colonialism established schemes introduced unique insight into the story. Thus, the narrative predominant is the representation of black population on the condition of subalternity. To define the Jongo cultural practice that had meant by African diasporics populations in different space/time- and put ourselves in place of great attention listening, we can observation other narratives, images and knowledge that confront and destabilize the hegemonic perspective has spread by colonialism. This study proposes think jongo not as historically been represented by the colonial traditions, but seeks to increase the compression on this culture as other possibility of thinking about the world, other explanatory and epistemological bases.