We stand witness at the dawn of the 21st century to increasing tensions between Aboriginal people in Canada, and the Canadian state, largely as a result of conflict over natural resources. Do these conflicts imply that we are unable to understand each other? Does the meaning of our words get 'lost in translation' as it crosses the space between us? If this is so, then how can we envision dialogue between the two craft depicted in the Kaswentha, when---from a Canadian perspective---we don't understand the words each of us is using? When we don't understand the meaning of 'sovereignty' from the perspective of an Aboriginal participant in the dialogue, how can we understand what possibilities of cooperation are open to us? The Mi'kmaq, in their own traditions and 'worldview', clearly articulated their own understanding of 'sovereignty' based on their traditions of political thought and action. Through their economic, legal, spiritual, political and 'environmental' articulations, the Mi'kmaq projected their understanding of 'sovereignty' into the creation of relationships with the French, Jesuit and English immigrants which arrived on their shores. Through an analysis of these articulations, we gain a new appreciation for Mi'kmaq sovereignty---one founded on the concept of sharing. The three pillars of continuity, responsibility---for themselves and their 'extended European kin'---and relationship-building characterized this shared space within which the Mi'kmaq founded their relationship with their blue-eyed 'kin'. In all of its aspects---environment and land; spiritual, political and legal; and economic---Mi'kmaq sovereignty was about the paths and passes that allowed them to build relationships with others. Indeed, in its content and structure, Mi'kmaq sovereignty was, and is, shared sovereignty---an idea that opens our minds to a new way of understanding the political landscape of 21st century Mi'kma'ki. Drawing on this concept of shared sovereignty, ideas with respect to the co-management of natural resources are discussed. These ideas draw to a conclusion the thesis, and open avenues for further research and reflection on the place of Aboriginal political thought in the foundations of political culture in Canada.

To better understand the relationship to Otherness, postcolonial translation theorists have examined cultures that are far away in space or time. This dissertation takes an alternative approach by examining a contemporary, nearby Other, that is Native People who have been dominated over in a system that has "translated" them. This study analyzes a set of institutional representations of Canada's First Peoples. Its goal is to shed light on how these representations create a frame of reference that impacts public discourse about these people. Particular attention is paid to movements of consolidation , displacement, or subversion exercised within these frameworks. The review starts by recalling the historical conditions governing the first representations of Native People. It continues by analyzing the representations produced among the spheres of greatest influence: the legal, educational, museological, and linguistic institutions. How do the earliest colonial representations continue to filter through in present-day legal texts? How to educate tomorrow's decision makers about historical and current Native realities? How do museums construct the population's views of these realities? What is the status of Native languages against that of the two "official" languages of colonization? What support do Native languages receive, to allow them to assume their role in education and the development of Native identities, or for defining what is modern? These are the questions that each chapter explores and answers. The creation of the Dominion of Canada put the last touch to the definition of "Indians" as persons. Henceforth, power relations between First Peoples and colonizing forces became asymmetrical, and Canadian institutions got considerable powers of influence, not only over representations of the Native Other, but also over the production and reproduction of these representations. It is important that the subject, who reads and interprets Otherness through the symbolic representations that impact his/her frame of reference, be conscious of the predominance, in public discourse, of representations projected by institutions. This dissertation has attempted to uncover the competing power relations that are at work in representing Native People, while focusing on the position of people who represent, and on the position of those who are represented. This has led us to foreground areas of possible intervention favouring the recognition of Native people in Canada.

This dissertation examines the evolution of development practices in a Native American community by looking at how participation becomes more or less present in local-level decision-making. By using education as a lens to track changes in development practices, I describe the challenges and opportunities that arose for a small-scale development enterprise - referred to as 'the Nonprofit'- as it negotiated program implementation with various different players and stakeholders. I analyze how different strategies were developed and adopted during the first three years of the Nonprofit's operations to show how it gradually became more structured as development programs expanded from the community to the district.

Iroquoian philosophy and political thought survived solely in the minds of old men and women at the end of the nineteenth century. These ideas endure today because of ethnographers who patiently transcribed the elder’s oratory. One such ethnographer was a Tuscarora tribal member named John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1857-1937). Hewitt was a linguist who worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology for fifty-one years and dedicated himself to preserving Iroquois thought. He was self-educated and became expert while assisting other staff ethnologists. Hewitt’s “Iroquoian Cosmology Parts I & II” (1903, 1928,) sealed his reputation as the leading Iroquois scholar of his day. In spite of this accomplishment, Hewitt’s reputation faded quickly after his death. This dissertation seeks to understand why Hewitt decided to withhold some material from publication, and looks towards Hewitt’s complicated relationship with the Iroquois – for whom he was both a fellow tribal member and a professional ethnographer – for the probable answer. Finally, I re-evaluate Hewitt’s place in the field of Iroquois Studies as the last of a group of notable self-trained ethnographers and examine the lasting impact of his work on contemporary Tuscaroras and other Haudenosaunee people.

Using Indigenous epistemology blended with qualitative methodology, I spoke with forty-five Indigenous people about navigating the problematic processes for multiple American Indian identities within different contexts. I examined Indigenous identity as the product of out-group processes (being invisible in spite of the prevalence of overt racism), institutional constraints (being in the unique position where legal identification validates Indian race), and intra-ethnic othering (internalizing overt and institutionalized racism which results in authenticity policing). I find that overt racism becomes invisible when racist social discourse becomes legitimized. Discourse structures society within the interactions between institutions, individuals, and groups. Racist social discourse becomes legitimized through its normalization created within social institutions--like education, media, legislation, and family. Institutions shape social norms to make it seem right to enact racial violence against, and between, Indigenous Peoples, using stereotypes, racist labels, and laws that define "Indian" race by blood quanta. Ultimately, Indigenous Peoples can reproduce or contest the legitimized racism of Western social norms. Therefore, this work explores the dialectical and reciprocal relationship between notions of structure and agency as represented in negotiations of Indigenous identity.

This dissertation is the result of geographic research combining several years of study of Guatemalan culture, society, and history with approximately eight months of fieldwork. Through this work I have sought to explain the social and environmental transformations of Maya communal lands in the Guatemalan highlands over time, with special reference to one particular tract of communal lands and its partial incorporation as an inhabited park into the country's national system of protected areas. I draw on theoretical and methodological frameworks from the geographic sub-discipline political ecology in order to better understand the complex and contested terrain of environmental conservation in an indigenous people's homeland. The focus of the dissertation is a case study, grounded in local and regional history and geography, of the evolution of land tenure and management of the communal forests and grazing lands of the Sierra Madre in the county of Totonicapan. The communal lands of the K'iche' Maya people of Totonicapan have been widely acknowledged as some of the best protected in the Central American region. Yet the issues that confront land managers and those who depend on the commons for livelihood and sustenance have grown increasingly complicated, involving conflicts and shifting alliances between state management agencies, national and international nongovernmental organizations and local communities, and reflecting diverse perspectives on conservation and development. The creation of a protected area in the region in 1997 that encompassed part or all of nine major settlements and as many as 20,000 K'iche' inhabitants raised serious questions regarding the future, not only of Maya communal lands, but of the Maya of Guatemala in general given the interconnectedness of Maya identity and communal land tenure. Weaving together some of the diverse strands that inform the political ecology approach—especially environmental history, political economy, cultural ecology, and post-structuralism—I seek to represent the creation of the Regional Municipal Park Los Altos de San Miguel Totonicapan as the result of a complex intersection of local, regional, national and global forces, and by doing so, to contribute to discussions of the park's future that better reflect this complexity.

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This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century. / English