This study considers religion and mimetic violence in the work of four contemporary Canadian Native writers: Maria Campbell, Beatrice Culleton, Thomas King, and Basil Johnston. The mimetic violence examined is both social (the colonial attempt to remake the colonized into a reflection of the dominant culture) and personal (inter-Native conflict in which participants mirror one another in their struggle for a mutually covetted object). In order to investigate the former, I rely on the work of Homi K. Bhabha on colonial mimicry and hybridity; to examine the latter, I employ René Girard’s model of mimetic desire and violence. The principal academic contexts to this work are the study of Native literature and the academic study of religion, including the sub-field of Religion and Literature. After reviewing the relevant literature in these fields, and examining mimetic violence in key texts by the Native authors listed, I make several concluding points. First, I argue that a causal link between colonial violence and inter-Native mimetic violence is evident in the category of Native literature labelled by Thomas King as “polemical.” This includes Campbell’s Halfbreed, Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree, and King’s own Green Grass, Running Water. Second, I find that Johnston’s Moose Meat & Wild Rice and Indian School Days generally take care to separate colonial mimesis from Native mimetic conflict. This work fits King’s “associational” category of Native literature, and the disconnect evident in Johnston’s stories between the two forms of mimesis might stand as a defining feature of this category. Third, I assert that in none of the Native literature examined is religion viewed in a positive, idealist manner that assumes in its “true” manifestation it cannot be the cause of violence, which is the position taken by most religion scholars. I argue that the emphasis the Native texts place on the historic, material actions and effects of Christian individuals and institutions complements similar work being done by a minority of academics in the study of religion. Fourth, I propose possible avenues for the further investigation of mimesis in Native literature, which would use/focus on: metaphor-centred hermeneutical models; trickster figures and theories; and the conception of both Native and colonial identity. Finally, I argue that critics of Native literature have tended to idealize Native cultures, and that inter-Native mimetic violence offers a humanizing corrective to this perspective.

This paper attempts to provide an answer to the question of why the White House Tribal Nations Conferences (2009-2011) are happening by offering two hypothesis-- the first being the growing American Indian political power, while the other looks at whether the Conferences are simply symbolic politics--as potential answers. An in depth analysis of the Conferences and the purported accomplishments from the summits are analyzed in order to gain a deeper understanding of the Conferences themselves. Lastly, an interview with a tribal leader is presented to provide another framework in which to view the Conferences.

This study considers religion and mimetic violence in the work of four contemporary Canadian Native writers: Maria Campbell, Beatrice Culleton, Thomas King, and Basil Johnston. The mimetic violence examined is both social (the colonial attempt to remake the colonized into a reflection of the dominant culture) and personal (inter-Native conflict in which participants mirror one another in their struggle for a mutually covetted object). In order to investigate the former, I rely on the work of Homi K. Bhabha on colonial mimicry and hybridity; to examine the latter, I employ René Girard’s model of mimetic desire and violence. The principal academic contexts to this work are the study of Native literature and the academic study of religion, including the sub-field of Religion and Literature. After reviewing the relevant literature in these fields, and examining mimetic violence in key texts by the Native authors listed, I make several concluding points. First, I argue that a causal link between colonial violence and inter-Native mimetic violence is evident in the category of Native literature labelled by Thomas King as “polemical.” This includes Campbell’s Halfbreed, Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree, and King’s own Green Grass, Running Water. Second, I find that Johnston’s Moose Meat & Wild Rice and Indian School Days generally take care to separate colonial mimesis from Native mimetic conflict. This work fits King’s “associational” category of Native literature, and the disconnect evident in Johnston’s stories between the two forms of mimesis might stand as a defining feature of this category. Third, I assert that in none of the Native literature examined is religion viewed in a positive, idealist manner that assumes in its “true” manifestation it cannot be the cause of violence, which is the position taken by most religion scholars. I argue that the emphasis the Native texts place on the historic, material actions and effects of Christian individuals and institutions complements similar work being done by a minority of academics in the study of religion. Fourth, I propose possible avenues for the further investigation of mimesis in Native literature, which would use/focus on: metaphor-centred hermeneutical models; trickster figures and theories; and the conception of both Native and colonial identity. Finally, I argue that critics of Native literature have tended to idealize Native cultures, and that inter-Native mimetic violence offers a humanizing corrective to this perspective.

In her novel Tracks, Louise Erdrich tells the story of a band of Anishinaabe early in the twentieth century. Through the two narrators, one a tribal elder and the other a mixedblood who eventually abandons the traditions of the tribe, the novel offers two divergent perspectives of the events that take place as the government divests the tribe of its land. The conflicting perceptions of these occurrences, which are magical realist in nature, underscore the conflict within the tribe to maintain tradition in the face of the ever-increasing influence of European settlers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptions at odds with one another in order to shed new light on the significance of Erdrich’s use of magical realism in the text. Highlighting Erdrich’s engagement with magical realism, a largely postcolonial literary device, will hopefully expand notions of identity and authenticity within the Native American literary tradition.

<p>The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and legislation. I contend that, taken together, these works narrate an ecological vision of national affiliation: a concept of the nation as an ecological, natural zone of interdependence and its citizens (or non-citizen inhabitants) as members of this environmentally-conceptualized nation. This shared narrative of natural collectivity gives rise to what I call an "organic citizen" - the literary-political figure of an individual imagined to be a natural member of an ecological national body. I show that this concept of eco-citizenship both informs and is informed by contemporaneous concepts of indigeneity (what it means to be native) and by the actual political positioning of the American Indian in the U.S. citizenry throughout the century.</p><p>In five chapters, I argue that environmentalism is a site in which subjectivity is shaped, initially establishing modes of assimilative collectivity at the turn of the last century and later providing a realm in which the terms of subject affiliation may be analyzed and revised. I show how environmentalist discourse is profoundly connected to democratic practice and membership and how it formulates models of citizen collectivity. I contend that this discourse encompasses significantly more than a narrowly defined set of conservationist concerns for ecological entities, and can be used as a site of activism. Certain forms of stories - narratives that question these terms of national affiliation- expose the nuances of environmentalist thought. This type of storytelling offers a means through which environmentalist thought can become a realm of citizen engagement or activist possibility, opening access to and agency within a participatory democracy. An examination of this eco-narrative, I suggest, provides useful insights into how land use and rhetoric give definition to the way U.S. citizenship is socially imagined, legally adjudicated, and independently or communally practiced in a democratic system.</p><p>The first chapter examines the simultaneous emergence of wilderness narratives with the science of ecology and discourses concerned about national and geographical assimilation of communities and individuals of ethnic difference. I draw upon the writings of social reformers, particularly Jane Addams, ecologists Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederick Clements, and environmentalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Together, I argue they demonstrate how immigrant and impoverished subjects living in urban zones were rhetorically imagined and physically and metaphorically associated with natural entities. I contend that this literal naturalization makes immigrant presence less threatening to a national collective by converting these bodies and places into natural resources to be consumed for nationalist purposes. This version of citizenship imagines collectivity as a form of organicism, a process by which foreign subjects and non-citizens can be incorporated into a citizenry as natural resources while not necessarily legally constituted as citizens of the nation.</p><p>While the rhetoric surrounding land use began to take new political, constitutional and sociocultural form in the first wave of a formal environmental movement, there simultaneously was a dramatic jurisprudential shift in Indian status in the U.S. This chapter explores how the formulation of an "organic citizen" at the turn of the century draws upon circulating concepts of indigeneity. I bring together Indian reform policy, specifically the Dawes Allotment Act, environmental policy, particularly the Antiquities Act, and fictional writings by Mary Austin and George Bird Grinnell. These narratives demonstrate the consistency with which American Indians were imagined as organically connected to natural lands. I argue that the result is a concept of indigenous organicism that is predicated upon the Indian being publicly, although uncomfortably, imagined as a natural constituent of a citizenry and Indian land as a natural part of a national body. Chapter Three examines the fictional and political writings of Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman to consider how they use stories and their public roles to analyze the legal and discursive connections between an environmentalist sensibility and concepts of indigeneity. I contend that Eastman and Zitkala-Sa begin to use a language of rights and democracy within this eco-discourse as a way to insert the native as a rights-bearing citizen in the U.S. nation, putting forth a race analysis that ultimately disrupts the idea of ecological assimilation prevalent at the time. Reading their work alongside key environmental policies, like the Organic Act of 1916, Indian reforms, like the Citizenship Act of 1924, and Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House highlights the persistence of a concept of natural indigeneity that continued to be narrated even after American Indians are given legal citizenship. </p><p>Eastman's and Zitkala-Sa's use of the environmentalist/native link as a means for race critique falls out of environmentalist thought and practice in a critical moment of transition in the environmental movement. Their use of storytelling and sense of political right, however, lays the foundation for the type of environmental narrative that emerges with the second stage of the environmental movement. My fourth chapter shifts to this moment, focusing on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). I argue that both authors use an environmental narrative, particularly storytelling, as a means to imagine citizen engagement in a participatory democracy. However, while Leopold and Carson incorporate a language of political rights, they do not carefully factor into their versions of national/ecological belonging and action the ways in which race and class identities affect the social, political, and legal standing of various subjects within the eco-nation. </p><p>My final chapter explores how a race and class critique in environmentalist thought and politics returns in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I draw from significant legislation and Supreme Court opinions that explicitly defined the political rights of ecological objects and species, such as Sierra Club v. Morton, the Endangered Species Act, and a series of legal battles that emerged around the construction of the Tellico Dam, particularly the Cherokees' resistance to its development. These documents and cases deliberate over the political standing and rights of natural, non-human entities, but they circumnavigate engagement with questions of political standing for geographically and socially marginalized human citizens in the U.S., although this issue is implicitly present and strategically drawn upon in their arguments. This lost component takes shape and political articulation in the following emergence of the environmental justice movement. The politics of voice - "speaking for oneself" - that emerges particularly out of indigenous environmental justice movements highlights the use of storytelling as an activist practice. In their careful novelization of environmental activism, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) not only pinpoint the interconnections, but also the injustices that arise out of the way human and ecological subjectivities are legally and culturally constructed. I argue that both authors use the literary form to model how stories and the act of storytelling allow for the articulation of and/or resistance to certain terms of national affiliation. Both Hogan's and Ozeki's novels bring forth an expanded sense of environmentalism, showing that storytelling can redefine our roles as U.S. citizens and position ourselves as active agents in democratic discourse, policy-making and change. </p><p>We are living in another pivotal moment of environmentalist thought as new attention is given to the way environmental conditions are deteriorating and as popular culture begins to take interest in these issues. It is crucial that Literary Studies rigorously engage with these issues to examine the kinds of narratives being generated. While Ecocriticism and Native American Studies have remained somewhat marginalized from the core of Literary Studies, this project (particularly in this moment) argues that these types of criticism and theory have an imperative role to play in illuminating narratives of identity, nation, and citizenship.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation research explored how indigenous peoples have responded to increasing conservation and development pressures in Suriname using two case study communities. One, in West Suriname, faced a proposed protected area and large-scale mining operation on the communities' traditional lands. The other community, in East Suriname, has been involved in a long-term co-management arrangement over an existing protected area. Community responses to these protected areas and development projects were considered through the important influence of a national indigenous rights organization and its multi-scalar networks. A total of 68 in-depth interviews with indigenous community leaders, indigenous rights organization leaders, conservation NGO personnel, company, and government representatives were conducted over a period of 9 months. In addition, 13 documents including conference proceedings, editorials, letters, and presentations were collected and analyzed. Results showed that strategies in the form of scalar politics, information politics, accountability politics, and cultural politics that drew from international legal instruments, guidelines, and the larger indigenous rights movement were used. These strategies enhanced the power, knowledge, and negotiating ability of the communities and NGOs, leading to the eventual rejection of a protected area and a stronger role in the mining project. However, the larger goal of land rights for indigenous peoples in Suriname has not yet been realized, and remains the focal point of indigenous struggles there.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation explores the history of the Assemblies of God's Home Missions to American Indians, the development of an American Indian leadership in the denomination and the development of a Pentecostal Indian identity. The history that is told in this work is that of a century-long struggle by American Indian Pentecostals for autonomy, leadership, and recognition within the Assemblies of God. I argue that the AG's efforts to establish indigenous churches in its home missions work to American Indians bore two important and largely unanticipated consequences. The first was that it prompted American Indian Pentecostals to forge a new identity: fully Indian and fully Pentecostal. The second was that it forced white Pentecostals to own up to their belief in the indigenous principle: that God's Spirit fell equally on peoples, without regard to ethnicity or social standing. I focus mainly on giving voice to the Pentecostal Indian actors in this history, in order to fill in the gaps on a group of modern Pentecostal believers that were almost never written about in the histories of the movement.</p><p> I have rooted this work in the history of American religious history, as well as Native American history and the history of American Pentecostalism. The majority of the sources come from the Assemblies of God's archives, chiefly, ministerial files, Pentecostal periodicals, letters, tracts, meeting minutes, and self-published autobiographies.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Targeted U.S. domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples has been documented since the time of Custer (Deer 2010, Smith 2005, Smith 2003). According to a few, geographically specific studies this practice continues today (Juran, et al 2014, Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition 2011, Pierce and Minnesota Indian Women&rsquo;s Resource Center 2009). The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), it&rsquo;s subsequent reauthorizations and the Violence Against Women&rsquo;s Act (VAWA) 2013 reauthorization have encouraged activists in Indian Country, defined broadly, to believe that a change is possible within the system if they continue to raise the issue. But what if that strategy is flawed? Despite increasing awareness, it is clear that the United States policy environment has not yet experienced any significant change since the introduction of anti-trafficking law in 2000&mdash;especially for Native America. Using a tribal, feminist, critical race perspective alongside Native Nation (re)Building theory and a grounded, interdisciplinary focus, this study explores prominent public policy perceptions about how widespread the targeted domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples is in the United States. The first of its kind, this study reaches across broad geography and perspectives to locate synergies and ruptures that may also present opportunities for Native self-determination in creating effective Indian Country solutions. It also offers United States public policy suggestions helpful in addressing anti-trafficking legislative inefficiencies beyond Indian Country generally.</p>

The period from 1969 until 1973 represented the height of “Red Power” for American Indians. Pan-tribal activists participated in hundreds of demonstrations and dozens of militant takeovers demanding tribal sovereignty. The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was at the forefront of this period of direct action even though it continued to receive funding for educational programs and advocated reform through legal means. Operating under an entirely new leadership, the NIYC of the early 1970s resembled the Youth Council of the mid-1960s by continuing to balance indirect action and legal reform with direct action and militant language. But by the end of 1973, the Youth Council ceased supporting direct action as a legitimate tactic for pressuring social change. By 1973 it became clear that pan-tribal protests could quickly upset the gains that American Indians were making in federal reform. Wealthy benefactors funded the NIYC throughout the period, but they never overtly pushed the Youth Council into a more moderate direction. Instead, outside funding increased the NIYC’s operational space and allowed it to gain a modicum of power within the federal agency responsible for Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The NIYC found itself able to pressure the BIA into negotiating on a range of issues, and the NIYC developed allies that shared its goals and ideology within the agency. However, the NIYC’s continued ability to negotiate with the federal government was vulnerable to controversy, and the highly confrontational episodes led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) tended to upset the pace of reform within the federal government. AIM’s 1972 takeover of the BIA national headquarters and AIM’s 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee created setbacks for the NIYC even as the events garnered national attention and support. Moreover, the political climate became receptive to supporting the self-determination of tribal governments, and pan-tribal organizations like the NIYC had to shift their focus in the context of newly empowered tribes. Foundation support allowed the NIYC to help open the way for tribes to negotiate with the U.S. state directly, and this very success made pan-tribal demonstrations increasingly obsolete by the mid-1970s. / text

<p>The Central American population consists of a majority of indigenous people and the parties to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) must strive to protect the culture, heritage and rights of the region&rsquo;s people. Trade agreements must recognize the rights of the indigenous peoples that are affected by environmental degradation resulting from trade activities, which can result in the forceful removal of their lands. The balance between the three pillars of sustainable development must be struck because international trade is necessary by fueling much of the economic growth in the developed world. Public engagement of the indigenous people through participation, information, consultation and consent are necessary to fulfill the goals of sustainable development and protect their right to property and traditional lands. We have to continue to incorporate the objectives of sustainable development in free trade agreements in order to preserve the global environment for future generations. </p>