abstract: This thesis will examine the novels and poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), exploring how they are working to maintain, control, protect and develop their spiritual Indigenous identities. I link their literary work to Article 31.1, from the United Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which states that “Indigenous people have the right to maintain, control, and protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies, and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.” I argue that both Silko and Tapahonso create narratives and characters that illustrate how indigenous identity is self-determined and maintained through resistance to colonization and assimilation. I examine how these stories and characters incorporate new knowledge, about modern lifeways, into traditional Indigenous oral traditions and histories. Both Silko and Tapahonso connect nature and history, as they illustrate how oral traditions are passed down through the continual sharing of inter-generational stories and ethnobotanical information about plants, animals and food. This study will track how oral stories help the characters (re)connect with the land, and with foodways, by re-establishing a relationship of resistance against the exploitation, assimilation, and colonization of indigenous peoples, lands, and resources and the maintenance of spirituality through oral traditions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2016

This thesis employs Foucaultian and postcolonial theories to identify, discuss, and trouble discourses surrounding leadership styles in two communities in the Northwest Territories: the Town of Hay River and the nearby community of K'atlodeeche First Nation/Hay River Reserve. The thesis is composed of two papers. The first paper analyzes the tendency of lifeguards at the Hay River swimming pool to embody an authoritarian leadership style. Further, this paper discusses how an authoritarian leadership style can foster an unwelcoming environment for Aboriginal patrons. The second paper looks at Dene women's leadership in K'atlodeeche First Nation/Hay River Reserve's Summer Day Camp and discusses its impact on one particular Eurocanadian leader. Both papers shed light on the necessity for southern-based, Euro-Canadian recreation leaders to understand Aboriginal communities' practices and norms surrounding culturally appropriate ways of leading in order to plan and implement effective and inclusive programming.

<p> Wailaki, a Dene language of northwestern California, is known as what is referred to in academic literature and sources such as the <i>Ethnologue </i> as an &ldquo;extinct&rdquo; language. While Wailaki descendant people may remember an older generation of relatives who spoke Wailaki to one another, as far as is known, there are no people alive today who grew up speaking this language (Golla 2011:81). This term <i>extinct</i> used to describe such languages, however, does not reflect the desire of communities for languages to be spoken again, and the efforts many are taking towards language revitalization. Extinct conveys finality to language loss and shift; however, the term <i> sleeping</i> is today used to describe dormant languages with substantial documentation that may be spoken again (Leonard 2011). Wailaki is one such language. </p><p> For Wailaki, documentation exists; however, no detailed description of the language exists prior to this work. For any scholar and language learner interested in the language, published materials on related languages such as Hupa or Mattole are referenced in order to make sense of available Wailaki documentation. This dissertation puts forth a phonological, morphological, and limited syntactic description of Wailaki, which is a cover term, used by many tribal descendants, for a dialect continuum also known as Eel River Athabaskan/Dene (Golla 2011). </p><p> Chapter 1 gives background information regarding the people, the resources available for analysis. Chapter 2 is a description of phonological processes within the dialect continuum. Chapter 3 is a description of word classes in Wailaki, and what criteria and behavior (either morphological or syntactic) that may be given to delineate classes. Chapter 4 describes the verbal morphology, and Chapter 5 describes the nominal morphology. Chapter 6 titled Clitics and Syntax describes clitics that express categories such as tense, aspect or mode, or perform syntactic functions. In addition, Chapter 6 gives limited description of aspects of Wailaki syntax such as conjunctions, negation, question formation, and some discussion of word order.</p><p>

<p> This research focuses on the problem of how early pottery in New York State is defined and analyzed. Many traditional models suggest early pottery developed from an earlier steatite stone bowl technology. Thus far, studies that examine early pottery in the Northeast, called the Vinette Type Series, focus on the potential functions, archaeological contexts, and surface appearance of these vessels and fail to account for the social practices and technological choices inherent within these artifacts. This dissertation reevaluates early pottery using a non-typological approach. In the place of descriptive analysis, this research uses petrography, experimental geo-archaeology, and technical choice and agency theories to identify the different types of temper present in early ceramic vessels. This study also looks at the patterns of different technical choices made by early potters. The redefinition of early ceramic technology using post-modern theories allows the author to better understand the social practices involved in the rise of ceramic technology. The ceramic technological patterns identified are then compared with steatite stone bowl technology. This study concludes that early ceramic technology is more closely related to the practices of earth oven convection cooking than it is to any other cooking artifact. A reclassification of early ceramic fabrics is presented and the traditional early ceramic Vinette type categories are rejected.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

This paper is an investigation into appropriate forms of reparation to compensate survivors and descendants of survivors of Indian Residential Schools for loss of culture. Indian Residential Schools perpetrated serious individual abuses upon pupils; however, Aboriginal peoples as a group also sustained a serious harm -- an injury to their culture. Whereas tort law and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms have provided redress for individual losses, a group-oriented reparations solution is required to compensate for cultural loss. This paper will set out the historical record of the school policy, and investigate the nature of the loss, i.e. culture, and its intergenerational relationships. The methods by which common law courts have dealt with contemporary cultural loss claims will be outlined, as well as the reparations scheme that has been implemented by the Canadian government. After analyzing the legal and non-legal responses to claims for loss of culture, a legislative solution will be offered that aims to protect and promote Aboriginal culture as it stands in Canada today.

This dissertation investigates several topics in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the Nez Perce verb and verbal clause. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the morphological segmentation of the Nez Perce verb and on the semantic description of the verb and clause. Chapter 1 provides a grammar sketch. Chapter 2 discusses the morphology, syntax and semantics of verbal suffix complexes for tense, space, aspect and modality. Chapter 3 investigates the modal suffix o'qa, which is variously translated can, could (have), would (have), should, may, and must, and used to make circumstantial, deontic and counterfactual claims. I argue that this suffix has only a non-epistemic possibility meaning, and that apparent necessity meanings are artifacts of translation. Chapter 4 investigates the future suffix u', generally translated will. Based on evidence from truth-value judgment tasks, conjunctions of u' sentences describing incompatible states of affairs, and negation, I argue that u' sentences have non-modal truth conditions. I also discuss challenges to this analysis from free choice licensing and from certain acceptable conjunctions of incompatible u' sentences. The second part of the dissertation explores the syntax of the verb and clause as revealed by the system of case-marking. Nez Perce case follows a tripartite pattern, with no case on intransitive subjects, and both ergative and objective cases in transitive clauses. Transitive clauses may alternatively surface with no case, however. I show that caseless transitive clauses in Nez Perce come in two syntactically and semantically distinguished varieties. In one variety, the subject binds a possessor phrase within the object. Chapter 6 takes up this construction together with possessor raising, which I analyze as involving movement to a &thetas;-position. I argue that the absence of case under possessor-binding reflects an anaphor agreement effect. In the other variety of caseless clause, the object is a weak indefinite. Chapter 7 concludes that such objects are not full DPs. In chapter 8, I propose a morphological theory of case-marking which captures the cased/caseless distinction for transitive clauses. Both ergative and objective cases are analyzed as morphological results of the syntactic system of agreement.

Thisiinvestigation focuses on the decision making relative to plants by Native Americans on one of the oldest and most continuously occupied reservations in the United States, the Mashantucket Pequot Nation. Within an agency framework, I explore the directions in which decision making about plants were changing from 1675-1800 A.D. I evaluate plant macroremains, specifically progagules (seeds), recovered from ten archaeological sites and the historical record from the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, located in southeastern Connecticut. I demonstrate how decision making about plants related to food and medicinal practices during the Colonial Period were characterized by heterarchical choices that allowed the Mashantucket Pequot to retain their sense of economic and cultural autonomy from their colonizers. This type of problem-directed agency analysis will aid in placing Indigenous individuals and communities into the contexts of colonization as more active participants in their own past, and as long-term stewards of the environment. More specifically, this dissertation shows that even as small a space as the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation is a rich testimony to the 11,000-year history, and continues to provide important information about how households and communities (re)conceptualize their socio-natural worlds under the most severe constraints.

No description available.

No description available.