Thesis (D. Miss.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 156-164).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1972.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 10, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

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This dissertation examines Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the subsequent impact the organizers and march had on American politics. A handful of monographs have examined this march on Washington D.C. but all of them have focused specifically on the march itself, largely examining the few weeks in 1894 when the march occurred. By extending the period study to include the long life and activism of Jacob Coxey what historians can see is that although the march was an expression of anger and concern over general inequality in American society, Coxey’s Army was also protest for specific demands. These two demands were specifically a program of public works and a desire for fiat currency for the United States. By examining the life Jacob Coxey we see that both of these demands grew out of longer issues in American social politics and reflect Coxey’s background in the greenback labor movement.<br><div><br></div><div>The question over currency— whether the economy should rely on a gold, silver, or fiat standard— has largely been untouched by historians, yet reflects one of the most interesting aspects of the march, namely that it was an instance in a broader movement to drastically change the U.S. state and establish a socialistic commonwealth, or commonweal, for American society. Coxey fit into this broader project by arguing specifically that the U.S. should maintain a market-based economy but do so through a kind of socialistic currency backed by the state. By organizing various marches throughout his life, Coxey attempted to achieve this goal by direct organizing of the masses and in so doing contributed to the long history of American social reform movement’s various efforts to reshape and redefine the concept of “the people.”<br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation makes four major arguments. First that the concept and phenomena of American Populism is a broad based, elastic movement with no essential political character. Attempts to define Populism as either reactionary or radical miss the broader issue that Populism could take on various political flavors depending on how it positioned itself in opposition to various actors in the state, economy, and civil society. Second, Coxey’s Army shows how the first march on Washington D.C. was part of a longer legacy of direct political action, and that although this march did make a contribution to the overall political debate of the time, it was not as a communicative act that the march was most significant. Instead Coxey’s Army was significant in the way it led to a reconceptualization of “the people” and therefore reimagined what legitimate democratic action entailed. Third, the concept of the commonweal, although largely taken for granted in previous historiographies, was part of a much deeper and intellectually rich fight between various activists and thinkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At stake in how a movement or party conceptualized something like the commonweal was what type of social, economic, and political order should be fought for and advanced by organizations of working class people. In this regard the currency question, far from being simply a side issue, was in fact central to how activists envisioned the role of the market and state in a more equitable society. Finally, this dissertation looks at the understudied career of Coxey after the march, specifically his short tenure as mayor of Massillon, Ohio. His failure as mayor raises further questions for historians to think about the promise and limitations of American Populism as both a protest movement and political force.<br></div>

This thesis focuses primarily on Lakota concerns about the appropriation of their spirituality. The religious authority of the Lakota has been recognised by Native Americans and non- Natives alike through the books of Nicholas Black Elk, who witnessed the establishment of reservations in the Plains, the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre and the conversion of his people to Christianity, and through the teachings of his nephew Frank Fools Crow who kept the prohibited Lakota Sun Dance alive and other ceremonial practices until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) was passed by Congress in 1978. Not long after, elders from Lakota and other Plains Indian Nations became increasingly concerned about what they perceived to be the misuse of their ceremonies. In 1993, five hundred representatives of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota peoples endorsed the ‘Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality’, which primarily attacks the commodification of Lakota ceremonies by ‘pseudo-Indian charlatans’ and ‘new age wannabes’. Ten years later, a group of Lakota and neighbouring Plains Indian spiritual leaders supported the ‘Arvol Looking Horse Proclamation’ prohibiting all non-Native participation in Plains Indian ceremonies. Meanwhile, in academic institutions, several Native American scholars accused their non-Native colleagues of exploiting Native American communities, raising methodological questions connected to insider/outsider debates and research ethics in the study of Native American religious traditions. The thesis first examines the historical roots of the religious ‘war’ between Native Americans and non-Natives and analyses how the expropriation of Lakota ceremonies across tribal boundaries became the basis of a pan-Indian religion. By bringing together diverse indigenous peoples of North America as the ‘colonised’ against non-Native appropriators perceived as the ‘colonisers’, a tension developed between racial interpretations of ‘Native American’ based on blood quantum methods, established by the federal governments, and ‘traditional’ definitions where attitude and behaviour determines membership of the group. The main body of the thesis explores this tension in a variety of contexts: among the Lakota themselves, non-Native Americans accused of appropriating Lakota ceremonies, contemporary Mi’kmaq in eastern Canada who have employed Lakota and other Plains Indian ceremonial practices, and in the academy where ethnicity and ethics in the study of Native American religions are currently debated. The matter is further complicated by evidence illustrating that the Lakota have no centralised authority where traditional religious matters are concerned; however, Native Americans consistently refer to ‘protocols’ that define the way ceremonies are performed and the rules of participation, largely based on the Lakota model again, in particular where pan-Indian religion is present, such as at Mi’kmaq powwows, and in ceremonies where the pipe is smoked, such as the sweat lodge ceremony and vision quest, which have been appropriated extensively, often without the protocols, by non-Native Americans, including practitioners in Britain where some have altered the ceremonies to create a reconstituted British indigenous tradition. The attempt to restrict participation in Native American ceremonies according to ethnicity has not only created conflict between Native and non-Native peoples, but within Native communities as well. Nevertheless, the call for exclusivity has come after previous warnings about the misuse of ceremonies had been ignored. Therefore, the thesis examines Native American discourses about the breaking of ‘protocols’ as being at the heart of objections to the appropriation of Native American spirituality.

In Australia, we have not yet composed a literature of place in which the Australian geographies sing, so in this dissertation, the author goes travelling with some North American writers in their native landscapes, exploring the practice of landscape witness, of ecological imagination. They carry on there,looking for the ways in which the wild music of the land be discerned and expressed in words. He talks with them about the business of writing the life of places. He takes heed of the natural histories in which their works have arisen, looking for correlations between those physical terrains - the actual earth, the solid ground of their work - and the terrain of these writers' prose, wondering how the prose (and sometimes the poetry) may be said to be an expression of the place. This work, in a sense, is a natural history of six nature writers; it is an ecological imagining of their lives and works and places. Writing the Wild is a journey through the light, the wind, the rock, the water, sometimes the fire that makes the land that houses the writers who compose these lyrics of place. Most of what it learns about those writers, it learns from the places themselves. This dissertation takes landscapes seriously. It reads the works of these writers as though the landscapes of which and in which they write might be worthy of regard in understanding the terrain of their texts. It lets places show light on works of words composed within them. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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In recent decades, rates of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and diabetic complications have reached epidemic proportions among Canadian Aboriginal people. Evidence in several populations suggests that abnormal birth weight, particularly low birth weight (LBW) and possibly high birth weight (HBW) may be linked to the development of T2DM. LBW often reflects poor maternal health/ nutritional status which may interfere with normal pancreatic development. HBW is a frequent complication of diabetic pregnancies which are associated with obesity and carbohydrate intolerance in adulthood. Since Saskatchewan Aboriginal newborns historically had higher rates of LBW, and more recently have experienced higher HBW rates, it follows that sub-optimal maternal/ fetal health may be important in the epidemic of T2DM in this population.<p> This thesis describes a case-control study that used Saskatchewan Health databases to determine the relationship between birth weight and T2DM. A sample of 846 adult diabetic Registered Indians (RI) were age and sex matched to three control groups: 1) non-diabetic RI, 2) diabetic general population (GP) subjects, and 3) non-diabetic GP subjects. RI subjects were identified as such by the provincial Health Insurance Registration File.<p> The results of this study show a significant association between HBW (> 4000 grams) and T2DM for RI people [odds ratio (OR) 1.63; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.20, 2.24]. This association increased in strength from the middle to the latter part of this century and was found to be stronger for RI females than RI males. The comparison of birth weights within the four study groups revealed that diabetic RI (16.2%) were significantly more likely (p<0.05) than controls (10.7%,10.0%, 7.5% respectively) to have HBW. An association between LBW and T2DM (< 2500 grams) was not evident within either RI or GP sample populations.<p> The findings of this study support the hypothesis that HBW and its causes may be risk factors for T2DM among RI people. Programs to prevent gestational diabetes, and to diagnose and optimally manage diabetes during pregnancy could help to reduce rates of diabetes in future generations of Aboriginal peoples.

“Ambassadors of Pleasure” examines the social and cultural history of ‘sin’ in the Detroit-Windsor border region during the post-World War II period. It employs the interrelated frameworks of “borderlands” and “vice” in order to identify the complex ways in which illicit economies shaped—and were shaped by—these border cities. It argues that illicit economies served multiple purposes for members of local borderlands communities. For many downtown residents, vice industries provided important forms of leisure, labor, and diversion in cities undergoing rapid changes. Deeply rooted in local working-class communities, prostitution and heroin economies became intimately intertwined in the daily lives of many local residents who relied on them for both entertainment and income. For others, though, anti-vice activities offered a concrete way to engage in what they perceived as community betterment. Fighting the immoral influences of prostitution and drug use was one way some residents, particularly those of the middle class, worked to improve their local communities in seemingly tangible ways. These struggles for control over vice economies highlight the ways in which shifting meanings of race, class, and gender, growing divisions between urban centers and suburban regions, and debates over the meaning of citizenship evolved in the urban borderland. This dissertation subsequently traces the competing interests brought together through illicit vice activities, arguing that they provide unique insight into the fracturing social lines developing in the postwar North American cities.