This thesis investigates the politics of representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian media. Using a case study of the 2011 housing crisis at Attawapiskat First Nation, I argue that emergency on reserve is constructed as Indigenous failure in mainstream print media and that these discourses work to construct a racialized national imaginary. Canadians are produced as benevolent through learning about Indigenous failure, and through their own capacity to assist and care for them. I have argued that this is a nation building practice of settler colonialism; it is inextricably linked to reclaiming ownership of land, and manufacturing legitimacy for the Canadian nation. This thesis traces these constructions through both mainstream, and alternative and independent media, and follows how these discourses invite white Settlers into a position of racial superiority. Examining ideas of goodness and innocence that condition Canadian identity, I offer strategies and limitations for anti-colonial engagement with Indigenous emergency.

This thesis investigates the politics of representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian media. Using a case study of the 2011 housing crisis at Attawapiskat First Nation, I argue that emergency on reserve is constructed as Indigenous failure in mainstream print media and that these discourses work to construct a racialized national imaginary. Canadians are produced as benevolent through learning about Indigenous failure, and through their own capacity to assist and care for them. I have argued that this is a nation building practice of settler colonialism; it is inextricably linked to reclaiming ownership of land, and manufacturing legitimacy for the Canadian nation. This thesis traces these constructions through both mainstream, and alternative and independent media, and follows how these discourses invite white Settlers into a position of racial superiority. Examining ideas of goodness and innocence that condition Canadian identity, I offer strategies and limitations for anti-colonial engagement with Indigenous emergency.

My dissertation provides an epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism in terms of settlers’ disavowal of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. I seek to explain how settlers can fail to hear Indigenous testimonies in ways that disrupt structural inequality and challenge settler colonial legitimacy. This theoretical consideration of settler ignorance reveals how the elimination of Indigenous peoples requires the delegitimatization of Indigenous peoples as knowers. This insight is crucial in evaluating contemporary governmental apologies and truth commissions aimed at reconciliation. In particular, I focus on the epistemic assumptions that do not challenge what I call ‘settler ignorance’ and so do not transform settler nation-myths that disavow past and present settler colonialism. My epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism demonstrates how the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the realm of reason, what I call their ‘epistemic elimination,’ is not accidental, but integral to the settler colonial project of eliminating Indigenous presence. Using this characterization of settler ignorance, I evaluate the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in terms of its ability to accomplish its mandate of “establishing and maintaining respectful relationships” between Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians. I conclude that the TRC fails on its own terms because it does not challenge epistemic assumptions that prevent testimonies of residential school survivors to be heard as expressions of Indigenous refusal of settler authority. Without challenging these epistemic assumptions, testimonies cannot disrupt structural settler ignorance and so, cannot lead to meaningful reconciliation. Meaningful reconciliation requires of settlers a reparative transformation of epistemic assumptions that work to maintain a structural ignorance of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. The goal of what I call ‘reparative knowing’ is both a personal one and a critical intervention into how settlers can become epistemically responsible agents. In the context of ongoing settler colonial violence, reparative knowing involves a troubling of settler common sense, and so, a disruption of structural settler ignorance. Without such an understanding of settler ignorance and reparative knowing, an investigation into the aims and transformations of settler colonialism would remain incomplete.

Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report in 2015, there has been a political and societal focus on the atrocities that occurred in residential schools. The abuse, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide of Indigenous children through the residential school system has become the main focus for many settlers in Canada. However, focusing our attention on the most heinous acts alone can obfuscate manifestations of Indigenous regulation and oppression that are subtler or more covert. This project takes a genealogical approach to allow for the exposure of naturalized settler colonial logics, while also placing residential schools within a continuum of Indigenous regulation and oppression. This project uses Foucault’s concepts of power (disciplinary power, biopower, governmentality) and contemporary colonial concepts of recognition and accommodation to uncover the governmental technologies used within the residential school system and the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections. This project challenges the progression fallacy which states our current epoch is more ethical than any other that came before by arguing the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence that justified the creation of residential schools still exist today. This project examines the Correctional Service of Canada’s approach to Indigenous corrections as a contemporary illustration of how the political rationalities of Western superiority and settler colonial benevolence not only serve as justifications for harmful policies, programs, and initiatives, but also aid in the production of new Indigenous subjects and populations. Although the manifestations of Indigenous oppression have changed throughout time, the political rationalities that underpin them have stayed the same.

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Although rarely included in environmental sociology, settler colonialism significantly structures eco-social relations within the United States. This work considers the range of environmental practices and epistemologies influenced by settler colonial impositions in law, culture and discourse. In this dissertation I also introduce the term colonial ecological violence as a framework for considering the outcomes of this structuring in terms of the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous peoples and communities. / 2020-09-06

Thesis advisor: William Gamson / Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / This dissertation examines Internal Colonialism Theory's importance to a comprehensive understanding of the oppression of African Americans still living in USA ghettos. It briefly explores the180 year history of Black activist depictions of a "nation within a nation," the impact of the depression-era Marxist notion of a Negro nation, Latin American influences on Robert Blauner, and the pervasive effect of international anti-colonialism and the Black Power Movement upon the development of American academic Internal Colonialism Theory. This appraisal evaluates Blauner's seminal presentation, Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt, and the major contributions of Robert L. Allen and Mario Barrera in analyzing African American and Chicano internal colonial experiences respectively. It re-assesses colonialism and moves beyond Eurocentric characterizations to elaborate a Continuum of Colonialism, including direct, indirect, external, internal, and "end of" colonialisms. This analysis addresses the contradiction that the American Revolution supposedly decolonized America without improving colonized conditions for African Americans or Native Americans, and defines internal colonialism as geographically based, disagreeing with the prevailing interpretation which contemplates the existence of diasporic African America as one collective colony. While summarizing the USA's course from settler colony system to today's inner cities of the colonized, this investigation explores African American class formation utilizing a variation of Marable's conception of Racial Domains as historical context through to the present. With the majority of African Americans in ghettos [internal colonies] scattered around the USA, this document outlines the positive and negative means of ending internal colonial situations within the contemporary USA. While elaborating how Internal Colonialism Theory quite practically fits harmoniously within several differing conceptualizations of American and global racial relations, this perspective offers a framework for more rigorous future discussions and debates about Internal Colonialism Theory, and previews three major international populations to which this assessment of Internal Colonialism Theory can be extended. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

This thesis explores the role of authority and how Indigenous people have been gravely impacted throughout the 2014 Mount Polley Mine Disaster. Through critical engagement of political theory, environmental racism, and Indigenous Nationhood, I offer an analysis of the disaster that asks: How do we construct, accept, and uphold notions of authority in the Mount Polley Mine Disaster? I answer this by conducting a discourse analysis informed by Kwakwaka’wakw geographer Sarah Hunt’s colonialscape, Environmental historian Traci Brynne Voyles’s wastelanding, and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s spatiolegal concepts of the state of exception and bare life. To conclude, I will provide an alternative understanding of authority that is grounded in Indigenous feminist approaches that can better represent what authority should look like. / Graduate / 2020-08-29

Stories about aborigines in a settler society, especially stories about aboriginal maidens and settler men, tend to become national allegories. Initially, the aboriginal maiden is a figure for colonial landscapes and resources, while later, in her conversion in fact or fiction from aboriginal to settler, she helps build national identity. Yet after being romanced, the aboriginal maiden’s fate is to disappear from settler consciousness, because she is displaced by the national settler mother or because the settler loses interest in her, only to return in abjection to haunt the settler conscience. In her return as a prostitute, a commodified bride or a ghost, she disturbs the discourse of ‘national domestication’, the notion of nation as family. Though she returns in abjection, an Amazonian association tends to linger in the person of the aboriginal maiden, an association that suggests the kind of self-empowerment on which a healthy liberal society depends. In other words, the figure of the aboriginal maiden tends to be used in the construction, the contestation, and potentially the reconstruction of national identity in a settler society. While I discuss examples from settler societies around the world, particularly the story of Pocahontas, and try to contribute to ‘settler colonial discourse studies’, I focus on postwar Taiwan. This dissertation proposes the notions of the ‘settler society’ and the Habermasian public sphere as ‘frames’ for the study of Taiwanese literature. I show how the Formosan aboriginal maiden has been appropriated for the construction and critique of both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms. I argue that while nationalism is partly about social control and the advancement of particular interests, writers who have romanced the Formosan aborigine have been implicitly participating in a debate about national domestication, the telos of which is the democratic imagination of a good society, one in which the Formosan aborigines will feel in some sense ‘at home’, though perhaps not as members of the ‘national family’. Finally, under the rubric of ‘alternative aboriginal modernities’, I discuss stories that reread the romance of the Formosan aborigine by aboriginal writers who have entered the national debate.

Stories about aborigines in a settler society, especially stories about aboriginal maidens and settler men, tend to become national allegories. Initially, the aboriginal maiden is a figure for colonial landscapes and resources, while later, in her conversion in fact or fiction from aboriginal to settler, she helps build national identity. Yet after being romanced, the aboriginal maiden’s fate is to disappear from settler consciousness, because she is displaced by the national settler mother or because the settler loses interest in her, only to return in abjection to haunt the settler conscience. In her return as a prostitute, a commodified bride or a ghost, she disturbs the discourse of ‘national domestication’, the notion of nation as family. Though she returns in abjection, an Amazonian association tends to linger in the person of the aboriginal maiden, an association that suggests the kind of self-empowerment on which a healthy liberal society depends. In other words, the figure of the aboriginal maiden tends to be used in the construction, the contestation, and potentially the reconstruction of national identity in a settler society. While I discuss examples from settler societies around the world, particularly the story of Pocahontas, and try to contribute to ‘settler colonial discourse studies’, I focus on postwar Taiwan. This dissertation proposes the notions of the ‘settler society’ and the Habermasian public sphere as ‘frames’ for the study of Taiwanese literature. I show how the Formosan aboriginal maiden has been appropriated for the construction and critique of both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalisms. I argue that while nationalism is partly about social control and the advancement of particular interests, writers who have romanced the Formosan aborigine have been implicitly participating in a debate about national domestication, the telos of which is the democratic imagination of a good society, one in which the Formosan aborigines will feel in some sense ‘at home’, though perhaps not as members of the ‘national family’. Finally, under the rubric of ‘alternative aboriginal modernities’, I discuss stories that reread the romance of the Formosan aborigine by aboriginal writers who have entered the national debate.