This thesis focuses on the interrelationship between Canadian colonial histories and Indigenous healing. I begin by problematising how colonialism is invoked in contemporary scholarship on Aboriginal health and healing, and arguing for more precise historical methods and a more relational understanding of colonial processes. Historicising Indigenous agency is integral to this analysis. Whilst colonial continuities in contemporary Canadian public policy discourse is an important theme, I also attend to social movements, institutions, professions, and political and economic forces beyond the state. Indigenous healing as a socio-political movement itself has a history dating at least to the late 1960s. Urban Indigenous healing discourse is characterised by linking present-day suffering to collective historical losses, and valorizing the reclamation of Indigenous identity, knowledge and social relations. Drawing on urban Indigenous social histories from Kenora and Toronto, I consider the urban healing movement as an example of Indigenous resistance influenced by the international decolonization and North American Red Power movements, but which over time has also engaged with dominant institutions, professions, policies, and discourses, such as the concept of trauma. My analysis considers professionals and patients invoking historical trauma as political agents, both responding to and participating in broader shifts in the moral economy. These shifts have created the conditions of possibility for public victimhood to become a viable strategy for attracting attention and resources to suffering and injustice. The thesis highlights the centrality and complexity of self-determination in urban Indigenous healing, drawing on historical and ethnographic analysis from three southern Ontario cities. I analyse how the liberal multiculturalism paradigm dominant in health policy and health care settings contributes to mental health professionals’ failure to recognise Aboriginal clients and issues. I argue that characterising pan-Aboriginal and ethno-national healing as approaches in opposition to one another produces an insufficiently nuanced analysis in the context of urban Indigenous subjectivities and social relations, where both approaches are valuable for different reasons. The thesis urges greater attention to the role of languages and local histories, and to the threat which dominant policy discourses on residential schools and mental health pose to the maintenance of distinct ethno-national histories, epistemologies and traditions in urban Indigenous healing.

This thesis focuses on the interrelationship between Canadian colonial histories and Indigenous healing. I begin by problematising how colonialism is invoked in contemporary scholarship on Aboriginal health and healing, and arguing for more precise historical methods and a more relational understanding of colonial processes. Historicising Indigenous agency is integral to this analysis. Whilst colonial continuities in contemporary Canadian public policy discourse is an important theme, I also attend to social movements, institutions, professions, and political and economic forces beyond the state. Indigenous healing as a socio-political movement itself has a history dating at least to the late 1960s. Urban Indigenous healing discourse is characterised by linking present-day suffering to collective historical losses, and valorizing the reclamation of Indigenous identity, knowledge and social relations. Drawing on urban Indigenous social histories from Kenora and Toronto, I consider the urban healing movement as an example of Indigenous resistance influenced by the international decolonization and North American Red Power movements, but which over time has also engaged with dominant institutions, professions, policies, and discourses, such as the concept of trauma. My analysis considers professionals and patients invoking historical trauma as political agents, both responding to and participating in broader shifts in the moral economy. These shifts have created the conditions of possibility for public victimhood to become a viable strategy for attracting attention and resources to suffering and injustice. The thesis highlights the centrality and complexity of self-determination in urban Indigenous healing, drawing on historical and ethnographic analysis from three southern Ontario cities. I analyse how the liberal multiculturalism paradigm dominant in health policy and health care settings contributes to mental health professionals’ failure to recognise Aboriginal clients and issues. I argue that characterising pan-Aboriginal and ethno-national healing as approaches in opposition to one another produces an insufficiently nuanced analysis in the context of urban Indigenous subjectivities and social relations, where both approaches are valuable for different reasons. The thesis urges greater attention to the role of languages and local histories, and to the threat which dominant policy discourses on residential schools and mental health pose to the maintenance of distinct ethno-national histories, epistemologies and traditions in urban Indigenous healing.

The thesis examines the political development in Southern Rhodesia 1960-1962 when two processes, the 1961 Constitutional process and the 1962 General Election, had far-reaching consequences for the coming twenty years. It builds on a hypothesis that the Constitutional process led to a radicalisation of all groups, the white minority, the African majority and the colonial power. The main research question is why the ruling party, United Federal Party (UFP) after winning the referendum on a new Constitution with a wide margin could lose the ensuing election one year later to the party, Rhodesian Front (RF) opposing the constitution. The examination is based on material from debates in the Legal Assembly and House of Commons (UK), minutes of meetings, newspaper articles, election material etc. The hypothesis that the Constitutional process led to a radicalization of the main actors was partly confirmed. The process led to a focus on racial issues in the ensuing election. Among the white minority UFP attempted to develop a policy of continued white domination while making constitutional concessions to Africans in order to attract the African middle class. When UFP pressed on with multiracial structural reforms the electorate switched to the racist RF which was considered bearer of the dominant settler ideology. Among the African majority the well educated African middleclass who led the Nationalist movement, changed from multiracial reformists in late 1950‟s to majority rule advocates. After rejecting the 1961 Constitution they anew changed from constitutional reformists to supporter of an armed struggle. Britain‘s role was ambivalent trying to please all actors, the Southern Rhodesian whites and Africans but also the international opinion. However, it seems to have been its own neo colonial interests that finally determined their position and its fault in the move towards Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the civil war was huge. On the main research question the analysis points to two reasons. Firstly, the decision by the Nationalists to boycott the election and the heavy-handed actions they took to achieve this goal created a white back-lash against the ruling party and the loss of the second vote advantage. Secondly, when the ruling party decided to make the repeal of the Land Apportionment Act a key election issue they lost not only indifferent voters but also a major part of its normal electorate. They threatened the Settler State‟s way of life for the white minority.

<p>This dissertation argues that the literary, intellectual, and cultural borders of Victorian Britain extended as far as Australia and New Zealand, and that the tradition of nation-based literary criticism inherited from the Victorians has blinded Victorian Studies to that possibility. Building upon the nineteenth century concept of "Greater Britain," a term invoking the expansion of the British nation through settler colonization, I demonstrate that literary forms did not simply diffuse from the core to the periphery of the empire, but instead were able to circulate within the space of Greater Britain. That process of circulation shaped Victorian literature and culture, as local colonial circumstances led writers to modify literary forms and knowledge formations; those modifications were then able to be further disseminated through the empire by way of the networks that constituted Greater Britain.</p><p>My argument focuses on the novel, because its formal allegiance to the imagined national community made it a valuable testing ground for the multi-centered nation that was being formed by settlement. I specifically locate the Victorian novel in the context of Britain's relations with the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, which were unique in that their transition from initial settlement to independent nations occurred almost entirely during the Victorian period. The chapters of <italic>Unsettled Nation</italic> focus on realism, romance and political economy's interest in settlement; the bildungsroman and theories of discipline developed in the penal colonies; the theorization of imperial spatiality in utopian and invasion fiction; and the legacy of the Waverley novel in the portrayal of colonization in temporal terms. Each chapter presents a specific example of how knowledge formations and literary forms were modified as a result of their circulation through the archipelagic nation space of Greater Britain.</p><p>Working at the intersection between Victorian Studies and Australian and New Zealand literary criticism, I seek to recover and reconsider the geographical mobility of nineteenth century Britons and their literature. Thus, more than merely trying to cast light on a dimension of imperialism largely ignored by critics of Victorian literature, I use the specific example of Australasia to make the broader claim that the very idea of Victorian Britain can and must be profitably expanded to include its settler colonies.</p> / Dissertation

Drawing on everyday encounters from a three year collaborative research project with young children and early childhood educators in British Columbia, Canada, the manuscripts contained in this dissertation craft and put to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. This work critically engages with the question of what attention to Indigenous presences, to ongoing colonialisms, and to human/more-than-human entanglements, in everyday pedagogical encounters might do towards enacting anti-colonial early childhood pedagogies. My particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that I inhabit with children and educators. In the first manuscript, enacting figurations of witnessing, I map the complexities of my role as a pedagogista, early childhood educator, and researcher; situating myself as an embodied and implicated presence within the research and pedagogical practices from which this dissertation is assembled. In the second manuscript, I articulate refiguring presences as an anti-colonial methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings. In the third manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences through a series of interruptive stories that attend to Indigenous relationalities, human-non-human entanglements and the settler colonial tensions that come together in the making of a mountain forest that I regularly visit with children and educators. In the fourth manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences to pay attention to everyday encounters with a community garden. I experiment with orientations that bring attention to messy historical relations and that attend to the vitalities of specific plant and animal worlds. I discuss the interruptive effects of this noticing in generating politicized dialogues with this place, where more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) disrupt and subvert colonial impositions of control, belonging and order. / Graduate

On April 1, 2011, the Maa-nulth Treaty went into effect. Negotiated between five First Nations, the province of British Columbia and Canada, the Treaty concerned territories never before ceded on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This study utilizes the Treaty as a point of departure to explore contemporary Indigenous-Settler relations. Using digital storytelling, youth from one of the five signatory First Nations identified their priorities for their Nation in a post-Treaty era. These stories are contrasted with a discourse analysis of mainstream media coverage surrounding the Treaty and a survey of local (mainly Settler) residents’ perceptions to explore dominant perspectives pertaining to this comprehensive land claims agreement. While youths’ ideas for the future were anchored to their Indigenous cultural identity, albeit integrating technology and novel art forms, Settlers’ perspectives remained statically centered upon ill-informed strains of colonial thought premised upon socio-political and economic stereotypes. Colonialism continues to be (re)produced structurally and individually; these findings point to the need for Settlers to engage in their own processes of decolonization.

This thesis probes the ways in which land-based and bodily violence inform contemporary North American Indigenous poetry. Since the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, English-speaking North American Indigenous writers have produced a substantial body of poetry that has significant implications in forwarding national sovereignty struggles. Gender violence enabled settler colonial land appropriation; resource exploitation also harmed Indigenous bodies. This project considers the ways in which Indigenous authors with diverse geographic, cultural and embodied experiences employ common strategies toward using poetry as an emancipatory tool. A poem is both whole, and a fragment of a larger body of work; engaging with the works of individual poets, and multi-authored anthologies allows for varied readings of the same poems and their engagements with the project’s key themes of homeland and embodiment. This paper is informed by the reading of many Indigenous theorists and poets, and aligns with an Indigenous-feminist critique that suggests that nationalist sovereignty struggles are meaningless as long as bodily violence against Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people is still prevalent. As such, contemporary struggles for reclaiming Indigenous lands must also be struggles toward a sovereign erotic, sovereignty over one’s sexuality and gender identity. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-12 03:07:52.957

In Canada, progress towards reconciliation with Aboriginal Peoples has been slow, in part because of a lack of emphasis on interpersonal reconciliation—changes in the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Physical distance, prejudicial public discourses, and insufficient, ineffective education for the public pose barriers to renewed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal Peoples. Drawing from transformative learning theory and pedagogy for the privileged, this narrative inquiry examines critical events in the lives of eight white settlers living in Mi’kmaw territory in Nova Scotia. The study uncovers factors which have prompted some Euro-Canadians to take up their responsibility for reconciliation and enabled them to stand as allies with the Mi’kmaq. The transformation process in settler allies was catalyzed by a combination of personal, intrinsic, and extrinsic events. New relationships between settlers and the Mi’kmaq were founded around shared interests or goals, and friendships provided an important foundation for learning. Hearing the personal stories of Mi’kmaw people challenged stereotypes and misinformation about Aboriginal Peoples. Settlers’ learning was further supported by immersion in Mi’kmaw communities or contexts, time spent on the land, and mentoring by Mi’kmaw people. Allies reported that the satisfaction they derived from relationships with Mi’kmaw people as well as a desire to do good and see justice done sustained these relationships over the longer term. The study suggests that a lengthy period of awareness raising and confidence building followed by opportunities for informal, experiential learning and face-to-face interactions are key elements in settler decolonization.

The recent popularity of mass-market New Zealand historical fiction coincides with the increasing vocality of particular cultural discourses that resist the influence of revisionist histories on dominant understandings of national identity. This thesis examines how the depiction of colonial history in four such novels legitimates and sustains hegemonic understandings of New Zealand as culturally European. The novels analysed are The Denniston Rose (2003) by Jenny Pattrick, Tamar (2002) by Deborah Challinor, The Cost of Courage (2003) by Carol Thomas, and The Love Apple (2005) by Coral Atkinson. The cultural context in which these books have been produced is situated within a history of nationalist discourses and Raymond Williams’s theorisation of hegemonic cultural processes is employed to explain how contemporary national culture continues to rely on colonial principles that sustain settler cultural dominance. Close analysis of the temporal and geographical settings of the novels reveals how the portrayal of history in these novels evades colonial conquest and the Māori cultural presence. A comparison of the historical and contemporary cultural significance of the spatial settings employed in these novels – the wilderness, pastoral, and colonial urban spaces – highlights how these settings tacitly communicate that New Zealand is culturally European. Nevertheless, the problematic cultural legacies of colonialism still haunt these novels. The way in which the narratives resolve these issues reveals that hegemonic New Zealand identity is reliant on a dehistoricised view of settlement and therefore perpetually vulnerable to the intrusion of Māori memory.

From 1839 to 1873 New Zealand was characterised by ideological, religious, economic cultural and social contest. This struggle to order a new society, in which colonists and indigenes were required to co-exist, is captured in the newspapers of the day. These document and attest to a contest over power; power to appropriate and control resources, power to administer, control and institutionalize the colony, and power to ascribe identities. Newspapers published during the initial period of colonization in New Zealand are saturated with instances of ideological work where discourses were deployed that supported the colonial endeavour. In this study therefore I have sought to understand and articulate those racial ideologies, racial formations, and discourses, which emerged from New Zealand’s colonial press archives. How did New Zealand’s colonial press constitute the privileges, entitlements and struggles of the white British colonist in relation to the native? What white British colonial ideologies, discursive formations and discourses can be identified in the colonial press in relation to the native? Are there any patterns or relationships between these discourses? What did these discourses look like over time? A critical discourse analytical approach has been applied to a body of texts extracted from newspapers published in New Zealand between 1839 and 1873. From this analysis three broad discursive formations have been apprehended; the discourses of sovereignty, discipline and paternalism respectively. These discourses were not independent of one another but worked to construct an interlocking network of discourse that provided sound ideological coverage. The discourse of sovereignty provided a broad platform for working out the colony’s ideological and institutional plan; discourses of discipline discursively managed native disruptions to the plan, while discourses of paternalism invested the colonial project with affectations of concern and interest in the progress of the native. Weaving through these discourses are patterns of meaning which worked to constitute white British colonial authority in economic, political, judicial, social, martial and moral affairs. These constitutive repertoires were malleable and adaptable and attached and detached themselves, according to the context, to and from the discourses of sovereignty, discipline and paternalism. Over time it appears that these discourses and the associated patterns of meaning worked responsively and flexibly, bleeding into each other, reconstituting authority and identity across different contexts. Furthermore, these discourses and patterns attest to a complex encounter with a vociferous non-white challenge, which necessitated a flexible reservoir of rhetoric to situate and position the white British colonial incursion favourably in the white settler public arena.