Settler colonial history underlies much of contemporary industry, including the extraction and transportation of crude oil. It presents itself in a variety of contexts; however, this disquisition applies a traditional Marxist perspective to examine how settler colonialism is present in news media representation of American Indian activists during the Dakota Access Pipeline protest. Rather than focus on the benefit of using colonized labor for financial gain, this disquisition pushes Marxism into settler colonialism in which the goal is to eliminate the Indigenous and continue to widen the gap between social classes. This research is important for two reasons. First, the media are powerful, making it the perfect vehicle to disseminate inaccurate representations of American Indians. These incorrect representations come in the form of media frames that created an altered reality for news audiences. Second, the term settler colonialism, in particular its relationship with American Indian protest, has been little studied in the American field of communication. A comparative qualitative content analysis was applied to media artifacts from the protest that occurred in North Dakota. Artifacts were discovered using a constructed week approach of two online versions of print publications—the Bismarck (ND) Tribune and the New York Times—and one digital only news site, Indian Country Today. One hundred twenty four artifacts were examined in total. Five dominant frames emerged from the analysis: blame, cultural value, water, American Indian stereotypes, and confrontation. These frames were considered dominant due to the number of coded excerpts that appeared in at least 20% of the artifacts. The frames either contribute to or resist settler colonialism based on the publication in which it appears. The Bismarck Tribune contributed the most to settler colonialism; the New York Times neither rejected nor acknowledged it while Indian Country Today resisted through recognition of America’s settler colonial past, sovereignty, and government-directed violence. The implication of this research is that elimination of the American Indian is ubiquitous in American news media. The mainstream media contributes to widening the gap between social classes, ensuring the dominant class stays in power and Indigenous issues are ignored.

Indigenous autonomy, self-government and self-determination have historically been an area of conflict within the settler colonial state of Canada. This thesis aims to analyze critically the Canadian state’s alleged progressive nature in regard to nation-to-nation relations as well as the discourses that portray Canadian society as fostering Indigenous rights. Grounded in previous research and contextual background, this study uses the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) to investigate how Canadian media produces and reproduces discourse around the issues connected with Indigenous resistance since the ‘Oka Crisis’ of 1990, based on the selected material published by The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The findings illustrate that while liberal-influenced narratives have improved, significant identification of decolonization within Canada’s media was not found and the structures of settler colonialism remain largely unchanged.

This research is inspired by Albert Memmi’s paradox of the colonizer who refuses, yet remains the colonizer, complicit in colonial structures. It is explorative, qualitative, speculative and possibility orientated. It utilizes a Critical Disability Theory (CDT) lens to seek out confluences with Indigenous Resurgence, decolonial actions and reconciliation praxis. It explores the concept of Everyday Acts as being applicable for resurgence projects and non-indigenous solidarity and reconciliation practices that center Indigenous self-determination and land and water based lifeways as paramount to ecological justice. The research design is phenomenological, embodied and transformative. It endeavours to explore some of the more nuanced pockets of possibility for emergent ally-ship, and solidarity within the context of the settler who refuses through engaging with Access Intimacy, symbiosis/solidarity, gifting economy, failure as praxis, and relationship building. It does this through a thematic literature review, an interview and the idea of email essays as Life Writing. Interview and Email essays are offered as phenomenological life writings from four Collaborators, that share personal insights and stories conveying everyday experiences of accountability, responsibility, community care, community engagement, intergenerationality, embodiment, disability, collaboration, friendship and everyday acts. In concentrating on the smaller felt spaces of engagement, this modest research project hopes to bring insight and awareness to how small conscientious intergenerational everyday acts of solidarity can catalyze meaningful change and the possibility of transformation. To conclude, the research offers a discussion and some recommendations for future research. / Graduate / 2023-04-14

No description available.

As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen Indigenous lands animate liberal and radical food system politics. The dissertation presents my ethnographic fieldwork in South Puget Sound over a period of 18 months with two related Coast Salish food sovereignty projects that brought Indigenous and settler food actors into weedy collaborations. One was a curriculum development project for Native and regional youth focused on the revitalization of Coast Salish plant landscapes, knowledge, pedagogies, and systems of reciprocity. The other was a campaign to counter the introduction of genetically engineered salmon into US food markets and coastal production facilities across the Western Hemisphere, which I situate within longstanding salmon-centered social and political struggles in Coast Salish territories in the context of Indigenous/settler-state relations. Throughout these engagements, I identified how multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist food movement frameworks share in common with neoliberal nature privatization schemes modes of disavowing the geopolitics of Indigenous sovereignty within the US settler state. The research reveals patterns in how Coast Salish food actors push back against the ways settler food actors are plugged into settler colonial governmentality. These insights, in turn, helped to make legible how inherited liberal mythologies of the nation-state and legal orders rooted in the doctrine of terra nulliuslimit the stakes of food system work in terms of inclusion and equality, and miss their collusion with structures that unmake the human-land relationships that Coast Salish people define as existential and (geo)political. In my analysis, I engage Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism to complicate Marxian, Deleuzian, and Foucauldian analyses of North American alternative food politics, while doubling back to consider the ways the disavowal of ongoing Indigenous dispossession functions across these literatures and the social practices they influence, ultimately to consider how food-centered scholarship, environmentalism, and politics in North America stand to be transformed by what I argue is a Coast Salish ‘politics of refusal’. This project is unique in attending to how settler colonial theory, Indigenous critical theory, and Indigenous politics in North America enrich and complicate the literatures provincializing the Nature-Culture divide, as well as a largely Marxian and antiracist critical food studies literature. It contributes to settler colonial studies as a project of redefinition for the study of US politics and society while specifically bringing that interdisciplinary project into the ambit of North American critical food studies scholarship.

No description available.

The study examines the contestations and conflicts over land access between smallholder settler farmers and nomadic cattle herders in the Kwahu Afram Plains South District. Current studies on the farmer-herder conflict in Ghana have emphasised the conflict between indigenous farmers and nomadic herders. This study has contributed to existing knowledge by highlighting the conflict between two migrant groups. As migrants, both settler farmers and nomadic herders are renting land and, in the process, come into conflict. The tension in the area is that both migrant groups have no ownership of land, which exposes their vulnerability to the landowners in the sense that they have no firm land rights. The study's main objective is to examine the root causes of the conflict between crop farmers and nomadic herders in the case study area of the Afram Plains. The environmental scarcity and political ecology theories were utilised to analyse the conflict in the study area. The study adopted the qualitative approach with the purposive and snowball sampling methods used to select participants for the research. The study's findings reveal that increasing land scarcity due to population growth, climate-induced migration, and large-scale land acquisition is a major cause of the land conflict. The study further reveals that, aside from the core issues leading to land scarcity, what instantly ignites conflict between farmers and herders includes crop destruction, burning of grasses, and alleged vices perpetrated by the herders. The findings of the study also reveal that the mitigation measures put in place to address the conflict have been ineffective because of corruption, poor land governance, and greedy chiefs. The study concludes that the farmer-herder conflict is complex and needs to be examined from diverse perspectives to appreciate the nuances of the conflict.

In recent years, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have increasingly turned their attention to the role of collective imagination in shaping sociotechnical futures. This scholarship leaves open the question of how the collectives involved in bringing these futures to life come into being. Starting with one episode in the ongoing conflict over the construction of Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory in settler-colonial Canada, this discourse analysis draws on scholarship in feminist, anticolonial, and co-productionist STS to study this process of collective formation in relation to sociotechnical futures. It does so by examining how oil and gas workers become enrolled into a sociotechnical imaginary I call Canadian resource techno-nationalism. Comparing media and politicians’ representations of oil and gas workers with White workers’ representations of themselves indicates that they can end up participating in this imaginary regardless of their affinity to it. Examining policy documents and scholarly literature about the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in impact assessment, as well as political debates and mainstream media coverage about the conflict over the Coastal GasLink pipeline, draws attention to how elites’ active construction and protection of the boundary between knowledge and politics works to enroll Indigenous people into oil and gas jobs and, therefore, into the collective performing Canadian resource techno-nationalism. In both cases, elite actors deploy the resources at their disposal in ways that help funnel oil and gas workers into lives imagined for them, securing the power of the settler state in the process. This dynamic illustrates the importance of disentangling participation in the collective performance of sociotechnical imaginaries from freely given consent. Residents of liberal states can end up performing dominant imaginaries less out of any sense of affinity to them than as a response to the disciplinary power these imaginaries help sustain.

This thesis utilises district court records from the three judicial districts of Hammerdal, Offerdal, and Undersåker to shed light on Saamis’ presence in north-western Jämtland during the seventeenth century. The research question posed is how encounters with the local communities shaped the Saamis’ situation during a period of emerging colonial mores and contributes to the discussion on how encounters with others impacted the situation for the Saami in early modern Sweden. The theoretical framework adopts the concepts of borderlands, concurrences, and settler colonialism to understand the manifold of encounters that shaped the situation for the Saami, acknowledging the possibility that the encounters could be contradictory while also understanding them as shaped within a context of power asymmetries. Contrary to the northern lappmarks, this thesis shows that the Saamis in north-western Jämtland were deprived of representation at the local courts, affecting their influence in local self-governance and administration of justice. Moreover, by not only focusing on Saamis’ encounters with the representatives of the Crown and the Church but also with the non-Saamis who resided in the local communities, this thesis concludes that the Saamis’ situation was shaped by concurring and conflicting encounters, encompassing not only coercion and confrontation but also cooperation and coexistence.

This dissertation examines social, political, and cultural dimensions of displacement, resettlement planning, and climate change adaptation policy experimentation along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. I draw upon four years of ethnographic research alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders, during a period just before and after their resettlement plans garnered $48 million in federal financial support. Through participant observation and interviews with Tribal leaders, their allies, media-makers who covered the Tribe’s experiences, and state planners tasked with administering the federal funds, I examined social encounters produced as the Tribe’s resettlement plans were embraced, circulated, and transformed throughout international media and policy. My analysis points to a number of tensions expressed as Tribal community-driven efforts to address historically produced vulnerabilities collided with government efforts to reduce exposure to coastal environmental hazards. I describe how policies, planning practices, and particular constructions of disaster and community encumbered Tribal leaders’ long-standing struggle for recognition, self-determination and sovereignty, land, and cultural survival. Ultimately, I argue that the state’s allocation of federal resettlement funds has reproduced a colonial frontier dynamic whereby redevelopment is rested upon the erasure of Indigenous histories; identities; and ongoing struggles for self- determination, land, and cultural survival. Using ethnography to interrogate the social encounters produced through adaptation may inform policies, planning processes, and activism in solidarity with those already regenerating social and ecological relationships threatened by racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and climate change. / Anthropology