For Native peoples, becoming Christian in north america has also meant becoming white. That is, the theological beliefs, cultural habits, and political movements that characterized american colonialism are inseparable. Among its many shortcomings throughout colonial history, Western Christianity has failed on a basic, epistemological level; it has failed to recognize itself as a particular theological tradition, instead positing itself as a universal. The insistence of the particular theological doctrines and scriptural interpretations of european settlers as Truth led to the demise of many Others—a violence to which the Indigenous peoples of this land attest. If, as I have suggested, particular theologies were part and parcel of the western colonial project, then it follows that attempts at disarming the imperial machine must not only involve decolonizing dominant politics and cultural habits, but also decolonizing dominant western theologies. This thesis takes up one of the dominant doctrines in Western Christianity, that of original sin. An analysis of this doctrine is pertinent because, in addition to articulating the dominant western Christian understanding of sin, death, and evil, in the world, it also reveals an undergirding anthropology and an implied soteriology, both of which provided justifications for the genocide on the Indigenous peoples of america. Following the decolonizing methodologies of Native americans Andrea Smith and Laura Donaldson, I will demonstrate that the doctrine is particular, both scripturally and culturally, and that the dominant reading of the supporting texts for the doctrine are neither universal nor necessary. Then I will interrogate the two primary texts, Genesis 3 and Romans 5 with alternative interpretations from Native theologians and the experiences of the doctrine by Native peoples. Finally, I will argue that if western theology is to truly release its monopoly on the Truth, even what it claims to be the True discourses and interpretations within Christianity, it must make itself vulnerable to deconstruction and interrogation by those it has oppressed; it must cultivate a posture of receptivity to the other and Native interpretive approaches, begin the hard work of unsettling settler theologies, and composing non-dominant readings of the bible.

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.

In this dissertation, I draw together an archive of twentieth and twenty-first century North American authors and artists who explore the settler colonial and racist ideologies of the Anthropocene, the proposed name for a contemporary moment in which anthropogenic forces have forever altered the Earth system. I hold that the “the Anthropocene” names a moment in which localized environmental injustices have become planetary. Addressing the representational challenges posed by the epoch requires engaging the underlying cultural assumptions that have long rationalized injustices as necessary to economic prosperity and narrowly conceived versions of national wellbeing. Works of literature and cultural representation can use literary and artistic form to this end. In this dissertation, I identify one such formal strategy, which I term insensible realism. As a form of realism committed to representing the real impacts of discursive and material practices, insensible realism refers to the rejection of rationality and Enlightenment ideals that have been used to justify the White supremacy, settler colonialism and environmental destruction that instantiates the Anthropocene. A realism of the insensible also refers to my archive’s concentration on what cannot be easily sensed: the epoch’s social and environmental interactions that are physically, temporally, geographically and/or socially imperceptible to dominant society. I argue that these works eschew accepted notions of rationality and empiricism in favor of using non-dominant cultural traditions and theories of environmental justice to address the problems the Anthropocene poses. Challenging the dominant logics that have been used to rationalize racist, settler colonial and environmental violence of the Anthropocene creates space for alternative environmental commitments and narratives. Throughout the dissertation, I draw on theories from women of color feminism, environmental justice scholars, settler colonial studies, theories of race, and new materialism. Through a critical environmental justice framework, I argue that the authors and artists that make up my archive develop a literary and artistic approach to environmental justice, using forms of representation to highlight—and challenge—the intersections of racism, settler colonialism and environmental destruction. / 2019-10-17

This dissertation examines the discursive and material terrain of urban Indigenous education in a public school district and Title VII/Indian Education program. Based in tenets of Tribal Critical Race Theory and utilizing counterstorytelling techniques from Critical Race Theory informed by contemporary Indigenous philosophy and methodological theory, this research takes as its focus the often-unacknowledged ways settler colonial discourses continue to operate in public schools. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in a public school district, this dissertation documents and makes explicit racial and colonial dynamics that manifest in educational policy and practice through a series of counterstories. The counterstories survey a range of educational issues, including the implementation of Native-themed curriculum, teachers’ attempts to support Native students in their classrooms, challenges to an administrator’s “no adornment” policies for graduation, Native families’ negotiations of erasures embedded in practice and policy, and a Title VII program’s efforts to claim physical and cultural space in the district, among other issues. As a collective, these stories highlight the ways that colonization and settler society discourses continue to shape Native students’ experiences in schools. Further, by documenting the nuanced intelligence, courage, artfulness, and what Gerald Vizenor has termed the “survivance” of Native students, families, and educators as they attempt to access education, the research provides a corrective to deficit framings of Indigenous students. Beyond building empathy and compassion for Native students and communities, the purpose is to identify both the content and nature of the competencies teachers, administrators, and policy makers might need in order to provide educational services that promote Indigenous students’ success and well-being in school and foster educational self-determination. This research challenges educators to critically interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about Native identity, culture, and education and invites educators to examine their own contexts for knowledge, insights, and resources to better support Native students in urban public schools and intervene into discourses that constrain their educational experiences.

abstract: Low-income communities of color in the U.S. today are often vulnerable to displacement, forced relocation away from the places they call home. Displacement takes many forms, including immigration enforcement, mass incarceration, gentrification, and unwanted development. This dissertation juxtaposes two different examples of displacement, emphasizing similarities in lived experiences. Mixed methods including document-based research, map-making, visual ethnography, participant observation, and interviews were used to examine two case studies in Phoenix, Arizona: (1) workplace immigration raids, which overwhelmingly target Latino migrant workers; and (2) the Loop 202 freeway, which would disproportionately impact Akimel O'odham land. Drawing on critical geography, critical ethnic studies, feminist theory, carceral studies, and decolonial theory, this research considers: the social, economic, and political causes of displacement, its impact on the cultural and social meanings of space, the everyday practices that allow people to survive economically and emotionally, and the strategies used to organize against relocation. Although raids are often represented as momentary spectacles of danger and containment, from a worker's perspective, raids are long trajectories through multiple sites of domination. Raids' racial geographies reinforce urban segregation, while traumatization in carceral space reduces the power of Latino migrants in the workplace. Expressions of care among raided workers and others in jail and detention make carceral spaces more livable, and contribute to movement building and abolitionist sentiments outside detention. The Loop 202 would result in a loss of native land and sovereignty, including clean air and a mountain sacred to O'odham people. While the proposal originated with corporate desire for a transnational trade corridor, it has been sustained by local industry, the perceived inevitability of development, and colonial narratives about native people and land. O'odham artists, mothers, and elders counter the freeway's colonial logics through stories that emphasize balance, collective care over individual profit, and historical consciousness. Both raids and the freeway have been contested by local grassroots movements. Through political education, base-building, advocacy, lawsuits, and protest strategies, community organizations have achieved changes in state practice. These movements have also worked to create alternative spaces of safety and home, rooted in interpersonal care and Latino and O'odham culture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2014

abstract: In 2005 the Navajo Nation Tribal Council passed the Navajo Sovereignty in Education Act (NSEA). The NSEA has been herald as a decisive new direction in Diné education with implications for Diné language and cultural revitalization. However, research has assumed the NSEA will lead to decolonizing efforts such as language revitalization and has yet to critically analyze how the NSEA is decolonizing or maintains settler colonial educational structures. In order to critically investigate the NSEA this thesis develops a framework of educational elimination through a literature review on the history of United States settler colonial elimination of Indigeneity through schooling and a framework of decolonizing education through a review of literature on promising practices in Indigenous education and culturally responsive schooling. The NSEA is analyzed through the decolonizing education framework and educational elimination framework. I argue the NSEA provides potential leverage for both decolonizing educational practices and the continuation of educational elimination. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Justice and Human Rights 2015

abstract: Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others to whiteness and western modernity are rooted in settler colonial histories and expansions of US and Anglo-European democracy. Informed by the rhetorical study of publics and public memory, critical race/whiteness studies, and transnational and Indigenous feminisms, this dissertation examines how memoryscapes of civilization and its Others circulate to shape geopolitical belongings in three cases: (1) public memory places in the US Southwest; (2) pro-Israel rhetorics enacted by the US organization Christians United for Israel; and (3) the embodied and mediated protests of European feminist organization FEMEN. In bringing these seemingly unrelated cases together as elements of a larger assemblage, I draw attention to their symbolic and material connectivities, examining the racialized, gendered, national, and imperial logics that move between these sites to shore up the frontiers of whiteness. Specifically, I argue for conceptualizing whiteness as a global assemblage that territorializes through settler colonial memoryscapes that construct "modern" national and global citizen-subjects as those deemed worthy of rights, protection, land, and life against the threatening bodies of Otherness seen to exist outside of the shared times and places of normative democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also examine, more broadly, how assemblage theory extends current approaches to studying rhetoric, public memory, and intercultural communication in global, trans/national, and (post)colonial contexts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2016

In the 1850s, the government of Canada West initiated a project to colonize a vast region of the Canadian Shield known as the Ottawa-Huron Tract. Later, in his influential interpretation, Arthur Lower argued the myth of the inexorable forward movement of the settlement frontier was here shattered by a reality of lakes, rocks, and forest inherently unsuitable for farming. This refrain continues to be repeated by proponents of what I call the failed-settlement narrative. A contrasting narrative emphasizes the perseverance of settlers and their descendants. This dissertation was born of an interest in the tension between these competing narratives. On the one hand, the failed-settlement narrative ignores the fact many people succeeded in farming on the Shield. On the other hand, the romanticized image of the pioneer is disconnected from the larger historical contexts which shaped the settlement process and informed those notions of success and failure by which we judge the actions of people in the past. If the colonization project was an unmitigated failure, how do we account for the persistence of settlers and their descendants? If the landscape and soils of the Shield were unsuited to cultivation, why did people continue to cultivate the land for decades after the settlement project was condemned? What follows is an exploration of these questions, focusing on the township of Brudenell, Ontario as a site of Canadian colonial experimentation. Failure and desertion were certainly important parts of the settlement experience in the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but these themes have been overemphasized by historians. Early on, many settlers realized the variability of the landscape in places like Brudenell and found small parcels of land which they turned to a variety of purposes. Settlers took advantage of government policies that made landowning a realistic goal even for those of modest means and diverse backgrounds. By embracing new and emerging forms of local authority settlers were also able to tune the structures of the colonial state to further their own interests. They profited from the proximate shanty market for agricultural produce wherever practicable, while also pursuing economic activities oriented toward local, regional, and national markets. Economic opportunities and the accessibility of land in Brudenell allowed cultural groups to develop spatially-distinct communities, which expanded to fill much of the available land in the township. This revision of the failed-settlement narrative stands out in the historiography of the Ottawa-Huron Tract, but dovetails with histories of settlement in other agriculturally-marginal regions of nineteenth-century Canada. / Graduate / 2019-03-01

Masters of Art / This thesis explores the shifting racial identification and politics of the emerging Jewish community in Southern Africa between the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 and the Union of South Africa in 1910. Through an investigation of their actions and thoughts on the cultural, economic, linguistic and political aspects of their lives, I show how the emerging Jewish community formed itself through the political subjectivity of White settlers. Understanding how racial categories were being amalgamated and partitioned in that period of state formation, I argue that the mainstream Jewish community colluded with the colonial state to join into the ‘unity of the White races’. I use Memmi’s (1967 [1957], pp. 19,45) analytic distinction between ‘coloniser’ – a European on African land - and ‘colonialist’ – a coloniser who supports colonialism and believes in its legitimacy - to examine how the process of subject formation is articulated through the political economy of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. When Jews from Eastern Europe (Yidn) began arriving in South Africa in the 1880s, they faced a settler population which simultaneously treated them as members of an undifferentiated European settler population, as candidates for assimilation into colonial Whiteness, and as dirty subjects under threat of colonial state violence. Though there were other possible responses to the colonial relationship that Yidn could have taken, such as linking the fight against antisemitism with other anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, the community went through a process of colonialist refashioning. To understand this transformation, I focus on four aspects of life. Culturally, Yidn were classed as dirty subjects and Jewish communal institutions worked with the state to ‘clean’, i.e. ‘Whiten’ them up. Economically, Jews of all class positions learnt the exploitative practices of settlers in racial capitalism. Linguistically, Yiddish became classified as a European language by utilising racial hierarchies. And politically, Yidn became citizens by embracing the ideology of a White-only franchise. Focussing in on these processes of assimilation into power, I argue that the primary Jewish communal institutions embraced and internally enforced a colonialist political subjectivity. This thesis is based on archival research conducted in three archives in Cape Town carried out between February and May 2019, and extensive reading of previous historical studies to write a new narrative from previously known sources.

Thesis advisor: Lillie R. Albert / This study developed and then utilized an anti-colonial mathematics curriculum evaluation framework based on Grande’s (2015) conceptualization of colonialist consciousness. This was done in an effort to both: a) illuminate the presence of colonial logics within mathematics curricular texts and b) re-conceptualize criticalmathematics for the purpose of addressing our intertwined ecological (e.g., climate change) and human crises (e.g. systemic racism). Rather than conceptualizing mathematics as a socio-politically neutral and/or a culture-free discipline this study offers a literature review of the genealogy of Western mathematics’ development in relation to British imperialism and Anglo-American settler colonialism. Working from these historical, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives the anti-colonial mathematics curriculum evaluation framework was constructed, piloted with a Common-Core-aligned 6th grade Eureka Math unit, and then refined. From there, two absolute criterial curriculum evaluations (Kemmis & Stake, 1988), one using the anti-colonial evaluation framework and the other using a criticalmathematics evaluation framework, were completed in relation to a 7th grade Eureka Math unit. Resulting from this process, this study offers two key findings. First, Grande’s (2015) conceptualization of colonialist consciousness can be specified to identify concrete manifestations of colonialist consciousness, which can be meaningfully organized in relation to aspects of curriculum (i.e., goals/objectives, pedagogy, and assessments) and curricular components (e.g., exit tickets). Second, aspects of criticalmathematics theorizations of justice may be fruitfully reconsidered to support the disruption of mathematics educations’ (and its curricular texts’) roles in the propagation of the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of coloniality. Implications of this study are presented generatively as actionable suggestions for textbook developers, teacher educators, and theory-driven evaluators interested in supporting the teaching and learning mathematics from an anti-colonial stance. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.