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This dissertation uses storytelling to examine the nature of settler colonial relations (SCRs) in Canada. It examines testimonies about land use in settler Canada from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). Utilizing a combined Tribal Critical Race Theory (TCRT) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study compares testimonies about land use from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples and asks the question what, if anything, does this comparison tell us about settler Canada? The comparison reveals how settler Canada depends on the liberal racialization of Indigenous peoples’ national identity. To undertake this comparison I narrated the RCAP testimonies into small stories and analyzed their morals, or the point of these stories, using dialogical narrative analysis. The narrated stories laid bare a stark contrast in the way Indigenous peoples spoke of their social relations with the land and the way non-indigenous Canadians spoke of theirs. This study demonstrates how the narrated testimonies from Canadians, or what are referred to as cultural narratives in the language of CRT, are about land use that racialized the national identity of Indigenous peoples through the discourse of the liberal order, whereas the narrated testimonies from Indigenous peoples, considered as counter stories in this study, contradict the cultural narratives and reveal a national identity rooted in language, spirituality, the Creator, and the consequences for Indigenous peoples from settler colonial relations. The narrated counter stories in this study not only contradict the cultural narratives from settlers by describing the consequences of settler colonial relations but they also provide a blueprint in a narrative sense to decolonize land use in contemporary settler Canada. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Many important developments have followed from the distinction being made between post-colonial and settler-colonial situations. This distinction has had implications that reach across disciplines, but have especially impacted the immerging field of Indigenous studies in Canada, which had previously been drawing, and to a certain extent continue to draw, on theories from post-colonial studies. I write this at the intersection of Indigenous studies and English literature building on the theories of decolonization in settler-colonial situations. I show that English poetry written by people in the Indigenous prairie context is one particularly active site of decolonization, in the sense that scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith explain. Through the poetry of Louise Halfe, Duncan Mercredi, Gregory Scofield, Marie Annharte (Née Baker) I show how important elements of Indigenous culture are being translated into printed poetry. Furthermore, these poets are Indigenizing aspects of settler-colonial culture. I use Halfe’s poetry, especially her collection Bear Bones & Feathers, to show the ways in which Indigenous concepts of medicine can be translated into printed poetic form and bring healing for the injuries inflicted by colonialism. Scholars Jo-Ann Episkenew and Sam McKegney provide other examples of this practice and the theoretical underpinnings for literature operating as medicine. Mercredi’s poetry reveals that some of the oral character of Indigenous stories can be translated into poetry. Indigenous scholars such as Neal McLeod argue that Indigenous cultures have long engaged in the use of wit and metaphor that is so prolific in poetry. Scofield translates ceremony into poetry. Drawing in part on J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity, I show that Indigenous poetry is an active force within communities. I read Annharte’s poetry as an example of Indigenization and activism in which she destabilizes the authority of the English language. Francis challenges artistic genres to assert his own Indigenous perspective in much the same way many Indigenous people are choosing not to seek the recognition of the neo-liberal state in what Glenn Coulthard calls “the politics of recognition.” I explore the significant potential for decolonization in this writing by authors writing from Indigenous perspectives. / October 2016

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

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.

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

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Picking up on current research about settler colonialism, this study uses a modified version of a model explaining modern-state formation to explain settler-colonial formation. Charles Tilly identified two simultaneous processes at work – war-making and state-making which produced modern states in Western Europe. Settler-colonial systems engage(d) in a particular type of war to produce their existence: total war. Hence, a modified version of total-war-making and settler-colonial-existence-making (production) occuring in the settler-colonial-creation phase is proposed. However, before this conceptual analytical framework could be developed, it was necessary to examine the meanings of terms such as 'nation' and ‘nation-state’ as well as concepts such as settler-colonialism and total war. The sample of relevant literature analyzed revealed inconsistencies in the meanings of the terms when applying W.H. Newton-Smith’s theory of meaning, suggesting the influence of what Edward Said identified as the workings of orientalism. This has conceptual implications on terms such as settler-colonialism and the meaning of the type of war it wages upon the indigenous nations. It also has implications on developing a conceptual analytical tool to understand the dynamics of the production of the settler-colonial existence. Thus, the terms and concepts needed to be de-orientalized before using them in the modified model which was then used to examine initially three settler-colonial cases: the United States, Australia and Apartheid South Africa. The modified analytical model was able to highlight particular dynamics relevant to settler-colonial systems and was then used – with the incremental and imbricate research done in the first three chapters – to examine the Zionist case. It illustrated that while the cases of the United States and Australia were able pass their creation phases, the Apartheid case could not and subsequently collapsed. The Zionist case seems to be still in its settler-colonial-creation phase. This has implications on current analysis concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In an age of unbridled global capitalism and caustic neocolonial relations to land and life, the question of the aims and approaches of doing counselling with young people, particularly those majoritarian youth who are inheriting the privileges and specters of capitalist and colonial conquest, is pertinent. This dissertation is a collection of three theoretical papers on critical counselling with majoritarian young people in the context of contemporary Empire. A critical lens drawn from decolonial analyses was applied to mainstream counselling practice and theory. By developing a map of how contemporary Empire functions as a permutation of settler colonialism and globalized capitalism, this work investigates the forms of power and discourse that structure contemporary counselling, particularly the bio-medical-industrial-complex of psychiatry and the pharmacology industry, societies of control and digital technology, affective labour, and coloniality. Practices of vulnerability, self-reflexivity, decolonization, accountability, and critique are weaved into a cartographic methodology to redefine counselling as an ethics-driven and politicized intervention in the reproduction of majoritarian subjectivity. In the 21st century, globalized capitalism and settler colonialism seek to push past material limits and appropriate the products of human relatedness—feelings, ideas, cultures, and creations. In resisting this affective extractivism, these papers explore what it might mean to position engagement, living encounter, and relationship in an ethics-based counselling paradigm of resistance and social justice. The challenge of a critical counselling praxis commensurate with such a paradigm is to find avenues to intervene in the majoritarian psyche’s capito-colonial grip on all forms of land and life. Counselling in an Age of Empire proposes that a politicized account of counselling with majoritarian subjects might prove to be a productive space for recrafting subjectivities. Through a careful critique of the majoritarian subject, in the roles of both counsellor and client, a praxis of counselling attentive to political context, based in living encounter, and grounded in a settler ethics of vulnerability and accountability is sketched out. Overall, the work is aimed at majoritarian students and counsellors, their teachers, and those interested in developing a counselling praxis grounded in settler ethics, critique, vulnerability, and the power of living encounter. / Graduate / 2019-09-30

What must we transform in ourselves as white settlers to become open to the possibility of ethical, respectful, authentic relationships with Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands? Situating this research in Stó:lō Téméxw (Stó:lō lands/world) and in relationships with Stó:lō people, this question has become an effort to understand what it means to be xwelítem and how white settlers might transform xwelítem ways of being towards more ethical ways of being. Xwelítem is a Halq’eméylem concept used by Stó:lō people which translates as the hungry, starving ones, and is often used to refer to ways of being many Stó:lō associate with white settler colonial society, past and present. Drawing on insights and wisdom of Stó:lō and settler mentors I consider three aspects of xwelítem ways of being. First, to be xwelítem is to erase Stó:lō presence, culture and nationhood, colonial history and contemporary colonial realities of Indigenous oppression and dispossession, and settler privilege. Second, being xwelítem means attempting to dominate, control, and repress those who are painted as “inferior” in dominant cultural narratives, it means plugging into racist colonial narratives and stereotypes. Third, being xwelítem is to be hungry and greedy, driven by consumption and lacking respect, reverence and reciprocity for the land. Guided by Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, critical place inquiry, narrative therapy, and autoethnography, I shape three narratives that speak to each aspect of being xwelítem, looking back towards its roots and forward towards pathways of transformation. I draw on interviews and experiences with Stó:lō and settler mentors, personal narratives, family history, and literature from critical Indigenous studies, anti-colonial theory, settler colonial studies, analytic psychology, and critical race theory. I aim to share what I have learned from rather than about Stó:lō culture, stories, teachings, and practices as these have been shared in relationships and as they have pushed me towards seeing anew myself and my family, communities, histories, and cultures. I have also walked this path as I have become a mom, and the co-alignment of these journeys has meant a focus on my role as a parent in recognizing and intervening with becoming/being xwelítem as it influences my daughter. I specifically center the space of intergenerational parent-child relationships and intimate family experiences as a deep influence on developing white settler subjectivities, and therefore also a relational space of profound transformative potential. I end with a call for settlers to offer our gifts towards the wellbeing of the land and Indigenous peoples through cycles of reciprocity as a basis for ethical relationships. Transforming white settler subjectivities is situated within the broader vision of participating in co-resistance, reparations and restitution, of bringing about justice and harmony, which inherently involves supporting the self-determination and resurgence of Indigenous peoples. / Graduate