The Inuit have experienced significant cultural changes since initial contact with European settlers and explorers in the 17th Century, changes that accelerated in the mid- 20th century. Basing their relationships to the Inuit in imperialism (the policy and practice of empire expansion), Europeans used political, economic and cultural tactics to swiftly establish a cultural hierarchy and solidify the Inuit’s position as ‘The Other’ – an ‘out-group’ viewed as inherently inferior to the ‘in-group’. The Arctic has remained hierarchized because of implicit settler colonial processes that permeate political and cultural relations and underpin modern policy development. An examination of the nutrition transition – the shift away from traditional foods to commercialized market options – brings these implicit settler colonial processes into focus. The transition to a Western diet has accompanied chronic poverty and provoked high levels of food insecurity, resulting in numerous negative health outcomes among Inuit. Current health promotion initiatives employ an ineffective downstream approach to reduce Nunavut food insecurity – which is approximately three times greater than the Canadian average – when the issue is a result of rampant poverty. Disproportionately high rates of food insecurity are a manifestation of settler colonialism and fuel a covertly racist national attitude toward the Inuit, maintaining their marginalized position. This study examines national coverage of Nunavut food insecurity as presented in two of Canada’s most widely read newspapers: The Globe and Mail and National Post. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed to analyze 24 articles, 19 from The Globe and Mail and 5 from National Post. Analysis suggests national print media propagates the Inuit’s position as The Other by selectively reporting on social issues such as hunger, poverty and income. Terms such as “Northerners” and “Southerners” are frequently used to categorically separate Nunavut from the rest of Canada and Inuit-driven efforts to resolve their own issues are widely ignored. This effectively portrays the Inuit as helpless and the territory as a failure, and allows Canadians to maintain colonialist views of Inuit inferiority and erroneously assume Federal initiatives effectively address Northern food insecurity. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2014-02-27 10:52:16.947

There is a tendency within both literature and practice to conceive of colonialism and decolonization as state-centric structures or events. Such an approach to colonialism and decolonization, however, ignores or overshadows the integral roles played by non-indigenous, non-state actors within both colonial and de-colonial processes. This thesis identifies and explores specifically how non-indigenous Canadian citizens, as settler denizens, contribute to colonialism within the country. Through the exploration of settlement stories (both those provided and those silenced), it is argued that, non-indigenous Canadians can come to understand the roles they play within ongoing process of colonialism within Canada today. It is only after these settler actors have identified and explored these roles and recognized their responsibilities to act in de-colonial ways that decolonization can begin. This thesis is, therefore, concerned with identifying and exploring the first step in the process towards decolonization – identifying the settler denizen within settler colonialism. / Graduate / 0334 / 0615 / deanne.am.leblanc@gmail.com

There is a tendency within both literature and practice to conceive of colonialism and decolonization as state-centric structures or events. Such an approach to colonialism and decolonization, however, ignores or overshadows the integral roles played by non-indigenous, non-state actors within both colonial and de-colonial processes. This thesis identifies and explores specifically how non-indigenous Canadian citizens, as settler denizens, contribute to colonialism within the country. Through the exploration of settlement stories (both those provided and those silenced), it is argued that, non-indigenous Canadians can come to understand the roles they play within ongoing process of colonialism within Canada today. It is only after these settler actors have identified and explored these roles and recognized their responsibilities to act in de-colonial ways that decolonization can begin. This thesis is, therefore, concerned with identifying and exploring the first step in the process towards decolonization – identifying the settler denizen within settler colonialism. / Graduate / 0334 / 0615 / deanne.am.leblanc@gmail.com

Why is it that, at a time when countless state officials are apologizing for historic wrongs and insisting that Canada has entered a period of reconciliation, many settlers continue to act towards indigenous peoples with unabated aggression and resentment? This thesis attempts to explain the continual reproduction of settler colonialism through an investigation of the processes involved in the formation of settlers as political subjects. Developing a Butlerean account of the subject, the author suggests that settlers are produced through colonial regimes as political subjects with deep and often unacknowledged investments in the reproduction of systems of oppression that provide for their material and psychic position of privilege. While the instability inherent in such systems ultimately threatens settlers themselves – as seen in the collapsing North American middle class – the fragility and precarity experienced by settlers who are targeted by neoliberal reforms often leads them to reinvest in, and aggressively defend, those very systems of power as a matter of subjective continuity. The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek. / Graduate

The following works are an exploration of the histories of colonization that Indigenous people experienced in North America and how the settler colonial phenomenon continues to exist in the contemporary United States. In this project I am placing “official” history alongside personal narrative in order to represent the overlooked experiences of those impacted by the colonial project in the southwest. Old English Modern Mestizaje acts to deconstruct the ideologies that create common sense notions of Mexico, Mexican American, Xicana/o/x and Mestizaje. With this project I am working to explore the impact of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, capitalism and hetero patriarchy, as they affect the material realities of people whose lives are determined by their relationship to the border. Through the use of sculpture, experimental video, documentary photography, urban sculpture, earthenware, and performance this series means to draw our attention to the ways we uphold and reconstruct institutions of power. I am most compelled by the places where evidence of resistance and survival is made manifest. With Old English Modern Mestizaje my desire is to generate alternative empathies that open paths for a new consciousness.

In 2018-2019, 35.5% of people with a Dangerous Offender designation were Indigenous (Public Safety Canada, 2020, p. 117). While the disproportionate number of Indigenous people with the designation corresponds to the broader trend of overincarceration of Indigenous people in Canada, very little research has addressed the use of the designation on Indigenous people. This thesis provides a critical discourse analysis of 15 case law reports of Dangerous Offender designation hearings guided by settler colonial theory to examine why the designation disproportionately targets Indigenous people. I specifically examine the ways in which discourse enables the erasure of settler colonialism, and at time Indigeneity, in the decision-making process of Dangerous Offender designation hearings. The analysis found that the juridical framework for the application of the Dangerous Offender designation does not allow the courts to consider the impacts of settler colonialism at the designation stage. As such, the social locations of the individuals that demonstrate how settler colonialism may have contributed to their offending are not discussed in the decision-making process thereby creating a form of erasure of settler colonialism in the designation process. Additionally, the juridical framework gives psych experts much authority in the decision-making process. Thus, risk discourse dominates much of the case law reports and the impacts of settler colonialism as thereby translated in individual risk factors. Many of the risk factors that justify the application of the designation are in fact symptoms of settler colonialism. In sum, I conclude that the juridical framework of the Dangerous Offender designation is designed in a way that contributes to disproportionately targeting Indigenous people because their unique experience of settler colonialism and the role in played in their offending is erased or translated in risk which makes them more of a target.

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

"Unforgetting the Dakota 38" projects a nuanced light onto the history and memory of the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men on December 26, 1862 following the U.S.-Dakota War in Southcentral Minnesota. This thesis investigates the competing narratives between Santee Dakota peoples (a mixture of Wahpeton and Mdewakanton Dakota) and white Minnesotan citizens in Mankato, Minnesota—the town of the hanging—between 1862 and 2012. By using settler colonialism as an analytical framework, I argue that the erasing of Dakotas by white historical memory has actively and routinely removed Dakotas from the mainstream historical narrative following the U.S.-Dakota War through today. This episodic history examines three phases of remembrance in which the rival interpretations of 1862 took different forms, and although the Dakota-centered interpretations were always present in some way, they became more visible to the non-Dakota society over time. Adopting a thematic approach, this thesis covers events that overlap in time, yet provide useful insights into the shaping and reshaping of memory that surrounds the mass hanging. White Minnesotans routinely wrote Dakota peoples out of their own history, a key element of settler colonial policies that set out to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the Minnesota landscape and replace them with white settlers. While this thesis demonstrates how white memories form, it also focuses on Dakota responses to the structures associated with settler colonialism. In so doing, this thesis argues that Dakota peoples actively participated in the memory-making process in Mankato between 1862 and 2012, even though most historical scholarship considered Mankato devoid of Dakota peoples and an Indigenous history. / Master of Arts / The U.S.-Dakota War wracked the Minnesota River Valley region of Southcentral Minnesota. Following a bloody and destructive six weeks in late-Summer 1862, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the mass execution of thirty-eight Mdewakanton Dakota men as punishment for their participation. This controversial moment in American history produced unique and divergent memories of the Dakota War, the hanging, and the Mdewakanton Dakota place in white American society. This thesis examines the memories that formed between 1862 and 2012, highlighting Dakota perspective and memories to shed new light on the history of this deeply contested event. By doing so, we gain new understandings of Mankato, the U.S.-Dakota War, and the mass hanging, but also a realization that Dakota peoples were always active in the memory-making process even though many have considered their participation nonexistent.

Canada is widely regarded as a liberal, multicultural nation that prides itself on a history of peace and tolerance. Oftentimes set up in contrast to the United States, Canada’s history of colonialism has been popularly imagined as a gentler, necessary, inevitable, and even benevolent version of expansion and subjugation of Indigenous populations. In recent decades scholars in the social sciences and humanities have challenged the rhetoric of Canada as a consistently benevolent and peaceful nation. They have pointed to the discontinuity between Canada’s rosy image, drawn from foundational nation-building myths of benevolence, and the deeply rooted colonial narratives of necessity and inevitability that underpin those nation-building myths. This discontinuity manifests itself in far reaching patterns of social and economic disparity between Indigenous and settler populations over time across the nation. This reality is acutely seen in the Canadian West, as Canada’s historic frontier. This thesis re-problematises narratives of Canadian nation-building from a regional perspective. It is argued that positioning the West as the frontier peripheral to Canadian ‘civilisation’ is part of a broader settler colonial logic that sees the contemporary manifestation of disparity between Indigenous and settler populations as emanating from uniquely backward, peripheral places in Canada, rather than challenging the fundamental benevolence of the Canadian nation. Through a close reading of two trials pertaining to an instance of multiple perpetrator sexual assault that occurred in Saskatchewan in 2003, I demonstrate how the complex web of interlocking systems of domination that oppress and privilege in trials do not emanate from the backwardness of the place in which they occurred, but are rather indicative of broader societal processes and power relations indicative of settler colonialism. This thesis argues there is a conflation between western Canadian identity, and settler identity, owing to the foundational nation-building myths in which the West became Canadian. In moving forward, this thesis proposes an acknowledgment of the settler colonial nature of westward expansion and suggests practicing openness to considering different ways westward expansion might have been understood and experienced. Key to this process is learning to listen, learning to hear, learning to believe, and learning to see oneself implicated in the stories of those who experienced westward expansion differently from how it is popularly constructed in settler society. I begin here by proposing the complainant’s voice in the trial be heard, and be believed. Her voice and her silence provides insight into understanding the oppressive power of settler-colonialism.

Canadian processes such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Comprehensive Land Claims as well as flashpoint events (Simpson & Ladner, 2010) such as the Kanien’kehaka resistance at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke (the “Oka Crisis”) and more recently, the Idle No More movement, signal to Canadians that something is amiss. What may be less visible to Canadians are the 400 years of colonial oppression experienced and the 400 years of resistance enacted by Indigenous peoples on their lands, which are currently occupied by the state of Canada. It is in the context of historical and ongoing Canadian colonialism: land theft, dispossession, marginalization, and genocide, and in the context of the overwhelming denial of these realities by white settler Canadians that this study occurs. In order to break through settler Canadian denial, and to inspire greater numbers of white settler Canadians to initiate and/or deepen their anti-colonial and/or decolonial understandings and work, this study presents extended life narratives of white settler Canadians who have engaged deeply in anti-colonial and/or decolonial work as a major life focus. In this study, such work is framed as living in Indigenous sovereignty, or living in an awareness that we are on Indigenous lands containing their own protocols, stories, obligations, and opportunities which have been understood and practiced by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. Inspired by Indigenous and anti-oppressive methodologies, I articulate and utilize an anti-colonial research methodology. I use participatory and narrative methods, which are informed and politicized through words gifted by Indigenous scholars, activists, and Knowledge Keepers. The result is research as a transformative, relational, and decolonizing process. In addition to the extended life narratives, this research yields information regarding connections between social work education, social work practice, and the anti-colonial/decolonial learnings and work of five research subjects who have, or are completing, social work degrees. The dissertation closes with an exploration of what can be learned through the narrative stories, with recommendations for white settler peoples and for social work, and with recommendations for future research. / February 2017