From its inception, Canada's 'Indian policy' has sought to undermine the bond between indigenous children and their communities. Each era has seen a new reason and corresponding tactic to remove indigenous children. They have been institutionalized in residential schools, placed in foster homes, provincial 'care' facilities, and adopted by Euro-Canadian families. While it is widely accepted that the forceful removal of indigenous children during the residential school era and the "Sixties Scoop" was a colonial strategy, contemporary child welfare practices seem to escape the same scrutiny. This seems to be the case even though indigenous children continue to be removed en masse and are vastly overrepresented in the Canadian child welfare system. Indeed, there are more indigenous children in 'care' today than ever before in Canadian history, including the residential school era and following the "Sixties Scoop". Given these trends the colonial effect of contemporary child welfare practices seems evident. This project thus seeks to problematize child welfare practices in relation to indigenous peoples. In particular, it is the aim of this thesis to shed light on some of the narratives that underlie these practices. Through a critical discourse analysis this thesis illuminates how news media in Alberta and Manitoba disseminate controlling images of indigenous peoples and their children. I argue that the discourses in both provinces normalize the removal of indigenous children while naturalizing colonial control. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-06-30 11:58:07.536

The mobility of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem is usually understood in terms of exclusion, reflecting their lack of access to urban services more broadly as well as the restrictive mobility regime at work across the Palestinian territories. Yet after fifty years of Israeli occupation, a more complex and contradictory situation has emerged in the city. This dissertation uses mobility as a vehicle to arrive at a more integrated understanding of the paradoxical manner in which Palestinian Jerusalemites are simultaneously excluded from and incorporated into the city and to analyse how they negotiate their interstitial and often contradictory position. The thesis approaches the question of Palestinian quotidian movement by engaging with theoretical work on mobility and embodied movement as well as from empirical study including eight months of on-site research. In its three core sections, the work examines in detail several manifestations of the restriction, facilitation, and contested nature of mobility. In the first section, a discussion of Palestinian exclaves and enclaves of the city shows the continuities of mobility’s exclusionary effects on both sides of the Separation Wall. This limitation of movement leads to a restriction of spatio-political possibilities – but at the same time, Palestinians expand the horizon of what is possible through everyday and leisure practices. The second section employs two case studies of recent public transport developments in East Jerusalem to examine how incorporation is operationalised through everyday movements across urban space. The third section analyses the paradoxical role of mobility as the result of a tension between the settler colonial and the neoliberal logics concurrently at work in the city. On the one hand, the restriction of movement gradually renders the Palestinians as external to their city. On the other, the facilitation and regulation of mobility in East Jerusalem also serves to normalise Israeli rule and constitute Palestinians as incorporated urban residents, thereby undermining long-term aspirations for autonomy in the east of the city. The examination of the manner in which mobilities are contested in Jerusalem shows that movement, although often associated with freedom and independence, is essential for negotiating the terms of interdependence in the city.

At the international level, indigenous activism has increasingly taken the form of advocating for ‘indigenous rights.’ These rights-based claims are articulated through a human rights framework, exemplified by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was passed by the UN General Assembly in September 2007. Since this time, the Declaration has become the focal point of indigenous activism at the international – and domestic – levels. Proponents of the DRIP have claimed that it moves international law into a “post-Eurocentric” position, and that for the first time, the rights of indigenous peoples have been recognized by the international community. This thesis interrogates the rights-based discourse employed in international indigenous activism. Using postcolonial and poststructuralist theory, it puts forward a hypothesis of double-movement governance affecting indigenous peoples throughout the world. In this thesis, the double-movement is made up of relations between biopolitical management of indigenous lives, and neoliberal governmentality, which come together to establish the power relations within our present-day colonial system. This double-movement governance is then connected to Glen Sean Coulthard’s critique of a politics of recognition framework, on which human rights are based. Together, this theory forms my hypothesis that instead of providing indigenous peoples with emancipatory pathways out of the colonial present, indigenous rights discourses further entrench colonial norms and hierarchies within indigenous communities, and between States and indigenous peoples. Having established my hypothesis, I then test it with empirical data from the Declaration, indigenous fora at the UN, and domestic laws, agreements and policies. Taking the evidence into account, I argue that despite meaningful steps being taken to establish collective rights for indigenous peoples, a rights-based discourse does indeed continue to entrench colonial norms and hierarchies within indigenous communities and between States and indigenous peoples. This is in part because of issues of translation that occur when indigenous claims are articulated through a human rights framework, but also because a system based upon a politics of recognition – such as a human rights framework – is unable to move indigenous peoples out of the present-day colonial relations of power in which they live. Ultimately, such a system is only able to offer indigenous peoples ‘white liberty and white justice.’

Over the last ten years, there has been extensive scholarly debate about the nature of settler colonialism and the category ‘settler’. The central problem animating this dissertation is the question of how we understand the position of a settler group like the Doukhobors in Canadian settler colonialism. In 1899 approximately 7,500 members of the Doukhobor religious movement fled oppression in Russia and arrived in Canada with the hope of creating an earthly paradise based on communal economy, mutual aid, pacifism, and an anarchistic theology. Less than a decade after fleeing Tsarist oppression in Russia and settling in the Canadian prairies, the Doukhobors once again came into conflict with a government; this time the conflict revolved around land and compliance with homestead regulations. This moment marked the beginning of more than half a century of provincial and federal government attempts to assimilate recalcitrant factions of the Doukhobor community. A number of tactics including opportunistic land policy, imprisonment, removal and forced education of children, legislation targeting communal property and inducements to integrate into mainstream Canadian society were employed by provincial and federal governments to make the Doukhobors into proper settler subjects. By examining these government attempts to re-make Doukhobor subjectivity in the image of an idealized Anglo-settler identity, this project sheds light on the broad process through which ‘settlers’ are ‘made’ by government action. Drawing on archival iv sources, this dissertation exposes the intersection of Canadian government policy, and colonial ideas, directed towards Indigenous peoples and the Doukhobors from 1899 until 1960. I examine this intersection through the themes of land, education, and colonial knowledge creation in government reports. The dissertation finds that the twin elements of settler colonialism—settlement and dispossession—must be considered as a unified political project. During the period under study there is significant transfer of ideologies and policies between those officials working on the assimilation of settlers and those working toward the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The dissertation concludes that an important element of the category ‘settler’ is its political nature, and therefore its contingent and contestable nature. / Graduate / 0615 / adam.burke.carmichael@gmail.com

abstract: What are possibilities for transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers? Research conversations among a set of project partners (Indigenous and settler pairs)—who reside in the Phoenix metro area, Arizona or on O’ahu, Hawai’i—addressed what good relationships look like and how to move the structural relationship towards those characteristics. Participants agreed that developing shared understandings is foundational to transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers; that Indigenous values systems should guide a process of transforming relationships; and that settlers must consider their position in relation to Indigenous peoples because position informs responsibility. The proposed framework for settler responsibility is based on the research design and findings, and addresses structural and individual level transformation. The framework suggests that structural-level settler responsibility entails helping to transform the structural relationship and that the settler role involves a settler transformation process parallel to Indigenous resurgence. On an individual level, personal relationships determine appropriate responsibilities, and the framework includes a suggested process between Indigenous persons and settlers for uncovering what these responsibilities are. The study included a trial of the suggested process, which includes four methods: (1) developing shared understandings of terms/concepts through discussion, (2) gathering stories about who participants are in relationship to each other, (3) examining existing daily practices that gesture to a different structural relationship, and (4) using creative processes to imagine structural relationships in a shared world beyond settler colonialism. These methods explore what possibilities unfold when settlers center their relationship with Indigenous peoples. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social and Cultural Pedagogy 2020

This thesis comprises an exploration of the plant commonly known as plantain, or Plantago major, through participant observation of an apprenticeship in traditional western herbalism in the Ottawa region of Ontario, Canada. The first section delves into ideas and manifestations of “weediness” and “invasion”, while offering medicinal/ herbalist views of such plants as a kind of counterpoint. This touches on learning to garden, soil, lawns, plantations, invasive species, protests, and extrajudicial police killings among other topics. The following section, “horror in the hedge”, takes us first on an “herb walk” in Ottawa’s Experimental farm before moving on to a discussion of medicinal understory plants and Plantain alongside hedgerows, witch trials, plagues of Covid-19 and vibration in healing. From here the final section discusses medicine, delving first into the darker side of things as they manifest in the realm of medicinal mushrooms, again touching on the over-harvesting of medicinals, and the discoveries of supposed messiahs. Following is an exploration of how herbalists see continuity between the terrain of the human body and the land, returning again to the “herb walk” as a pedagogic mode utilized by herbalists. Finally, this work is summed up by an exploration of herbal formulation and medicine making, of the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herb’s Charm and the potent power of the triad. Drawing on Plantain as a kind of talisman, and structured after the Lacnunga’s Nine Herb’s charm, this work is an anthropological invocation of animist traditions emerging from Europe. To these ends, the works of Anna Tsing, Tim Ingold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guatarri, Donna Haraway, Michael Taussig, Silvia Federici, David Abram, and Victor Turner, among many others, underpin the theoretical framework of this project.

Abstract Sápmi, located in the North of Fennoscandia, including Finland, Sweden, Norway and parts of Russia, is the home of the majority of the indigenous Sámi people. With a high amount of natural resources in the shape of minerals, forests, and energy extraction, Sápmi is a place of a dispute between different actors such as the Nordic governments, corporations, locals, and Europe’s only indigenous people, the Sámis. On 22 March 2022, the Swedish Government granted a mining license to mobilize an iron ore mine in Gállok, the Swedish side of Sápmi, which has contributed to land-use conflicts and discrimination against the Sámi people. Thus, this issue continues today, making it vital to continue research on the land-use conflict in Sápmi. This qualitative study method uses an abductive approach and case study design. The interview method used is semi-structured interviews with purposive sampling to collect Sámi interviewees. Indigenous methodologies are used to conduct ethical research and apply Johan Galtung's violence triangle as a theory. The study's objective is to understand the land-use conflict in Gállok through the Sámi perspective. The study looks at the methods external actors use to access Gállok and the consequences of a mine in the area. The thesis findings showed that the three violences are visible in the land-use conflict in Gállok. The study presents that the methods used to access Gállok originates from education and media, furthers the laws and regulations by the Swedish authorities and the use of language to promote a green transition and civilization. The consequences found was the negative impact on the Sámi development through their perspective, hindering the chances to continue Sámi livelihood and an effect on Sámi well-being and identity. Additionally, the findings showed that the violences were differently dominating. However, cultural violence has shown to be the core contribution to structural and direct violence. Future research can focus on an intersectional impact on the mining establishment Sámis experience and furthering a decolonizing process.

In 2016, An estimated 15,000 people representing 400 Indigenous Nations and non-indigenous allies gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect Mni Sose, the Missouri River. They became known as the Water Protectors. This dissertation analyzes the response in environmental philosophy journals to the #noDAPL protest at Standing Rock. Even though the Stand at Standing Rock became one of the most important and monumental environmental protests of the last decade, neither Standing Rock nor the Water Protectors appear in environmental philosophy journals at all--not once. Why? I suggest a possible answer by exploring the Stand of the Water Protectors as a moment in a much longer continuous history of resistance to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism attempts to facilitate the erasure of Indigenous populations by colonial ones, in order to gain access to territory—to land. The omission of Standing Rock from environmental philosophy journals represents the ease with which environmental philosophy can become complicit in the project of settler colonial erasure and replacement through absence. Drawing on Indigenous land-based philosophies of kinship, Latin American decolonial philosophy, settler colonial theory, and frameworks of Indigenous environmental justice, I show how the geo-politics of colonialism have come to produce environmental injustice and planetary ruin. I work to break the silence on Standing Rock in environmental philosophy and allow the Water Protectors example to guide the project toward an environmental philosophy which centers colonialism and Indigenous resurgence as core concerns.

No description available.

This paper delves into the significance of land disposal to indigenous rights and Settler-Colonies. Specifically, it examines land use regulations for forestry management and Forest Sami villages. Through interviews with practicing forest reindeer herders, it has been revealed that forestry practices in Sweden have dramatically altered the landscape, posing significant challenges to the continuation of reindeer herding. In the context of Settler-Colonialism, the analysis of these findings shows that land use regulations align with the "logic of elimination," which seeks to remove the native population to secure settlers’ access to land.