Over the past decade, the "problem" of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effects among Aboriginal peoples has received increasing attention from the Canadian nation-state. However, few feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-colonial scholars have offered a critique of FAS/E "prevention" policies aimed at Aboriginal women. In this dissertation, I present my analysis of the "official knowledge" and "public pedagogies" articulated in one such policy, The First Nations and Inuit Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/ Fetal Alcohol Effects Initiative (herein "the Initiative"). This analysis unravels the complex and contradictory tensions in contemporary state policy formation. My findings show how the Initiative paradoxically supports the development of inclusive, grassroots approaches to FAS/E prevention in Aboriginal communities while at the same time eclipsing the voices and concerns of Aboriginal women. Though neglected in the official policy texts and talk of the Initiative, young Aboriginal mothers' agency and insights are central in the dialectic of ideology, discourse, and lived experience that this study documents. To facilitate this shift, I engage a productive methodological synthesis of textual analysis, institutional ethnography, and participatory research, by grounding my analysis of the texts in indepth group interviews with six Aboriginal mothers whose lives include substance use and FAS/E. This study offers significant implications for the development of future policy, research, and "culturally appropriate" pedagogy for and about FAS/E "prevention". My findings do not support the outright rejection of medical models of disability, as has been favoured by many critical theorists and activists on the grounds that such models are universally oppressive and disenfranchising. Rather, the women's insights into their own lived experiences emphasize the simultaneously enabling and disabling consequences of medicalization. Accordingly, my findings underscore the urgent need to reconsider the roles of "race", gender, class, nation and dis/ability in contemporary theories and practices of substantive citizenship and nation-building in and outside of education. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

In the past twenty-five years there has been a marked increase in the number of women in the paid labour force, especially among women with young children. Time studies have shown that when a woman has a young family plus a position in the paid labour force, she works a very long day and has little time for recreational or leisure pursuits. This thesis therefore poses the following questions: 1. Do women who participate in the paid labour force report poorer health status than their counterparts who are homemakers? 2. Do women who participate in the paid labour force exhibit lifestyle patterns significantly different from their homemaker counterparts? 3. Do women in the paid labour force exhibit health care utilization patterns significantly different from their homemaker counterparts? and 4. Do women's lifestyles, reported health status and health care utilization patterns differ from those of their male counterparts in the paid labour force? Data from the 1978-79 Canada Health Survey (C.H.S.), which had asked a wide cross-section of Canadians about their lifestyle, health status and use of the health care system, were used to explore these questions. A model was then developed for this study which linked health risk behaviours, health status and health care related behaviours, and which used the variables available in the C.H.S. data base. Multiple Classification Analyses were carried out to determine the best predictors of women's health risk behaviours, health status and health care related behaviours. The three study groups were then standardized using the top two predictors and the rates of the various states and behaviours were compared. First, in the prediction of women's health risk behaviours, the demographic variables included in the model were not effective as only 3-4% of the variance in the scores could be explained. Secondly, in the prediction of health status scores, the composite health risk scores developed for each subject plus the demographic variables were able to explain 4 - 11% of the variation. Thirdly, in the prediction of women's health care related behaviours the composite health risk scores, the health status scores and the demographic variables were together able to explain 14 - 27% of the variance. When the standardized rates for high health risk behaviours were compared, there were significant differences between the three groups but no group was consistently better or worse than any other. The men's group however, consistently reported better health and less use of the health care system. The women's groups reported similar health states but women in the paid labour force reported a higher use of medications and fewer days in hospital. The C.H.S. was designed to address issues which affect the whole population. The questions therefore, were not always sufficiently specific to describe the special circumstances of women, especially for example in their childbearing and nurturing years. The rapidly changing social and economic circumstances of women and their families, as women enter the paid labour force, plus the need for more information on their health risk behaviours - what these behaviours are, and what predisposes women to engage in them - point to the need for more research focused specifically on this section of the population. / Medicine, Faculty of / Population and Public Health (SPPH), School of / Graduate