Diss. Helsinki : Helsinki Universitet. 2008.

This study aims to unfold and explain the historical Swedish view upon the Samic people. The fundamental question asked is: ”In which manner, or manners, are the Samic people in the so called Lappmarkerna portrayed by Swedish missionaries during the 17th century? The study makes use of five Swedish missionaries’ written accounts of their travels in Lappmarkerna during the 17th century. The primary sources are examined through a hermeneutic method and the results are analyzed from a postcolonial theoretical framework based mostly on Edward Said’s Orientalism and Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/postcolonialism. The results unfold a view of the Samic people as indeed something other than the rest of the Swedes. The Samic people were described as cowardly, lazy, small in stature, not particularly strong, vigorous, fairly intelligent, disgraceful in the context of trade and very skilled with a bow and at hunting in general, but lacking any inclination towards war. The view of the Samic people as the other is however mostly not based on a suggestion that there were any ontological differences between the Samic people and the Swedes. On the contrary, the described differences were mostly ascribed to historical and cultural causes. It’s plausible that the explanation for the limited claims about any fundamental differences is found in the Swedish missionaries’ purpose of producing accounts of their travels. The Swedish missionaries were probably inclined to emphasize the basic similiarities in order to establish that the Samic people were possible to convert to Christianity as well as foster into becoming proper Swedish subjects.

This dissertation excavates the political economy and cultural politics of the "Vanishing Indian." While much of the scholarship situates this ubiquitous American trope as a rhetorical representation, I consider the ways in which the "Vanishing Indian" was necessarily rooted in the emerging capitalist and cultural economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By combining cultural history, Native studies, material culture, and public history, my project addresses a predicament peculiar to settler societies. Specifically, I address the dilemma faced by an immigrant people who attempted to make the transition from colonial to national without being indigenous. My investigation into the complex historical processes of a symbolic, material, and oftentimes-ambivalent reconfiguration of self seeks to broaden our understanding of a national identity not only rooted, but also deeply invested, in settler-colonialism. The ancient mummified remains of an early Woodland aboriginal woman disinterred in Kentucky in 1811, are the axis around which this dissertation revolves. The history of her disinterment links American national identity formation with capitalist imperatives for natural resource extraction, the exploitation of slave labor, settler expansion, and the development of another form of "Indian Removal" – practiced below ground, as it were. The plunder of ancient ruins, disinterment of Indian graves, and the correlated development of early American archaeology became part of a larger national project. While Native remains were not in and of themselves economic resources, increasingly, speculators in science and antiquities came to regard them as both natural and national resources. Their disinterment was certainly as much a byproduct of scientific speculation as of speculation in lands "opened up" by western expansion. The appropriation of Native remains became a locus of power through which Americans sought to add the length and breadth of an historic past to the promise of a national future. Ultimately, I seek to interrogate one of the many aims of colonization through settlement—the appropriation of indigenous status—and situate a history of science, curiosity, and the appropriation of American Indian land and bodies at the center of this development.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter One traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.

Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession’s social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and ‘saved’ within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance. In this study, I provide a detailed analysis of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with racialized social workers. I trace the production of the profession’s values and notions of good practice within their narratives. I specifically explore the moments in which ‘good’ practice and commitments to the values of the profession break down in everyday work with clients and co-workers. Racist encounters with clients appear as overwhelming occurrences within workers’ narratives, and a complex paradox is revealed: the discursive arrangements within social work that constitute good, social justice-oriented practice, are the very same discourses that disavow the operation of racism. Within these moments workers are left questioning whether or not they can be ‘good social workers’ because the act of naming racism appears to be incompatible with their commitments to the values that shape what is recognized as good social work practice. The narratives presented in this thesis point to the trespasses, erasures and individualizing discourses that secure whiteness at the exact moments in which race is made invisible. I contend that, when workers name racism, their very presence is destabilizing to a social work profession that needs to construct an image of itself as a site of goodness. Social work must examine the colonial continuities that construct contemporary practices, and to make visible the ways in which hegemonic scripts shaping justice and goodness reinstall whiteness and collude with racism.

The following paper explores three case studies of large-scale forced and coercive surgical sterilizations on indigenous women in Canada, the United States and Peru. The author utilizes settler colonialism as explanation for the complicity of these states in reproductive rights abuses and identifies some risk factors for reproductive rights abuses in future social welfare and global health aid projects.

The current trend of global violence and their impact on families and communities as well as the field of university education is scary for a society that is struggling with this false sense of apathy and complacency. How did the ordinary people get seduced to the idea that there is no way out of this global assault? How then do we extricate ourselves from this “tortured consciousness” (Asante, 2007) and this false sense of “nihilism” (West, 1994) and recoup this “incommensurable loss” (Simmons, 2010) to global violence? Even more crucial, where is the place of education in retrieving this incommensurable loss while providing hope and possibility for a better future? Provoked by the desire to have answers to these questions, the dissertation relies on the knowledge and experiences of twenty qualitatively selected university activists and existing literature to critically examine the non-violent praxes of Gandhi and King, Jr. and their pedagogical implications for transformative university education. The dissertation further draws on the knowledge of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X to bring complex and nuanced readings to violence and non-violence. The dissertation notes that violence and non-violence are not mutually exclusive as already known. The dissertation also notes that while resistive violence may be justified, it does not necessarily guarantee true transformation, reconciliation, and healing. Instead, love, humility, truth, dialogue, non-violent direct action, discipline, and spirituality are salient in achieving true transformation in university activism. The dissertation further observes that educational activism is more than walking on the street with placards to protest against institutional violence. Sometimes, the secret activism that is done strategically within the corridors of power can achieve more far-reaching results than the open protest against power on the street. The dissertation concludes with six key non-violent strategies that can help in social and political mobilization of university students for transformative university education.

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

In Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie (1999), Audrey Andrews recounts the life and trial of Dorothy Joudrie, a so-called wealthy socialite who was arrested in Calgary in 1995 for attempting to murder her estranged husband after decades of domestic abuse. Andrews tells Joudrie’s story in the form of a semi-auto/biographical text that quotes other scholarly and creative literary works in an intertextual dialogue about violence against women, post-World War II gender socialization, and the “battered women syndrome” defence. This thesis takes this highly referential dialogue as its starting point, and then extends Andrews’ cultural work by tracing a genealogy of colonialism in Canadian domestic violence laws with the help of selected intertexts – including Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the trial of Angelique Lavallee, and Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous case. First, I source the epigraphs that Andrews strategically places at the start of each chapter and discern the layer of meaning that these external texts bring to Joudrie’s story in order to raise questions about how Andrews rearticulates the work of others and the politics of such a rearticulation. Second, I similarly frame Joudrie’s 1995 trial as a referential and intertextual discourse based in precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1990 when it ruled that expert testimony on the “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in the R. v. Lavallee case (Shaffer 1). This allows me to consider a consequence of the ruling often overlooked in feminist literature: due to the fact that the original defendant, Angelique Lavallee, was a Métis woman whose identity was erased in the courtroom and in case law, subsequent trials employing the “battered woman syndrome” defence repeat settler relations entrenched in colonial violence. Third, I expose how representations can fail by thinking through what Stephen Couser calls the auto/bio/ethics of life writing, which reveals the limits of Canadian laws and literatures. Ultimately, this discussion generates questions about who is considered human under the law and how life writing might re-imagine the “reasonable” human in more just and compassionate ways. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-28 10:28:24.988

The current trend of global violence and their impact on families and communities as well as the field of university education is scary for a society that is struggling with this false sense of apathy and complacency. How did the ordinary people get seduced to the idea that there is no way out of this global assault? How then do we extricate ourselves from this “tortured consciousness” (Asante, 2007) and this false sense of “nihilism” (West, 1994) and recoup this “incommensurable loss” (Simmons, 2010) to global violence? Even more crucial, where is the place of education in retrieving this incommensurable loss while providing hope and possibility for a better future? Provoked by the desire to have answers to these questions, the dissertation relies on the knowledge and experiences of twenty qualitatively selected university activists and existing literature to critically examine the non-violent praxes of Gandhi and King, Jr. and their pedagogical implications for transformative university education. The dissertation further draws on the knowledge of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X to bring complex and nuanced readings to violence and non-violence. The dissertation notes that violence and non-violence are not mutually exclusive as already known. The dissertation also notes that while resistive violence may be justified, it does not necessarily guarantee true transformation, reconciliation, and healing. Instead, love, humility, truth, dialogue, non-violent direct action, discipline, and spirituality are salient in achieving true transformation in university activism. The dissertation further observes that educational activism is more than walking on the street with placards to protest against institutional violence. Sometimes, the secret activism that is done strategically within the corridors of power can achieve more far-reaching results than the open protest against power on the street. The dissertation concludes with six key non-violent strategies that can help in social and political mobilization of university students for transformative university education.