This thesis is about Cree people who many refer to themselves as Ininew and whose original language is Ininewin. The main focus of this thesis is to generate dialogue on the colonial legacies that affect the Ininewak at Pimicikamak today in the area of community governance and the community’s creative responses to colonialism. First this paper provides a synopsis of the colonial history of Pimicikamak, making reference to the First Written Law (Pimicikamak Okimawin Onasowewin) and how this is a step forward to decolonization. Pimicikamak Nation`s government is recently new. It empowers the four councils: the Elders Council, Women’s Council, Youth Council, and Executive Council to make and amend laws as direction from its citizens. Modern written Pimicikamak customary law is subject to acceptance by consensus of a general assembly of the Pimicikamak public. This thesis will also discuss methods of the current colonial-derived governance system to provide a critique of the mechanisms that continue to raise havoc on Indigenous peoples. As well, this thesis will discuss the concepts of self-governance and suggest that in order to decolonize and liberate Indigenous people from the colonial entrapment that binds them to a governance system foreign to their own, there must be a committed, intellectual awareness and comprehension of the roots that continue to undermine Indigenous peoples, including Pimicikamak. This awareness is needed to visualize and comprehend centuries of systematic displacement and to acknowledge that the current colonial system still represents its history.

This thesis is about Cree people who many refer to themselves as Ininew and whose original language is Ininewin. The main focus of this thesis is to generate dialogue on the colonial legacies that affect the Ininewak at Pimicikamak today in the area of community governance and the community’s creative responses to colonialism. First this paper provides a synopsis of the colonial history of Pimicikamak, making reference to the First Written Law (Pimicikamak Okimawin Onasowewin) and how this is a step forward to decolonization. Pimicikamak Nation`s government is recently new. It empowers the four councils: the Elders Council, Women’s Council, Youth Council, and Executive Council to make and amend laws as direction from its citizens. Modern written Pimicikamak customary law is subject to acceptance by consensus of a general assembly of the Pimicikamak public. This thesis will also discuss methods of the current colonial-derived governance system to provide a critique of the mechanisms that continue to raise havoc on Indigenous peoples. As well, this thesis will discuss the concepts of self-governance and suggest that in order to decolonize and liberate Indigenous people from the colonial entrapment that binds them to a governance system foreign to their own, there must be a committed, intellectual awareness and comprehension of the roots that continue to undermine Indigenous peoples, including Pimicikamak. This awareness is needed to visualize and comprehend centuries of systematic displacement and to acknowledge that the current colonial system still represents its history.

As the number of Indigenous people/s in Canadian cities is increasing, more research in the field of decolonization is needed to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of how to decolonize urban settler space. This thesis takes a critical qualitative and decolonization approach to investigate how Indigenous people/s experience urban settler space by using a case study of Indigenous students at the University of Ottawa. Through sharing circles, personal interviews, and reflexive journaling, I centre my participants’ experiences and perceptions of the University of Ottawa campus as space. In the first results chapter (Chapter 3), I present my participants’ perceptions of the built environment of the campus and in turn identify the contours of a settler space. In the next chapter (Chapter 4), I examine the participants’ experiences of the campus as a social space. Their responses reveal that settler spaces are imbued with settler norms – what I call settlernormativity – that often reproduce unequal settler-Indigenous relations in and through space. Drawing from my participants’ views on how to decolonize campus space, in Chapter 5, I propose acts of decolonization in space-time as a strategy to decolonize settler urban spaces.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-345). Also available online in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This study examines how decolonization, both as a political problem and as a historical periodization, figured in the postwar thought of a group of liberal American thinkers who considered the decline of European empires to be a more significant historical phenomenon than the Cold War. These figures — in policy-suggesting venues such as the Council on Foreign Relations as well as in the departments of universities — entertained a variety of approaches for how to handle the “colonial problem.” After examining the late 1940s and 1950s, when decolonization was still considered manageable by these US elites, the study moves inside Cold War-era universities to show how hinge-thinkers in several disciplines and subfields came to view decolonization less as a process that could be governed than a crisis that required new thinking. The figures examined include Rupert Emerson, Samuel Huntington, Clifford Geertz, and others who negotiated European colonial knowledge and transformed the focus of their disciplines, as well as the relationship of their disciplines to the US state. The Conclusion examines the way these American thinkers accounted for what was widely perceived as the tragedy of the Third World liberation, and how they theorized about the period in retrospect. The study ends by arguing that the emergence of “globalization” as a concept in the early 1980s was significantly conditioned by the withdrawal of liberal political hopes for the future of the Global South, where they were substituted with market-based imaginaries and panaceas.

A Muskego Inninuwuk methodology provided the foundation to explore experiences of individuals who possess both Indigenous (Cree) and non-Indigenous ancestry in the development of their identities. Natural conversations facilitated sitting with and listening to Cree Elders and engaging with mixed-ancestry Cree individuals about the stories of their identities. The overall goal was to create space for individuals to express impacts of systems, relationships and ways to come to understand their overall wellbeing and connection to ancestors through stories of identity. Elders shared stories of disconnection and intergenerational experiences that caused diversion from the natural progression of Cree identity development as impacts of colonization. They also shared their stories of re-connection and healing. Common experiences mixed-blood Cree participants highlighted: the impact of colonization on their understanding and expression of themselves as individuals and as members of community, the complexity of their experiences of identity, and how wellbeing is connected to healing. Stories shared processes of healing, decolonization and resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing in reclamation of self.

A Muskego Inninuwuk methodology provided the foundation to explore experiences of individuals who possess both Indigenous (Cree) and non-Indigenous ancestry in the development of their identities. Natural conversations facilitated sitting with and listening to Cree Elders and engaging with mixed-ancestry Cree individuals about the stories of their identities. The overall goal was to create space for individuals to express impacts of systems, relationships and ways to come to understand their overall wellbeing and connection to ancestors through stories of identity. Elders shared stories of disconnection and intergenerational experiences that caused diversion from the natural progression of Cree identity development as impacts of colonization. They also shared their stories of re-connection and healing. Common experiences mixed-blood Cree participants highlighted: the impact of colonization on their understanding and expression of themselves as individuals and as members of community, the complexity of their experiences of identity, and how wellbeing is connected to healing. Stories shared processes of healing, decolonization and resurgence of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing in reclamation of self.

The work at hand traces the trajectory of one particular iteration of decolonization praxis, from its origins in pre-colonial Andean thought through to the consciously traditional collective life being forged by six Quechua communities in Qosqo, Perú. It diverges from other investigations of Indigenous praxes by undertaking a purposefully non-comparative analysis of both the concepts and strategies employed, as well as of the consonances and tensions between the two. The case study detailed here offers a rebuttal to prior theories of an Indigenous political absence in the Peruvian highlands through offering evidence of a uniquely Andean place-based politics. It details efforts to revitalize and repatriate the cultural landscape of the Quechua ayllu, drawing on a variety of tactics to assert the primacy of the relationship between Andean Peoples and Andean lands. This is decolonization as relocalization, wherein the near-ubiquitous ‘local’ of non- and anti-state discourses is reconceptualised as ‘emplacement.’ / Graduate