There is little work done in the area of indigenous disability identity issues and how they are recognised in domestic and international human rights laws. The discourse of disability has always been based on social constructionism and without it, there is no identity. I discuss its relevance to indigenous (Māori) with disabilities and how the multiplicitous nature of the identity of other has a particular impact when indigenous, gender and disability are all identified from marginalised groups. I also explore the impact of westernised thinking around impairment, in particular the models of disabilities on indigenous well-being. The issues of family (whānau), whakawhanaungatanga (family relationships), interdependence (community) and collectivity identities central to indigenous thinking are largely ignored by law and policy, yet central to indigenous identity. This ignorance in policy has led to the disparities that continue to remain for indigenous persons with disabilities, particularly those from within thematic identity groups.

This dissertation examines the construction and evolution of categories of indigeneity within the context of the Oblate (Roman Catholic) apostolate at Île-à-Crosse in present-day north-western Saskatchewan between 1845 and 1898. While focusing on one central mission station, this study illuminates broad historical processes that informed Oblate perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate concepts of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of missionary correspondence, mission records and published reports. In the process, this dissertation challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, this dissertation contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

This dissertation examines the construction and evolution of categories of indigeneity within the context of the Oblate (Roman Catholic) apostolate at Île-à-Crosse in present-day north-western Saskatchewan between 1845 and 1898. While focusing on one central mission station, this study illuminates broad historical processes that informed Oblate perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate concepts of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of missionary correspondence, mission records and published reports. In the process, this dissertation challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, this dissertation contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

<p>The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and legislation. I contend that, taken together, these works narrate an ecological vision of national affiliation: a concept of the nation as an ecological, natural zone of interdependence and its citizens (or non-citizen inhabitants) as members of this environmentally-conceptualized nation. This shared narrative of natural collectivity gives rise to what I call an "organic citizen" - the literary-political figure of an individual imagined to be a natural member of an ecological national body. I show that this concept of eco-citizenship both informs and is informed by contemporaneous concepts of indigeneity (what it means to be native) and by the actual political positioning of the American Indian in the U.S. citizenry throughout the century.</p><p>In five chapters, I argue that environmentalism is a site in which subjectivity is shaped, initially establishing modes of assimilative collectivity at the turn of the last century and later providing a realm in which the terms of subject affiliation may be analyzed and revised. I show how environmentalist discourse is profoundly connected to democratic practice and membership and how it formulates models of citizen collectivity. I contend that this discourse encompasses significantly more than a narrowly defined set of conservationist concerns for ecological entities, and can be used as a site of activism. Certain forms of stories - narratives that question these terms of national affiliation- expose the nuances of environmentalist thought. This type of storytelling offers a means through which environmentalist thought can become a realm of citizen engagement or activist possibility, opening access to and agency within a participatory democracy. An examination of this eco-narrative, I suggest, provides useful insights into how land use and rhetoric give definition to the way U.S. citizenship is socially imagined, legally adjudicated, and independently or communally practiced in a democratic system.</p><p>The first chapter examines the simultaneous emergence of wilderness narratives with the science of ecology and discourses concerned about national and geographical assimilation of communities and individuals of ethnic difference. I draw upon the writings of social reformers, particularly Jane Addams, ecologists Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederick Clements, and environmentalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Together, I argue they demonstrate how immigrant and impoverished subjects living in urban zones were rhetorically imagined and physically and metaphorically associated with natural entities. I contend that this literal naturalization makes immigrant presence less threatening to a national collective by converting these bodies and places into natural resources to be consumed for nationalist purposes. This version of citizenship imagines collectivity as a form of organicism, a process by which foreign subjects and non-citizens can be incorporated into a citizenry as natural resources while not necessarily legally constituted as citizens of the nation.</p><p>While the rhetoric surrounding land use began to take new political, constitutional and sociocultural form in the first wave of a formal environmental movement, there simultaneously was a dramatic jurisprudential shift in Indian status in the U.S. This chapter explores how the formulation of an "organic citizen" at the turn of the century draws upon circulating concepts of indigeneity. I bring together Indian reform policy, specifically the Dawes Allotment Act, environmental policy, particularly the Antiquities Act, and fictional writings by Mary Austin and George Bird Grinnell. These narratives demonstrate the consistency with which American Indians were imagined as organically connected to natural lands. I argue that the result is a concept of indigenous organicism that is predicated upon the Indian being publicly, although uncomfortably, imagined as a natural constituent of a citizenry and Indian land as a natural part of a national body. Chapter Three examines the fictional and political writings of Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman to consider how they use stories and their public roles to analyze the legal and discursive connections between an environmentalist sensibility and concepts of indigeneity. I contend that Eastman and Zitkala-Sa begin to use a language of rights and democracy within this eco-discourse as a way to insert the native as a rights-bearing citizen in the U.S. nation, putting forth a race analysis that ultimately disrupts the idea of ecological assimilation prevalent at the time. Reading their work alongside key environmental policies, like the Organic Act of 1916, Indian reforms, like the Citizenship Act of 1924, and Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House highlights the persistence of a concept of natural indigeneity that continued to be narrated even after American Indians are given legal citizenship. </p><p>Eastman's and Zitkala-Sa's use of the environmentalist/native link as a means for race critique falls out of environmentalist thought and practice in a critical moment of transition in the environmental movement. Their use of storytelling and sense of political right, however, lays the foundation for the type of environmental narrative that emerges with the second stage of the environmental movement. My fourth chapter shifts to this moment, focusing on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). I argue that both authors use an environmental narrative, particularly storytelling, as a means to imagine citizen engagement in a participatory democracy. However, while Leopold and Carson incorporate a language of political rights, they do not carefully factor into their versions of national/ecological belonging and action the ways in which race and class identities affect the social, political, and legal standing of various subjects within the eco-nation. </p><p>My final chapter explores how a race and class critique in environmentalist thought and politics returns in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I draw from significant legislation and Supreme Court opinions that explicitly defined the political rights of ecological objects and species, such as Sierra Club v. Morton, the Endangered Species Act, and a series of legal battles that emerged around the construction of the Tellico Dam, particularly the Cherokees' resistance to its development. These documents and cases deliberate over the political standing and rights of natural, non-human entities, but they circumnavigate engagement with questions of political standing for geographically and socially marginalized human citizens in the U.S., although this issue is implicitly present and strategically drawn upon in their arguments. This lost component takes shape and political articulation in the following emergence of the environmental justice movement. The politics of voice - "speaking for oneself" - that emerges particularly out of indigenous environmental justice movements highlights the use of storytelling as an activist practice. In their careful novelization of environmental activism, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) not only pinpoint the interconnections, but also the injustices that arise out of the way human and ecological subjectivities are legally and culturally constructed. I argue that both authors use the literary form to model how stories and the act of storytelling allow for the articulation of and/or resistance to certain terms of national affiliation. Both Hogan's and Ozeki's novels bring forth an expanded sense of environmentalism, showing that storytelling can redefine our roles as U.S. citizens and position ourselves as active agents in democratic discourse, policy-making and change. </p><p>We are living in another pivotal moment of environmentalist thought as new attention is given to the way environmental conditions are deteriorating and as popular culture begins to take interest in these issues. It is crucial that Literary Studies rigorously engage with these issues to examine the kinds of narratives being generated. While Ecocriticism and Native American Studies have remained somewhat marginalized from the core of Literary Studies, this project (particularly in this moment) argues that these types of criticism and theory have an imperative role to play in illuminating narratives of identity, nation, and citizenship.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis engages with aspects of Witi Ihimaera's oeuvre that demonstrate influences from cultures other than Maori. These may be overt in the fiction, such as plot settings in Venice, Vietnam and Canada, or implicit in his writing mode and style, influenced by English romanticism, Pakeha cultural nationalism, Katherine Mansfield's modernist epiphanies, and Italian verismo opera. In revealing Ihimaera's indebtedness to cultural and aesthetic influences commonly seen as irrelevant to contemporary Maori literature, this thesis reveals a depth and richness in Ihimaera's imaginary that is frequently overlooked and undervalued in New Zealand literary interpretation. Illuminating cross-cultural influence in Ihimaera's works calls into question the applicability of biculturalism as a comprehensive manner of accounting for both Maori cultural ambitions of self-determination and the Maori relationship with Pakeha on the national level. Far from an "us-versus-them" dialectic based on a separatist notion of two individually self-sufficient and complete cultures, Ihimaera's fiction shows Maori culture to have been shaped by a long history of interaction and influence with the colonial British and the Pakeha. This is manifest in the way that the Maori sovereignty and renaissance movements, which gathered force in the 1970s, have been inspired by European concepts of modernity, the structures of nation building and, more recently, by Western globalization described in the theories of transculturation and diaspora. Similarly, in New Zealand literature, Maori writing is commonly considered a parallel genre which describes a distinctive Maori worldview and literary style. Contrary to the familiar interpretation of Ihimaera's fiction from this standpoint, this thesis argues that an emphasis on difference tends to lose sight of fiction's capacity to bring into play issues of differentiation, originality and hybridity through its very form and function. In effect, Maori negotiation of its sovereign space in its literature takes place in its forms rather than in its storyline, for example in multiple linguistic significations, in the text's unstable relationship with reality, and the way that imagery escapes concrete, definitive explanation. In this optic, this thesis analyses little-discussed aspects of Ihimaera's fiction, including his love of opera, the extravagance of his baroque lyricism, his exploration of the science-fiction genre, and his increasing interest in taking Maori into the international arena. While reading against the grain of current New Zealand literary practice, this thesis does not intend to contest such reading. Rather, it endeavours to present an additional, complementary analytical framework, based on a conviction that contemporary Maori-Pakeha cultural and literary negotiation and contestation is far from unique, but a local manifestation of other international and historical efforts for recognition and respect.

This dissertation examines the construction and evolution of categories of indigeneity within the context of the Oblate (Roman Catholic) apostolate at Île-à-Crosse in present-day north-western Saskatchewan between 1845 and 1898. While focusing on one central mission station, this study illuminates broad historical processes that informed Oblate perceptions and impelled their evolution over a fifty-three-year period. In particular, this study illuminates processes that shaped Oblate concepts of sauvage and métis. It does this through a qualitative analysis of missionary correspondence, mission records and published reports. In the process, this dissertation challenges the orthodox notion that Oblate commentators simply discovered and described a singular, empirically existing and readily identifiable Métis population. Rather, this dissertation contends that Oblates played an important role in the conceptual production of les métis.

This study deals with the implications of implementing the World Heritage site of Laponia in northern Sweden. Laponia, consisting of previously well-known national parks such as Stora Sjöfallet and Sarek, obtained its World Heritage status in 1996. Both the biological and geological significance of the area and the local Sami reindeer herding culture are included in the justification for World Heritage status. This thesis explores how Laponia became an arena for the long-standing Sami ethno-political struggle for increased self-governance and autonomy. In many other parts of the world, various joint management schemes between indigenous groups and national environmental protection agencies are more and more common, but in Sweden no such agreements between the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the Sami community have been tested. The local Sami demanded to have a significant influence, not to say control, over the future management of Laponia. These were demands that were not initially acknowledged by the local and national authorities, and the negotiations about the management of Laponia continued over a period of ten years. This thesis shows how the local Sami initially were marginalized in the negotiations both because of their alleged “difference” and because of their alleged “similarity” to the majority population. By navigating through what can be described as “a politics of difference,” the Sami involved eventually succeeded in articulating their cultural and historical difference in such a way that they were perceived as different but equal in relation to the other actors. By describing the many twist and turns of the negotiations between the local Sami and the local authorities, this thesis shows how the involvement of international agencies and global protection aspirations, such as the World Heritage Convention, might establish a link between the local and international levels that to a certain extent bypasses the national level and empowers indigenous/local peoples and their ethno-political objectives. As such, this study demonstrates how local/indigenous peoples’ involvement in environmental protection work is above all a political issue that ultimately leads to a situation where their relation with the state authorities is reshaped and reassessed.

The thesis focuses on representations of Indigeneity by non-Indigenous writers and in particular the author's practice in the writing of a children's novel, in which the relationship between non-Indigenous and Indigenous characters is represented as part of a colonial and post-colonial, contemporary world. The exegesis takes an experimental approach to representing theory in a fictocritical, multi-genre form.

Submitted by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2016-12-07T15:04:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Parcial - Eliaquim T. Cunha.pdf: 609438 bytes, checksum: 91ca5b7c50d4858a79afa95cc02a616f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2016-12-07T15:04:57Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Parcial - Eliaquim T. Cunha.pdf: 609438 bytes, checksum: 91ca5b7c50d4858a79afa95cc02a616f (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2016-12-07T15:05:18Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Parcial - Eliaquim T. Cunha.pdf: 609438 bytes, checksum: 91ca5b7c50d4858a79afa95cc02a616f (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-07T15:05:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação Parcial - Eliaquim T. Cunha.pdf: 609438 bytes, checksum: 91ca5b7c50d4858a79afa95cc02a616f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-09-13 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The goal of this research is to describe policies and Protection Service Projects to Indians - SPI, with regard to their participation in the process of construction of Rondônia. Army historical Ethnography procedure; serving me of anthropological, sociological instruments, historical and geographic. In this way, seek to break with the absence of indigenous institution with regard to studies on the highlighted region. To do this, divide the search as follows: in the first chapter, "Rondônia: an excerpt from the great siege of peace" deal on "Rondônia" provided a political project, bringing Edgar Roquette-Pinto (1915), when he formulated the project of construction of a antropogeográfica called province as "Rondônia" honoring a national hero, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. In chapter two, "the construction of the ninth Regional Inspectorate: the politics of indigenous in Rondônia tutelage", from documents produced by the agents of the SPI. In this opportunity, while the text is formed by the meeting of the elements to the study of the formation of Rondônia, I emphasize the context in which the ninth Regional Inspectorate was built (1940-1945) coming to events occurring in the 1950. This Province was under the jurisdiction of the Federal territory of Guaporé. The third chapter, "the SPI in the memoirs: Cassupá trajectory indigenous in the formation of Rondônia", present the experience of a group that lived several offsets accompanying the SPI, coming to live in the city of Porto Velho and that in recent years participated in the "indigenous peoples protection program Cassupá and Salamãi, in the area of influence of the Santo Antônio Porto Velho , Rondônia. The reading that I propose, in addition to build a chronology of political and administrative life of the SPI, focusing on the construction of the ninth Province, it is about understanding a complex network of scientific and military actions, amalgamated to a State formation process, otherness and producing social change that have structured in certain propositions the formation of Rondônia. / O objetivo da pesquisa é descrever políticas e projetos do Serviço de Proteção aos Índios – SPI, no que diz respeito a sua participação no processo da construção de Rondônia. Exercito o procedimento da etnografia histórica; servindo-me de instrumentos antropológicos, sociológicos, historiográficos e geográficos. Deste modo, busco romper com a ausência dessa instituição indigenista no que concerne aos estudos sobre a região em destaque. Para tanto, divido a pesquisa da seguinte forma: no primeiro capítulo, “Rondônia: um trecho do grande cerco de paz” trato sobre “Rondônia” na condição de um projeto político, trazendo Edgard Roquette-Pinto (1915), quando formulou o projeto da construção de uma província antropogeográfica denominada como “Rondônia” homenageando um herói nacional, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. No capítulo dois “A construção da Nona Inspetoria Regional: A política da tutela indigenista na formação de Rondônia”, a partir de documentos produzidos pelos agentes do SPI. Nesta oportunidade, ao passo que o texto é formado pela reunião dos elementos para o estudo da formação de Rondônia, sublinho o contexto no qual a Nona Inspetoria Regional foi construída (1940-1945) chegando a abordar eventos ocorridos na década de 1950. Essa Inspetoria esteve sob jurisdição do Território Federal do Guaporé. O terceiro capítulo, “O SPI nas memórias indígenas: A trajetória Cassupá na formação de Rondônia”, apresento a experiência de um grupo que viveu vários deslocamentos acompanhando o SPI, chegando a viver na cidade de Porto Velho e que nos últimos anos participaram do “Programa de Proteção aos Povos Indígenas Cassupá e Salamãi, na área de influência da UHE Santo Antônio Porto Velho, Rondônia”. A leitura que proponho, além de construir uma cronologia da vida político-administrativa do SPI, focando na construção da Nona Inspetoria, trata-se de compreender sobre uma complexa rede de ações militares e científicas, amalgamadas a um processo de formação de Estado, produtoras de alteridades e mudanças sociais que estruturaram em determinadas proposições a formação de Rondônia.

This ethnographic study describes the intersection between politics and education, and between discourses and practice pertaining to indigeneity among the Manobo of Tagpalico in a highland area of the Philippines. The analysis reveals the interrogation of my own personal values as I came to understand what are held to be important values by the Manobo. For example, my idealistic perceptions of indigenous leaders were challenged by what I came to appreciate about their leadership skills relative to strategic and situated participation in the context of complex relations with various outsiders. This study further explains how adults and children actively engage in social processes through which they negotiate what counts among them as significant, appropriate knowledge and learning. It discusses how global discourses of education, literacy, and indigenous peoples are spoken about in ideal terms, but enacted differently in local practice. Salient in understanding this study is an appreciation of how the role of learning in practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) plays an important part in situated participation of actors in the educational enterprise. Against a background of local understanding about what it is important to know about – principally farming and other economic activities - and international discourses of indigeneity, schooling, literacy and development, children, parents, leaders, teachers, and nuns have appropriated and negotiated their notions of being ‘educated’ and ‘indigenous’ within a social space that is the school setting. As the Manobo explore what it means to be ‘educated’ in a politically volatile environment, they also learn to use their understanding of what it means to be ‘indigenous’ in order to negotiate their positionalities relative to external groups like the nuns, teachers, anthropologists, the military, guerrillas, and other non-Manobo groups.This study argues that learning to become educated transforms understanding of what it is to be a more valued person in the community, which altogether translates into significant differences in the children’s sense of self or personhood. Children are allowed to negotiate their social position within the family and the community through education but at the same time it also creates new forms of ‘inequality’ and ‘social separation’ (Froerer, 2011:695). For example, emerging forms of social differentiation in Tagpalico are evident in the processes through which more female members are becoming educated, bringing in a greater contribution to the family’s economic resources and thereby, developing a sense of choice about their lives as ‘individuals’ in charge, to a certain extent, over their own destinies.