The social and economic restructuring accompanying increasing globalisation has provided new opportunities and new limits for social and ethnic movements in New Zealand as elsewhere. The purpose of this thesis is to establish the theory of tribal-capitalism through an examination of the responses to these changing global economic circumstances that have characterised the Maori ethnification, indigenisation and retribalisation movements since the 1970s. Although both the initial 'prefigurative' and the later 'strategic'(Breines, 1980:421) routes to tino rangatiratanga ('Maori sovereignty') were attempts to restore traditional social relations and secure political and economic autonomy from the dominant Pakeha society, the projects are distinguished by different approaches. On the one hand the 'prefigurative' traditionalist project indicted both capitalism and Pakeha society as its exponents sought a return to the precapitalist social relations of the pre-Contact era. On the other hand exponents of the 'strategic' project sought to establish a concordat with capitalist Pakeha society based upon the assumption that a capitalist economy could be made compatible with Maori political and cultural autonomy. It is argued that neither project, 'prefigurative' traditionalism nor the 'strategic march through the institutions of capitalism', achieved the objective of tino rangatiratanga. Irrespective of approach, Maori ethnification, indigenisation and retribalisation became reshaped and reconstituted by the conditions that made the movements possible and that shaped them in decisive ways. These tino rangatiratanga movements emerged from the institutional channels enabled by Pakeha bicultural idealists and given substance by the Waitangi Tribunal as a tribal-capitalist regime of accumulation characterised by exploitative class relations and reified communal relations. An extensive range of case studies is employed to provide evidence that tests the hypothesis of the emergence of tribal-capitalism from out of the projects that attempted to retain the traditional in a world dominated by capitalist relations. Despite the structural opportunities provided by Pakeha bicultural idealists, and despite the different approaches of the Maori tino rangatiratanga projects, it was not possible to restore communal relations of production. Objective forces, rather than internal miscalculation, ineptitude or corruption, brought about the failure as firstly 'prefigurative' and then 'strategic' projects became doomed attempts to sidestep class location within capitalist structures. The various studies examine the ways in which the 'prefigurative' and 'strategic' projects not only led to the transformation of the ethnification and indigenisation movements into the new class formations of tribal-capitalism, but actually became constitutive of the class fractions that define the regime. The dialectical interactive of agency and structure which transformed the projects became a reconstituting and shaping mechanism of change. First the study of the Pakeha new class's bicultural project grounds the later studies by locating the institutional inclusion of Maori indigenous particularity in the universalism of the new class humanists. Biculturalism established relatively benign conditions for the tino rangatiratanga projects by providing both opportunities and resources for Maori development. It is in the retribalising form of that development that an indigenous version of the capitalist regime of accumulation is located. The next three sections of the thesis examine the 'prefigurative' and 'strategic' routes of this indigenous particularity into the new inclusive structures in studies of: a reviving Maori family, an ascendant tribe, a separate Maori education system and the creation of the national Maori fishing industry. The outcomes of each study are examined to trace the failure of both approaches as particular groups within the retribalisation movement developed new and exclusive relationships to the traditional lands, waters and knowledge. The concluding section contrasts culturalist theories of the Maori tino rangatiratanga projects with the hypothesis of the emergence of tribal-capitalism advanced in this thesis. The claim that cultural strength can resist the imposition of capitalist class relations is found not to be sustained.

The examination of the tools that prehistoric people crafted for subsistence and related practices offers distinctive insights into how they lived their lives. Most often, researchers study these practices in isolation, by tool type or by material. However, by using a relational perspective, my research explores the tool assemblage as a whole including bone, stone and shell. This allows me to study the changes in tool industries in relation to one another, something that I could not accomplish by studying only one material or tool type. I use this broader approach to tool manufacture and use for the artifact assemblage from Crystal River (8CI1) and Roberts Island (8CI41), two sequential Middle and Late Woodland Period (A.D. 1-1050) archaeological sites on the central Gulf coast of Florida. The results of my research show that people made different choices, both in the type of material they used and the kind of tools they manufactured during the time they lived at these sites as subsistence practices shifted. Evidence of these trends aligns with discrete changes in strata within our excavations. The timing of depositional events and the artifacts found within each suggest people also used the sites differently through time. These trends exemplify the role of crafting tools in the way people maintain connections with their mutable social and physical world.

Students of colonialism know well that the stories we tell have the capacity to make, maintain, or transform our relationships as well as our material futures. As earlier work has shown, Indigenous and settler peoples encountered and apprehended one another through story at first contact and in all subsequent contact moments, reaching right up to present-day mechanisms for negotiating conflicts over rights, resources, sovereignty, and historical injustice. In this dissertation, I explore in depth the role of story as a social practice in Indigenous-state relations, examining a series of key encounters over the last 150 years in which Indigenous peoples challenged and contested the state’s possession of their lands in what would become British Columbia. Informed by archival and community-based research with two Indigenous nations – the Stó:lō and the Haida – this study offers a history of Indigenous tactics in pursuit of the larger objective of decolonization, especially since the 1960s. Each of the four main chapters explores how Indigenous peoples have engaged distinct state-sanctioned mechanisms for addressing the state’s dispossession of their lands. The first chapter examines the dynamics of orality and literacy in a series of Stó:lō petitions from the late nineteenth century, a time when reserves were being reduced in order to accommodate a rapid influx of settlers seeking agricultural lands. Chapter 2 looks at Stó:lō experiences of treaty negotiation in the early twenty-first century, and how they are attempting to re-write the master narrative of Stó:lō -state relations. Chapter 3 focuses on the Haida blockade of logging in the mid-1980s, examining how the Haida acted into being what would become an iconic story of Haida nationhood. Finally, chapter 5 explores story and belief through a close study of the narrative dynamics of Haida participation in the Joint Review of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project between 2012-2014. In each of these encounters, Stó:lō and Haida people exceed the limited narrative spaces they are assigned for communicating who they are and how they relate to their territories and to the state, while attempting to shift the established narrative. Recent scholarship on Indigenous-state relations has focused on how liberal settler states continue to exclude Indigenous peoples even through their gestures at including them into the body politic. While such work on the state is critical, I suggest that it is equally important to understand Indigenous peoples’ demonstrated capacity for collective cultural endurance, and how it exists in tension with the forces acting to assimilate and subsume Indigenous difference within the normative structures of settler society. This study attempts to grasp the nature of this endurance, and demonstrates how narrative is as central to Indigenous peoples’ repossessions of their land as it was to the state’s original dispossession of it. / Graduate / 2018-08-08

Applies James Gee's concept of Discourses to illustrate how literacy and orality thematically constitute hybrid identity in Silko's novel Ceremony. Then, applies Wallace Chafe's linguistic framework of integration and involvement showing that the novel is a linguistic hybrid, not just a text that thematically elevates hybridity. Unlike other Native American authors who create half-breed characters merely as bridges between two cultures, Silko creates her character Tayo as an embodiment of an emergent hybrid culture.

This thesis introduces an obscure storytelling device, The Unsung Hero character, as one way of examining how movies function as stories. This character is often overlooked, as it frequently cloaks its idiosyncrasies, thus it lacks any apparent signs of internal conflict. This analysis foregrounds the character’s overall functionality, found only in rare instances and typically in the story of a movie. With effective implementation in a story, as a functional harbinger device, brief appearances of The Unsung Hero character demonstrate flashpoints or disclosures of a forthcoming misfortune in the story. This movie analysis shows how The Unsung Hero character functions effectively as a harbinger device in stories.

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.

Comprehensive planning can help communities engage in purposeful and sustainable land use development. Previous research has indicated that Indian reservations in the United States often face unique roadblocks to these planning efforts: checkerboard patterns of tribal and nontribal ownership, and the presence of both tribal and local governments exercising land use authority within the same shared space. These roadblocks can lead to uncooperative, uncoordinated, or unsustainable development. Despite these noted problems, there remains an important gap in the current literature regarding solutions to overcome these roadblocks. The purpose of this study was to address that gap. Guided by Forester's critical planning theory to critically examine the social and historical roots of planning within a particular community, this qualitative case study examined government records and conducted 18 interviews of tribal and local government officials. Data analysis consisted of coding data to reveal emergent themes relating to cooperative land use planning in the future. These themes included: (a) approaching planning with a regional philosophy in mind, (b) strengthening interpersonal relationships, (c) finding ways to fairly compensate each other for government services, (d) continuing to acknowledge each government's ability to govern within this shared space, and (e) refraining from asserting authority over a neighboring government. This research is an important contribution to the existing literature and enhances social change initiatives by providing guidance for tribal and local government officials to increase cooperative land use planning.

The inconsistencies of the state and federal policy toward Native populations and additionally those inconsistencies within the two governments themselves, require the maintenance of Indian and Alaskan Native organizations with sophisticated mechanisms developed to advocate “reforms” in Indian services to meet unique Indian needs. Indian and Alaskan Native social workers invariably find themselves at the confluence of client service provision and surviving the extension of policies available to them from resource allocators for the purpose of service provision. In order to approach this dilemma, the Native American Social Work Symposium, held in May of 1977, convened on the basis of three purposes: To provide a conferencing situation with Indian and Alaskan Native social workers and non-Indian social workers who primarily provide social welfare services to Indians, to address specific problems involving the provision of social welfare services, and to present a series of concurrent workshops to provide specific training curriculum pertaining to Native social service concerns.

Due to the L.D.S. philosophy concerning the origin and destiny of the American Indians, Brigham Young felt the gospel should be taught to the various Indian tribes. Thus, at the spring semi-annual conference of the Church in 1855, a number of men were called as missionaries and assigned to establish five Indian missions. Four of these, Elk Mountain, Las Vegas, White Mountain, and Salmon River, were in or near the Utah-Idaho region and the fifth was in the Indian Territory.

Since the signing of their Final Agreement and Self-Government Agreement in 2003, Kluane Fist Nation (KFN), located primarily in the southwestern Yukon, has been navigating their post-settlement realities as an autonomous self-governing First Nation. According to the Canadian state, these Agreements intended to achieve certainty for all Parties, including certainty over jurisdiction, and KFN's ability to govern their own land and peoples. Two decades into the implementation of their Agreements, I ask, what has been achieved in actuality? In partnership with Kluane First Nation, this research sought to produce results KFN desired and found valuable. As such, it explores KFN's chosen topic of Traditional Leases, alongside essential entwined elements such as KFN's enactment of value, their navigation of uncertain and precarious land claim legislation as techniques of jurisdiction and territoriality, and taking control of research within their Traditional Territory. This exploration stems from our research partnership, my ethical commitments to KFN, and research's methods and methodologies. I argue that in their work with researchers, and their policies and practices on the land, KFN is enacting their vision for a meaningful and good life, within ongoing settler-colonial attempts to maintain control. KFN is engaging in and enacting what they find valuable in their use of their land despite ever-increasing obstacles, and often in ways which remain invisible to the settler-state.