<p> This dissertation explores the artistic expressions of Native womanhood by Native women artists. The intention is to offer further examples of creative acts of resistance that strengthen Native identities, reinforce female empowerment, and reclaim voice, and art. This qualitative study utilized the narratives and the artwork of six Native women artists from diverse artistic practices and tribe/nation affiliations. Visual arts examples included in this study are digital images, muralism, Ledger art, beadworks, Navajo rugs, and Navajo jewelry. Through Kim Anderson&rsquo;s theoretical Native womanhood identity formation model adopted as framework for this study, the results revealed three emergent themes: cultural connections, motherhood, and nurturing the future. Native women artists lived experiences shaped their visual expressions, influencing their materials, approach, subject matter, intentions, motivation and state of mind. This dissertation discloses Native womanhood framework is supportive of visual expressions created by Native women.</p><p>

Data about Indigenous populations in the United States are inconsistent and irrelevant. Federal and state governments and researchers direct most collection, analysis, and use of data about U.S. Indigenous populations. Indigenous Peoples' justified mistrust further complicates the collection and use of these data. Nonetheless, tribal leaders and communities depend on these data to inform decision making. Reliance on data that do not reflect tribal needs, priorities, and self-conceptions threatens tribal self-determination. Tribal data sovereignty through governance of data on Indigenous populations is long overdue. This article provides two case studies of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and their demographic and socioeconomic data initiatives to create locally and culturally relevant data for decision making.

The purpose of this thesis was to draw new insights on Thomas Berger’s classic American novel, Little Big Man, and his representation of fictional violence that is a substantial aspect of any text on the Indian Wars and “Custer’s Last Stand”. History’s major world wars led to shifts in the political climate and a noted change in the way that violence was represented in the arts. Historical, fictional, and cinematic treatments of “Custer’s Last Stand” and violence were each considered in relation to the text. Berger's version of the famed story is a revision of history that shows the protagonist as a dual-member of two violent societies. The thesis concluded that Berger’s updated American legends and unique “white renegade” character led to a representation of violence that spoke to the current state of affairs in 1964 when the world was becoming much more hostile and chaotic place.

The high incidence of obesity and obesity related diseases have been well-documented within First Nations communities across Canada. Therefore, examining current dietary choices and then altering and managing alternative healthier choices are essential in the treatment of obesity and its related diseases. The present article describes a dietary study looking specifically at the dietary choices of women living in a First Nation's community in northwestern Ontario. An ethnography was conducted over a three-week period in which the researcher attended community events and interviewed twenty six women. Experiences in women's lives led them on different life courses. Family involvement and age of women influenced transmission of informal knowledge and feelings of self worth. These and other factors influenced the life course and the resultant "dietary trajectory" from which women made choice. Considering individuals in changing social, cultural and historical climates deemed the life course perspective applicable in this study. Findings suggest that solutions to the "health epidemic" can be found by looking to the women in the community who are making nutritious choices. From this point, formal and informal programs that facilitate reintroduction of traditional knowledge into lives of younger community members can be developed.

This study examines the representations of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis geographies within a contemporary grade-nine Canadian geography textbook. Although First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples have lived on the territory now known as Canada for thousands of years, in the past two hundred years, with the exception of some place names, colonialism has worked to largely remove evidence of their presence from the landscape and to exclude them from the dominant narratives of Canadian geography. In this study, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of a textbook currently approved by the Ontario Ministry of Education's Trillium List for the compulsory grade-nine applied-level Canadian geography course: Canadian Geography: A Sense of Place. First, I consider how the textbook creates knowledge of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples and their geographies. Next, I examine how this creation compares to the textbook's representation of Canadians. Finally, I explore what an Aboriginal geography might look like and how Aboriginal perspectives could be incorporated into the text. The grade-nine Canadian geography course is the only mandatory geography course for students in the applied stream. If students do not continue with geography, the text they use in this course or used by the teacher to organize this course will be their last exposure to geography texts and formal discussions of Aboriginal geographies. This textbook is important because for many students, it will be the only time in their lives that they are systematically exposed to knowledge about First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. While there are attempts at inclusion, old misrepresentations appear again in new forms within this textbook. A major task of this textbook is constructing the nation and presenting a nationalized geography.

In its review of international law, court decisions and federal legislation and policy, this paper confirms that the Crown is not meeting international standards of respect for the connection between Indigenous peoples and the land, is consistently in breach of the Constitution and recommendations from the Canadian Courts to reconcile the rights of Indigenous peoples with the sovereignty of the Crown, excludes First Nation peoples from environmental decision making, and rejects a fundamental principle of most First Nation peoples' traditional cultures; the interconnectedness of all things. This attack on First Nation peoples' inherent rights to self-determination and self-government undermines their capacity to sustain their traditional cultures, which in turn frustrates the preservation of biological diversity. This paper recommends the inclusion of First Nation governments, as equals to the Crown, in environmental governance, thereby facilitating the exercise of traditional laws of respect for the land as a means to help sustain biological diversity.

In October 1869, the fledgling Canadian federation was preparing for the transfer of Rupert's Land and the Northwestern Territory when the Metis set up a Provisional Government in order to resist what they saw as a unilateral annexation of their homeland. Although there were multiple references made to 'republicanism' during the Resistance, no scholar has ever explored whether republican conventions were actually present in political discourse in the District of Assiniboia prior to the Resistance and whether they were effectively activated during the Resistance. Working from the Cambridge School approach of discourse analysis, it first identifies the conventions of democratic rhetorical republicanism, which includes positive and negative liberty, the rule of law, the mixed and balanced constitution and citizenship, which in turn involves virtue, the militia and real property. It then looks at the gradual introduction in Assiniboia of republican discourse from multiple sources, including the United States, Lower Canada, Upper Canada, Ireland, France and Great Britain and its circulation throughout several practical political struggles during the period from 1835 to 1869. In doing so, it shows that certain 'organic intellectuals' acted as 'transmission belts' of republican conventions and that institutional structures were a factor that rendered the activation of such conventions almost inevitable. By the time the Resistance took place in 1869, a more or less fully developed republican paradigm formed part of the linguistic matrix and was available to political actors in Assiniboia. Finally, the thesis shows that republican discourse was effectively mobilised by identifying fragments of republican conventions that were harnessed in various speech-acts during the Resistance. It is argued that republican language was fundamental to the success of the ideological and political manoeuvres of the leaders of the Resistance as it was particularly effective both as an instrument of anti-colonialism and as a pragmatic ideal of self-government that sought to correct the iniquities of colonial government.

My research is a study of the perspectives of resilience by survivors of domestic violence (DV) in three Aboriginal communities. The Executive Directors (EDs) of the women's shelters on these reserves were interviewed, as well as three DV survivors who were identified by the EDs. The meanings articulated by interviewees is intended to provide educators and those in anti-violence efforts with an increased understanding of resilience as defined by Aboriginal DV survivors. The interpretations that were voiced are different from those that are understood according to prevailing Western tradition. Among Aboriginal populations, internally-derived perspectives of resilience, I contend, are foundational in developing curricula aimed at reducing DV and its traumatic manifestations. DV is often deceptively and simplistically construed as the conduct and dynamics of two people within a home. However, my investigative study that includes a comprehensive literature review, exposes the fallacy of this assumption as it pertains to Aboriginal communities: DV has historic origins that are strongly grounded in colonialism. DV is, as well, socially constructed in power hierarchies that sustain patriarchal supremacy, and a devastating social and psychological plague in all reserve communities. My research recognizes that community-based interventions in Aboriginal communities can only be effectively operationalized with the knowledge of the intricacies of colonialism as they pertain specifically to DV. Drawing on traditional beliefs and community principles such as meaningful participation, integration of cultural and spiritual practices, recognition of historical injustices by colonizing forces, consensus-derived decision-making involving women and youth all help inform educational offerings about the actionable content and delivery of resilience teachings. Keywords: Aboriginal, colonialism, domestic violence, resilience, well-being

This thesis consists of three chapters investigating the impact of immigrant language skills on Canadian wages. The first chapter, “Linguistic diversity among Canadian immigrants: 1981-2006”, describes the changes in linguistic diversity among Canadian immigrants, as measured by a preferred linguistic distance measure, the Levenshtein Distance (LD) Index, and documents socio-demographic characteristics of recent immigrants as well as their labour market performance based on their language capital at the time of entry. The LD is an approximation of immigrants’ language skills in the Canadian official languages and represents the “distance” of an immigrant’s reported language to the Canadian official languages. Using the 20% micro-data files of the Canadian Censuses between 1981 and 2006, I assign each immigrant an index number based on two language measures: mother tongue and home language. French and English are defined as the Canadian official languages in Quebec and outside of Quebec, respectively. The main findings suggest that although immigrants’ mother tongues became more “distant” to the Canadian official languages in both regions over time, the language skill of an average immigrant based on home language remained almost the same in Quebec, in particular, between 1981 and 1996. In terms of immigrants’ socio-demographic characteristics and their labour market performance, general patterns were similar across the two regions, although there were significant differences by language groups. In particular, the change in immigrants’ wages by language groups is suggestive of the role of language skills in determining wages. The second chapter, “Immigrant versus native men? Substitutability and the role of linguistic diversity in Canada”, estimates the degree of substitutability between immigrant and native men by incorporating immigrants’ language skills into the analysis and calculates the potential wage effects of immigration on Canadian wages. Using the 20% micro-data files of the Canadian Censuses between 1981 and 2006 and imposing a nested-CES production function on the Canadian economy, I estimate immigrant-native substitutability based on immigrants’ language skills in addition to education levels and years of labour market experience. I use the LD Index to represent immigrants’ language skills by the distance of the mother tongue and home language of an immigrant to English outside of Quebec and to French in Quebec. I define three language groups for immigrants as the high language-skilled, the medium language-skilled, and the low language-skilled. The key findings are as follows. First, home language-based estimates suggest imperfect substitutability in Canada outside of Quebec in some cases. Second, by language skill groups, the low language-skilled immigrants are more likely to be imperfect substitutes for the Canadian-born. Third, the findings for Quebec are substantially different from those for Canada outside of Quebec. My simulations suggest that the long-run effect of immigration on immigrants’ wages was negative between 1981 and 2006 while the long-run effect of immigration on the wages of the Canadian-born was small but positive over the same period. The third chapter, “Gender, linguistic diversity, and labour market substitutability”, uses the same methodology and data sources as in the second chapter to incorporate female workers into the analysis of immigrant-native substitutability. This study estimates the elasticity of substitution between immigrant language groups and natives for female workers and the pooled sample of male and female workers. The findings suggest that the degree of substitutability between female immigrants and female natives is similar to the degree of substitutability between male immigrants and male natives. The main results do not change for the pooled sample. Due to potential differences between language accumulation processes between female and male immigrants, the third chapter also estimates female-male immigrants substitutability based on language skills, education levels, and years of labour market experience. The findings suggest that female and male immigrants are imperfect substitutes outside of Quebec regardless of language measures.

No abstract included. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate