The purpose of this project was to prepare a group interpretation script which is derived from the books cited in the title. An effort was made to prepare a unified script reflecting contemporary American Indian concepts of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, psychology, and education by selecting appropriate portions from the three books. The thesis includes a production concept, production procedures, the rationale for selection of excerpts, and the finished script, It is designed to employ seven readers and is divided into six parts. Those elements may be altered to fit various physical arrangements and program lengths.

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<p>The marketing of Indigenous peoples, lands, art and culture from within areas that can loosely be drawn together under the rubric of “tourism,” draws Indigenous peoples in a tenuous and complex web of negotiations of imagery, authenticity, nationalism, economics, and identity. Many scholars have explored the economic implications of such interactions. My dissertation, however, is instead focused on attending to the relationship between the contemporary representation of Indigeneity, Canadian national identity, and the intensifying commoditization of ‘all things Indigenous’ (such as Indigenous bodies, identities, languages, spirituality, and material culture) within such spaces. My work asks, what are the consequences of particular forms of commodification of Indigenous culture and identity? In what ways are Indigenous peoples complicit with such forms and in what ways do we negotiate and/or resist them? How do current representations differ from those during the height of “Wild West” shows during Canada’s early nation- building phase, if at all? Mapping a trajectory of representations and visual spectacle in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries across a number of sites I explore Indigenous and Canadian tourism marketing, the 1976, 1988 and 2010 Olympics, and Casino Rama. Such Indigenous self-conscious representation has often taken up through a constitutive, discursive lens of “Aboriginality.” Since the Canadian state’s entrenchment of the term “Aboriginal” within the <em>Constitution Act</em> (1982), Aboriginality has become its own representational force whereby some Indigenous peoples embrace it as a pathway to community economic revitalization. It is rather more productive, I argue, to recognize the Aboriginal as an allegorical figure of a contemporary market-focused society. While certainly related to what Daniel Francis refers to as the “Imaginary Indian,” the figure of the Aboriginal and of Aboriginality conceals much more sinister state projects that are tied to lingering Canadian state racism and colonializing agendas that seek, through, neoliberal economic terms, to assimilate Indigenous peoples. This assimilationist project is relaunched by the intensification of the corporatization and marketing of culture and identity. Indigenous peoples participation in the production of Aboriginality is increasingly positioned by the state as evidence of a willingness to assimilate but also as evidence of the reconciled nature of relationship between Indigenous and settler Canadians and the indigenization of settler Canadians. I close out by engaging in the fourth chapter a discussion of the artistic expression of Indigenous mixed media artists Rebecca Belmore and Terrance Houle, artists who, I contend, resist the increasingly regimented frame of Aboriginality and challenge the ease with which the state and settlers lay claim to Indigenous imagery, stories, lives, and lands.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

All children residing in the United States have the right to a quality education. At least that is our collective expectation. Through the lived experience of Yuli, a Native American woman from the Southwest, you will discover, due to her birth on a remote reservation, she was not given the same access to education you or I would expect. On Yuli’s reservation, the school system is managed by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). Rather than provide K-12 schooling, the BIE operates K-8 on her reservation and then Native youth who want to go to high school must move off-reservation. This qualitative study focuses on Yuli’s experience as she traversed the educational system offered to her in order to complete eighth grade, earn her high school diploma and be accepted to college. Her narrative gives insight into what she lost, personally and culturally, as a result of the operational delinquency of a United States of America government agency tasked with one duty, providing an adequate, quality education to Indigenous youth across America. This study explores Yuli’s story, educational inopportunity, and the cultural impact of leaving the reservation to attain an education.

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During the 1960s and 1970s, tribes across Indian Country struggled for tribal sovereignty against “termination” policies that aimed to disintegrate the federal government’s trust responsibilities and treaty obligations to tribes and assimilate all Indians into mainstream society. Individual tribes, pan-Indian organizations, and militant Red Power activists rose up in resistance to these policies and fought for self-determination: a preservation of Indian distinctiveness and social and political autonomy. This thesis examines a crucial, but often overlooked, element of the self-determination movement. Hundreds of tribal and national-scope activist newspapers emerged during this era and became the authentic voices of American Indians and the messengers of the movement. This thesis examines the stories of several key newspapers. By looking at the opportunities and challenges their editors faced and the different approaches they took, this thesis will assess how they succeeded and fell short in telling authentic stories from Indian Country, fighting for distinct indigenous culture and rights, and reshaping public discourse and policy on American Indian affairs.

Indigenous cartography is based on a relational epistemology that works within a system where "place" and "ways of knowing" are intimately tied to Native communities' notions of kinship, oral tradition, and traditional ecological knowledge acquired over the millennia. It brings to life a place where mapping and geography cease to be simply Cartesian coordinates on a Euclidean plane and instead become storied landscapes. Indigenous cartography can be described as "radical" because it represents a departure from traditional Western ways of mapping and affirms an Indigenous political, economic and cultural sovereignty. As an intensely political act, Indigenous cartography can be an important tool used by Indigenous people to assert sovereignty in a bottom-up approach to land claims, in the management of cultural resources, and even to claim human remains for repatriation and reburial. If Indigenous groups wish to successfully utilize geospatial technologies as legal strategies, it will first require the development of the necessary infrastructure and training of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists from within. In much the same way that colonial practices of the past worked to achieve hegemony through the making of political and cultural boundaries, Indigenous cartography can work to dismantle these same colonial boundaries. A theory and methodology of Indigenous cartographic praxis is in use among some First Nations in British Columbia. However no "best practices" yet exist for the Indigenous use-and-mapping discipline. Consequently in the United States, Indigenous mapping is still considered an emerging approach. Therefore, can American Indian political and cultural sovereignty be supported by the implementation of Indigenous geospatial technologies? This dissertation will examine the British Columbian model and distill principles that can be successfully implemented by U. S. Native American communities who wish to develop capacity for this emerging geospatial technology based on the success of the First Nations model.