Despite vast research on North American Indigenous people and their struggles with sovereignty and autonomy, little attention has been paid to internal conflict within a First Nation. Inter community conflicts affect Mi’kmaq peoplehood and they relate to themselves and each other. This research was conducted in Mi’kma’ki, the traditional Mi’kmaq territory and explored issues surrounding language, financial wellbeing, geography, and Pow-wow. Interviews with 17 self-identified Indigenous people in Nova Scotia, Canada reveal that colonially induced conflicts only run so deep. Pow-wows seem to lesson conflict and become space of political protest, social inclusion and cultural reclamation. Hope lies with the younger generations who are now extending their relationships beyond the borders of the reserve.

Writing a Way Home examines ways that Cherokees in the latter half of the 20th century who have been marginalized through the privileging of state narratives have deployed literature as a way to challenge narratives of state domination and to imagine and work toward more critical, ethical Cherokee nationhood. I examine the ways that Robert K. Thomas and Natachee Scott Momaday used literature during the federal Termination and Relocation programs to imagine functioning tribal nations against the United States' assimilation narrative of the time. I further delve into how the Cherokee Nation's state narrative of the Cherokee Freedmen has denationalized Freedmen descendants and how, by using the WPA narratives of former Cherokee slaves and Tom Holm and Thomas' Peoplehood Matrix, we can re-narrate the Freedmen descendants into a more ethical Cherokee Nation. Finally, I close the study with an examination of Daniel Heath Justice's Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy that uses storytelling to re-imagine a place of reverence for gay and queer-identified Cherokees at a time when the Cherokee Nation passed a ban on same-sex marriage, claiming that such relationships defied what the Cherokee state narrates as tribal tradition. I aim to show in this study the danger of uncritically accepting the state model for tribal nations and the importance of periodically challenging tribal nations when leaders behave unethically. Likewise, this study demonstrates the power of story to not only check the excesses of state sovereignty that marginalize people based on their history, politics, race and sexuality, but also the power to re-imagine a nation -- a home -- that welcomes all its relations. / text

Toward the end of the Troubles, the notion of an Ulster-Scots ethnicity, culture, and language began to be pursued by certain unionists and loyalists more desirous of ‘something more racy of the soil’ (Dowling 2007:54). Peace-building in Northern Ireland had undergone something of a cultural turn: the armed struggle over constitutional and civil rights questions began in the eighties to be ‘ethnically framed’ (Brubaker 2004:166). With cultural identity politically potent, the conception of an Ulster-Scots ethnic group began to gain traction with a tiny but influential subsection of unionists and loyalists. Since the nineties, this movement has gained considerable ground. This thesis represents an intersectional investigation of the inclusion of Ulster-Scots education into schools in Northern Ireland. I contend that Ulster-Scots studies represents an ethnicisation of the conception of a discrete Protestant politico-religious “community” within Northern Ireland, holding considerable potential for the deepening of senses of intercommunal differentiation. Rather than presenting the potential for the deconstruction of ideas of difference, such a pedagogy of reifies, perpetuates, (re)constructs and even deepens such ideas of difference by grounding notions of difference in ethno-cultural and genealogical bases. Ulster-Scots is often described as a means of waging cultural war in post-conflict Northern Ireland (Mac Póilin 1999). Contrariwise, I contend that it represents neither the uncritical, sectarian, loyalist pedagogy of its critics nor the pragmatic and innocuous solution to a problem of durable collective identities of its protagonists. Rather, Ulster-Scots education is embedded in the politics of consociational peace. The logic of consociationalism explicitly entails the maintenance of stark boundaries of ethnic difference. This research does not merely critique of Ulster-Scots pedagogy, but calls into question the whole consociational logic in which it, and the Northern Irish peace process in general, has been embedded.

As colonized peoples Native Americans have had a complicated relationship to the United States. They have faced the question of whether they should demand tribal independence or embrace American citizenship. During the early 1970s, when radical ethnic and political movements occupied center stage in the United States, and in 1992, when the 500 year anniversary of Columbus discovery of America was celebrated, the issue of Indian American identification was actualized. The various possible ways in which Native Americans could identify in relation to the United States made their identification often seem contradictory. The same group and even the same individual could  identify as both part of and apart from the United States. Likewise, the same event could trigger different identifications in relation to the United States. How can this be explained? In this thesis I offer an explanation of Indian American identification that combines the perspectives of world view and historical context. Native Americans have related to two different world views, a Western world view which imagines a world made up of states, and a "traditional" Indian world view which imagines a world made up of peoples placed on their lands by the Creator. Different ways of understanding the world impacted how Native Americans understood "America," as USA or Indian ancestral homelands. Different world views provided different images of Native American relationship to the United States. These images could be put forward or be actualized in different contexts. The historical context influenced which images were most commonly chosen. During the 1970s, given the period's generally revolutionary discourse, more separatist images were prominent. In 1992, when a government-to-government relationship between tribal and federal governments was firmly established, Indians chose a more inclusive relationship to the Untied States.