As Aboriginal peoples relocated to urban areas in the 1950s and 1960s they often found that the services they were offered did not suit their needs, to address this issue Aboriginal peoples began advocating for organizations of their own. Two such organizations include the Saskatoon Indian and Métis Friendship Centre and the Community Liaison Committee. This thesis will explore how Aboriginal peoples worked to create organizations that served their needs, rather than assimilating as was expected; how the status blind approach within organizations was resisted; and how these organizations had a strong desire and vision to become self-governing, often demonstrated by engaging in coproduction, even in the very early stages of organizational development. The data collected included archival documents and informant interviews and was analyzed using an adapted form of grounded theory. The research and analysis revealed waves of engagement in coproduction as a way to defy expectations that Aboriginal peoples would assimilate once moving to the city, and rather embrace Aboriginal cultures and practices in the city.

In 2003, the town of Craik initiated a unique renewable energy project with the dual goals of addressing both the environmental and the rural economic crisis. This Masters thesis provides an exploration of the factors that both facilitate and constrain the advancement of this project. The research focuses on the question: What are the cultural and social factors that inhibit the Craik project from meeting its environmental and economic goals? New social movement theory provides a theoretical framework for explaining contradictions within social movements, while a critical ethnographic methodology is used to uncover specific underlying contradictions that exist at Craik. This thesis analyzes the dynamics of facilitating and non-facilitating factors to make visible the deeper sources of conflict, to contribute to theoretical models of social change and understandings of community development. Furthermore, the thesis provides direction for the Craik eco-project that can further the implementation of practices that will facilitate both its economic and environmental goals. Finally, the study provides valuable insights to other communities working to facilitate similar eco-projects and influence public policy in response to global warming

The 1907 <i>University of Saskatchewan Act</i> stated that no women shall by reason of her sex be deprived of any advantage or privilege accorded to male students of the university . This study explores whether or not this piece of progressive and prescriptive legislation was adhered to by university administrators, male faculty, staff, and students. Using the ample primary source material available in the University Archives Special Collections, this thesis has examined the demographic, cultural, and lived experiences of the women at the university from 1909 to 1922 and concluded that although the administration employed many inclusive policies, the internal culture and experiences of the women who worked, learned, and lived at the university were far less egalitarian than that described in <i>University Act</i>. This study offers a new prairie perspective and as such constitutes an important addition to the discussion concerning the experience of the first generation of female university scholars in Canada.

This thesis explores notions of community and Aboriginality within the histories of two Aboriginal communities: the primarily Métis town of Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan and the Stó:lõ reserve of Seabird Island, British Columbia. By reading community members oral histories in terms of these two concepts, it historicises the accounts, giving temporal context to academics writings and local histories that at times act as snapshots of a small span of time.<p/> Considering Île-à-la-Crosse and Seabird Island in terms of their communal and Aboriginal components also complicates definitions of community and Aboriginality or indigeneity as they relate to these two places, thereby reinforcing the links between histories and the places and people from which they originated. Thus, the first part of this thesis situates Seabird Island and Île-à-la-Crosse historically and physically, and demonstrates how local oral histories introduce broader historical themes. The second part focuses on the community aspect of these places: the Aboriginal component to both Seabird Islands and Île-à-la-Crosses existence is what has tended to attract outside academic research and attention, yet an Aboriginal community exists as such because of influences that make and sustain a community as well as its Aboriginal components.<p/> While each category draws on understandings of the other in order to create a cohesive definition of the whole, a community does not become a community simply by being Aboriginal, nor is it Aboriginal simply as a result of Aboriginal people living together. Therefore, diverse definitions and histories of Aboriginality are also significant in maintaining historical links among inhabitants of Île-à-la-Crosse and Seabird Island.<p/> There exists a historiography in these communities that, while sometimes unintentional or implicit, links community members accounts of their community and its Aboriginal features with outside observations. This connection places these interpretations of historical events into a historiographical context of ways these Aboriginal communities have been both, and alternately, communities and Aboriginal places.

Watersheds in Canada are under increasing threats due to the cumulative environmental effects from natural and anthropogenic sources. Cumulative effect assessment (CEA), however, if done at all is typically done on a project-by-project basis. This project-based approach to CEA is not sufficient to address the cumulative effects of multiple stressors in a watershed or a region. As a result, there is now a general consensus that CEA must extend from the project to the more regional scale. The problem, however, is that while the science of how to do watershed CEA (W-CEA) is progressing, the appropriate institutional arrangements to sustain W-CEA have not been addressed. Based on a case study of the South Saskatchewan Watershed (SSW), this research is aimed to identify the institutional requirements necessary to support and sustain W-CEA.<p> The research methods include document reviews and semi-structured interviews with regulators, administrators, watershed coordinators, practitioners, and academics knowledgeable on cumulative effect assessment and project-based environmental assessments (EAs). The findings from this research are presented thematically. First, participants perspectives on cumulative effects, the current state of CEA practice, and general challenges to project-based approaches to CEA are presented. The concept of WCEA is then examined, with a discussion on the need for linking project-based CEA and W-CEA. This is followed by the institutional requirements for W-CEA. The Chapter concludes with foreseeable challenges to implementing W-CEA, as identified by research participants.<p> The key findings include that cumulative effect assessments under project-based EAs are rarely undertaken in the SSW, and the project-based EA approach is faced with considerable challenges. The project-based EA challenges suggested by interview participants are similar to the ones discussed in the literature, and are primarily related to the lack of guidance to proponents regarding boundaries of assessments and thresholds, the lack of data from other project EAs, and the lack of capacity of both proponents and regulators to achieve a good CEA under project EA. These challenges could be addressed by establishing regional objectives at a broader scale, which could provide better context to project-based approaches. Further, interview results revealed several opportunities for the government to take the lead in implementing and sustaining W-CEA, but a multistakeholder approach is essential to W-CEA success. The results also suggest that the establishments of thresholds and data management are necessary components of W-CEA, but that the need for legislation concerning such thresholds and W-CEA initiatives is not agreed upon. At the same time, research results emphasize that the coordination and education among various stakeholders will be difficult to achieve. The lack of financial commitment, political will, and difficulties in establishing cause-effect relationships currently impede the implementation of W-CEA.

This thesis explores the utility of the conflated term “colonial medicine” by drawing on events during an historical outbreak of amebic dysentery that occurred on several Indian Reservations near Loon Lake, Saskatchewan, during the 1960s and ‘70s, including a series of government-sponsored drug trials conducted to stem the outbreak. Largely devoid of the racialized notions characterizing primary documents used by previous scholars of ‘colonial medicine’, the medical journal articles, government memorandums, and letters written by physicians in connection with the outbreak and trials reveal their immersion in ‘la clinique’, or an anatomo-clinical discourse similar to what theorist Michel Foucault described in Birth of the Clinic. Conversely, conversations with Loon Lake area community members on the subjects of the outbreak and trials reveal their multiplex and nuanced reactions to medical and colonial discourses. Arguably, then, when writing about past events, historians should weigh ‘medicine’ and colonial discourse separately. Essential methodological consideration was given to the Foucauldian concept of ‘disinterring’ popular knowledge. Drawing on Foucault’s edited works Power/Knowledge and I, Pierre Riviére, the subjugated knowledges of Aboriginal community members, physicians, sanitation workers, and government employees gleaned through interviews and text are contrasted as per his example in these works with the false functionalism of ‘scientificity’. Moreover, when considered in tandem, these subjugated knowledges illustrate a ‘structural violence’, following anthropologist Paul Farmer’s methodology for describing such phenomena in Pathologies of Power. Overarchingly, they obscure the paradigmatic dichotomies (‘doctor’/‘patient’, ‘patient’/the healthy person, ‘colonizer’/‘colonized’, ‘oppressor’/‘oppressed’) espoused in medical, colonial, and even post-colonial discourses. This understanding forces the reflexive recognition that–if we accept rhetorician Christopher Bracken’s assertion in Magical Criticism there is a recourse to savage philosophy within academia–what we say as historians has consequence beyond discourse, possibly creating new ‘subjects’ in a Foucauldian, disciplined society.

The application of Sustainability Assessment (SA) within Canadian municipalities is a recent notion, but is quickly becoming widespread. The Government of Saskatchewan alone has already released two SA checklists. However, such tools are normally aimed at communities of all sizes, ranging from rural municipalities to big cities, without considering differences in the capacity base, needs, and conditions among those types of communities. Additionally, practical implementation of SA often does not reflect the scope of scientifically established criteria for SA tools. This paper will present the analysis of the 2009 Saskatchewan Sustainability Checklist for Municipalities (comparing it to one of the most prominent frameworks for SA and other similar checklists developed in Canada and internationally) in order to identify possible areas for improvement so that the Checklist reflects established SA principles and is sensitive to a small town context. Based on the results of interviews with 16 small town administrators in Saskatchewan, this thesis demonstrates that, from a theoretical perspective, both of the existing SA tools are deficient in a number of important ways. The tools mainly focus on evaluating the municipal and service provision, rather than evaluating the sustainability of a community as a whole, including such areas as environmental conditions; social equity; livelihood sufficiency; resource maintenance; and intragenerational and intergenerational equity. However, the research reveals even if all of the above-mentioned criteria are integrated within the existing tools, it will be challenging for municipalities to perform a full sustainability assessment, since small towns’ administrations often have limited financial and human capacity to perform such exercises. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding on how to integrate the results of an assessment into decision-making, and a perceived inability to change some of the existing economic or social conditions in a town, due to the limited scope of influence that local municipalities have. There is a need for an alternative approach to sustainability assessment in the case of small towns; one that is sensitive to their unique pressures, circumstances, and capacities to enact change.

Time-since-fire data are used to describe wildfire disturbances, the major disturbance type in the Boreal forest, over a landscape. These data can be used to calculate various parameters about wildfire disturbances, such as size, shape and severity. Collecting time-since-fire data is expensive and time consuming; the ability to derive it from existing forest inventory data would result in availability of fire data over larger areas. The objective of this thesis was to explore the use of forest inventory information for the prediction of time-since-fire data in the mixedwood boreal forests of Saskatchewan. Regression models were used to predict time-since-fire from forest inventory variables for each inventory polygon with a stand age. Non-water polygons with no stand age value were assigned values from neighbouring polygons, after splitting long polygons that potentially crossed many historic fire boundaries. This procedure filled gaps that prevented polygons from being grouped together in latter analysis. The predicted time-since-fire ages were used to generate wildfire parameters such as age-class distributions and fire cycle. Three methods were examined to group forest inventory polygons together to predict fire event polygons: simple partitions, hierarchical clustering, and spatially constrained clustering. The predicted fire event polygons were used to generate polygon size distribution wildfire metrics. I found that there was a relationship between time-since-fire and forest inventory variables at this study site, although the relationship was not strong. As expected, the strongest relationship was between the age of trees in a stand as indicated by the inventory and the time-since-fire. This relationship was moderately improved by including tree species composition, harvest modification value, and the ages of the surrounding polygons. Assigning no-age polygons neighbouring values and grouping the forest inventory polygons improved the predicted time-since-fire results when compared spatially to the observed time-since-fire data. However, a satisfactory method of comparing polygon shapes was not found, and the map outputs were highly dependent on the grouping method and parameters used. Overall it was found that forest inventory data did not have sufficient detail and accuracy to be used to derive high quality time-since-fire information.

As areas of agricultural production expand worldwide, complex zones of wildlife-agriculture interface present numerous benefits and challenges to farmers and wildlife managers. In western Canada, free-ranging elk (Cervus canadensis), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) make frequent use of cereal, oilseed, and pulse crops. However, cervid use of annual crops presents substantial socio-economic concerns for producers. Additionally, use of crops may facilitate cervids co-mingling and increase the risk of intra- and inter-specific transmission of chronic wasting disease (CWD). The purpose of my thesis research was to determine the key environmental factors influencing the selection of agricultural crops by elk, white-tailed deer, and mule deer, analyze overlap in species’ selection, and develop predictive models to identify the spatial distribution of crop damage risk. In this study, I analyzed 19,069 damage claims paid by Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation to Saskatchewan farmers for confirmed losses to annual crops (cereals, oilseeds, pulses) from 2000-2012 by elk, mule deer, and white-tailed deer. These data were used to conduct species-specific ecological niche factor analyses (ENFAs), which relate habitat variables within damaged sites to that of the surrounding landscape. The key habitat variables influencing selection of annual crops were then incorporated into resource selection probability function (RSPF) models. These models characterize and predict the probability of crop damage by elk, mule deer, and white-tailed deer, and each possible dual species combination. By integrating damage probability values and historical monetary values of regional crop production, I evaluated the risk of annual crop damage by each of the three species, and dual species combinations, across all sections of agricultural land in Saskatchewan. The ENFAs revealed that elk and white-tailed deer selected for areas where a high proportion of farmland is seeded to oats, barley, canola, and alfalfa, while avoiding areas farther from protected areas, with a high density of paved or unpaved roads and a high proportion of open grassland. Alternately, mule deer favoured open grasslands, shrublands, and areas with a greater density of streams or water bodies, while avoiding areas where a high proportion of farmland is seeded to oats, canola, flaxseed, wheat, and barley. Areas at highest risk for annual crop damage by elk bordered the northern edge of the study area; mule deer damage risk was highest in south-western and central Saskatchewan; while white-tailed deer damage risk was highest in north-eastern and north-central areas of the province. Identifying these specific associations between landscape variables, rates of crop damage, and associated species overlap may provide an important opportunity for agencies to develop cooperative management strategies to efficiently allocate mitigation resources. Efforts to prevent the selection of cereal, oilseed, and pulse crops by free ranging elk, mule deer, and white-tailed deer in Saskatchewan could prove to be a valuable step in not only minimizing crop damage and maintaining wildlife tolerance in rural communities, but also in managing the spread of chronic wasting disease throughout western Canada.

Climate change is being observed through increased average temperatures world-wide, as well as through increased frequency of extreme events, such as floods and droughts. As climate is an uncontrollable yet essential input in the agriculture industry, the impact of climate change may have on crop production in Saskatchewan is of importance. The main objective of this study is to investigate how farmers adapt to climate change by switching their crop mix, and how this crop mix may change under future climate change scenarios. A fractional multinomial logit (FMNL) model was used to assess how total area of cropland has changed over a thirty year time period. The panel data included variables to represent the land characteristics of Saskatchewan (i.e. the three major soil zones - Black, Dark Brown and Brown), climatic variables to represent average monthly temperature and precipitation, and price and policy variables in order to assess how average seeded area of each crop group changed. With these results, a simple simulation model was developed to evaluate how the area of each crop group in a base year comparison (2000) would change under future climate scenarios for each soil zone. The results from the FMNL model indicate that crop allocation depends largely on the price of other crop groups and temperatures in the spring (April) and summer (July). Climate plays and important role in the major crop groups, such as wheat, canola and pulses. Cool, dry springs are the ideal conditions when choosing nearly all crops, while hot, wet summers increase the choice to leave land to summerfallow. Policy and the different soil zones also play a significant role in area allocation decisions. Changes in policies such as the removal of the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement, and the removal of oats from the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) marketing, had a negative impact on the choice to grow wheat, as expected. The different soil zones in Saskatchewan played an important role in area allocation for a majority of the crops, having a negative effect on the choice of wheat over every other crop group except pulses and summerfallow. Three climate change scenarios were simulated for each soil zone and compared to a base area (year 2000 area seeded) of crop groups. The findings from the projected changes in climate indicate that the area allocated to wheat will continue to decrease into the future, following current trends. The average projected decline in wheat area from the base years by 2099 ranges between 3.5% to 4.6% in the Black soil zone, between 2.7% and 2.9% in the Dark Brown and 2.7% to 4% in the brown soil zone, depending on climate change scenario. Interestingly, the area left to summerfallow is projected to increase over the future climate change scenarios. The choice of wheat is preferred over pulses, feed and forages, while the choice of specialty oilseeds (flaxseed, mustard seed and canary seed) are projected to become preferred over wheat in the future. The major conclusion from this research are: (i) following current trends, the area devoted to spring wheat and durum wheat would continue to decline into the future; (ii) Area devoted to wheat remains a preferred choice over pulses, feed and forages while specialty oilseeds represent a viable alternative choice to wheat and (iii) most significantly, summerfallow area would increase. This is in contrast to the current trend of declining summerfallow area as a result of tighter crop rotations. This finding was observed throughout all three soil zones as well as for all three climate change projection periods. This will have major implications on individual farmers as well as the economy in Saskatchewan, as summerfallow does not produce a crop in the year it is chosen. It is therefore important to determine a possible new crop mix that would benefit from the projected change in climate. This study could be improved by including a measure of profitability for each crop group and introducing a new crop group that is better suited to the projected change in climate in Saskatchewan.