In 2018-2019, 35.5% of people with a Dangerous Offender designation were Indigenous (Public Safety Canada, 2020, p. 117). While the disproportionate number of Indigenous people with the designation corresponds to the broader trend of overincarceration of Indigenous people in Canada, very little research has addressed the use of the designation on Indigenous people. This thesis provides a critical discourse analysis of 15 case law reports of Dangerous Offender designation hearings guided by settler colonial theory to examine why the designation disproportionately targets Indigenous people. I specifically examine the ways in which discourse enables the erasure of settler colonialism, and at time Indigeneity, in the decision-making process of Dangerous Offender designation hearings. The analysis found that the juridical framework for the application of the Dangerous Offender designation does not allow the courts to consider the impacts of settler colonialism at the designation stage. As such, the social locations of the individuals that demonstrate how settler colonialism may have contributed to their offending are not discussed in the decision-making process thereby creating a form of erasure of settler colonialism in the designation process. Additionally, the juridical framework gives psych experts much authority in the decision-making process. Thus, risk discourse dominates much of the case law reports and the impacts of settler colonialism as thereby translated in individual risk factors. Many of the risk factors that justify the application of the designation are in fact symptoms of settler colonialism. In sum, I conclude that the juridical framework of the Dangerous Offender designation is designed in a way that contributes to disproportionately targeting Indigenous people because their unique experience of settler colonialism and the role in played in their offending is erased or translated in risk which makes them more of a target.

This thesis looks at three seasons of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) radio show Canada Reads – 2014, 2015, and 2016. I examine how each year’s debates over reconciliation (2014), inclusive multiculturalism (2015), and Canada’s role as a global refuge (2016) commonly presume a national mythology that Indigenous peoples have either disappeared or become “Canadian.” I argue that despite the show’s desire to build a better society through encouraging Canadians to read Canadian books, the debates featured on Canada Reads reflect the way assumed Canadian control of Indigenous lands is embedded in the language of Canadian literature and culture to both limit the political disruptiveness of Indigenous presence and reproduce ongoing colonial domination. Central to my argument is the sad truth that, even as the show invites diverse critiques of Canadian society, it nonetheless favours stereotypical narratives of Canadian multiculturalism, benevolence, and civility, and by doing so buttresses Canada’s unchanged status as a settler colonial state. I track and evaluate ruptures in the show's civil language and decorum by reading moments of debate when the logical foundations of these stereotypical national narratives are challenged. Thus, this thesis examines not only what panelists say to each other, but also what their dialogue says to other Canadians. I argue that panelists’ critiques of the nation drawn from their readings of the books - readings that are not so much holistic interpretations of books but strategies for winning the Survivor-style game - are welcomed by the show’s annual social justice themes which then use them to purvey the nation’s virtuous liberalism. Ultimately, my analysis traces how the civil protocols of the program through these three seasons reproduce conflicts between Indigenous peoples and Canadians by reinforcing the inequity of the arrangements of the existing nation-state. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

"Unforgetting the Dakota 38" projects a nuanced light onto the history and memory of the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men on December 26, 1862 following the U.S.-Dakota War in Southcentral Minnesota. This thesis investigates the competing narratives between Santee Dakota peoples (a mixture of Wahpeton and Mdewakanton Dakota) and white Minnesotan citizens in Mankato, Minnesota—the town of the hanging—between 1862 and 2012. By using settler colonialism as an analytical framework, I argue that the erasing of Dakotas by white historical memory has actively and routinely removed Dakotas from the mainstream historical narrative following the U.S.-Dakota War through today. This episodic history examines three phases of remembrance in which the rival interpretations of 1862 took different forms, and although the Dakota-centered interpretations were always present in some way, they became more visible to the non-Dakota society over time. Adopting a thematic approach, this thesis covers events that overlap in time, yet provide useful insights into the shaping and reshaping of memory that surrounds the mass hanging. White Minnesotans routinely wrote Dakota peoples out of their own history, a key element of settler colonial policies that set out to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the Minnesota landscape and replace them with white settlers. While this thesis demonstrates how white memories form, it also focuses on Dakota responses to the structures associated with settler colonialism. In so doing, this thesis argues that Dakota peoples actively participated in the memory-making process in Mankato between 1862 and 2012, even though most historical scholarship considered Mankato devoid of Dakota peoples and an Indigenous history. / Master of Arts / The U.S.-Dakota War wracked the Minnesota River Valley region of Southcentral Minnesota. Following a bloody and destructive six weeks in late-Summer 1862, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the mass execution of thirty-eight Mdewakanton Dakota men as punishment for their participation. This controversial moment in American history produced unique and divergent memories of the Dakota War, the hanging, and the Mdewakanton Dakota place in white American society. This thesis examines the memories that formed between 1862 and 2012, highlighting Dakota perspective and memories to shed new light on the history of this deeply contested event. By doing so, we gain new understandings of Mankato, the U.S.-Dakota War, and the mass hanging, but also a realization that Dakota peoples were always active in the memory-making process even though many have considered their participation nonexistent.

During the nineteenth century an unprecedented number of emigrants left Britain, primarily for America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Recent historical scholarship has argued that these predominantly Victorian mass migrations belong to an even larger history of “Anglo” migration, characterized by its global reach and ideological investment in settlement. Situating my approach in relation to this wider framework, this thesis argues that Victorian periodicals played a key and overlooked role in both imagining and mediating the dramatic phenomenon of mass British settler emigration. As I argue in chapter 1, this is both owing to close historical and material links between settler emigration and the periodical press, and to the periodical’s deeper running capacities to register and moderate forms of modern motion. While most novels do little to engage with emigration, turning to periodicals brings to light a large range of distinct settler emigration texts and genres which typically work with cohesive spatio-temporal models to offset the destabilizing potentiality of emigrant mobility. Moreover, many now canonical texts originally published in periodicals can be situated alongside them; presenting opportunities to produce fresh readings of works by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and others which I incorporate throughout. My first three chapters focus on settler emigration genres which circulated across a range of mainstream, predominantly middle-class periodicals: texts about emigrant voyages, emigration-themed Christmas stories, and serialized novels about colonial settlement. I argue that these texts are cohesive and reassuring, and thus of a different character to the adventure stories often associated with Victorian empire. The second part of my thesis aims to capitalize on the diversity and range which is a key feature of Victorian periodicals by turning to settler emigration texts that embody a feminized or radical perspective, and which often draw upon mainstream representations in order to challenge their dominant formations.

abstract: What are possibilities for transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers? Research conversations among a set of project partners (Indigenous and settler pairs)—who reside in the Phoenix metro area, Arizona or on O’ahu, Hawai’i—addressed what good relationships look like and how to move the structural relationship towards those characteristics. Participants agreed that developing shared understandings is foundational to transforming the structural relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers; that Indigenous values systems should guide a process of transforming relationships; and that settlers must consider their position in relation to Indigenous peoples because position informs responsibility. The proposed framework for settler responsibility is based on the research design and findings, and addresses structural and individual level transformation. The framework suggests that structural-level settler responsibility entails helping to transform the structural relationship and that the settler role involves a settler transformation process parallel to Indigenous resurgence. On an individual level, personal relationships determine appropriate responsibilities, and the framework includes a suggested process between Indigenous persons and settlers for uncovering what these responsibilities are. The study included a trial of the suggested process, which includes four methods: (1) developing shared understandings of terms/concepts through discussion, (2) gathering stories about who participants are in relationship to each other, (3) examining existing daily practices that gesture to a different structural relationship, and (4) using creative processes to imagine structural relationships in a shared world beyond settler colonialism. These methods explore what possibilities unfold when settlers center their relationship with Indigenous peoples. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social and Cultural Pedagogy 2020

No description available.

Picking up on current research about settler colonialism, this study uses a modified version of a model explaining modern-state formation to explain settler-colonial formation. Charles Tilly identified two simultaneous processes at work – war-making and state-making which produced modern states in Western Europe. Settler-colonial systems engage(d) in a particular type of war to produce their existence: total war. Hence, a modified version of total-war-making and settler-colonial-existence-making (production) occuring in the settler-colonial-creation phase is proposed. However, before this conceptual analytical framework could be developed, it was necessary to examine the meanings of terms such as 'nation' and ‘nation-state’ as well as concepts such as settler-colonialism and total war. The sample of relevant literature analyzed revealed inconsistencies in the meanings of the terms when applying W.H. Newton-Smith’s theory of meaning, suggesting the influence of what Edward Said identified as the workings of orientalism. This has conceptual implications on terms such as settler-colonialism and the meaning of the type of war it wages upon the indigenous nations. It also has implications on developing a conceptual analytical tool to understand the dynamics of the production of the settler-colonial existence. Thus, the terms and concepts needed to be de-orientalized before using them in the modified model which was then used to examine initially three settler-colonial cases: the United States, Australia and Apartheid South Africa. The modified analytical model was able to highlight particular dynamics relevant to settler-colonial systems and was then used – with the incremental and imbricate research done in the first three chapters – to examine the Zionist case. It illustrated that while the cases of the United States and Australia were able pass their creation phases, the Apartheid case could not and subsequently collapsed. The Zionist case seems to be still in its settler-colonial-creation phase. This has implications on current analysis concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This dissertation is an intervention aimed primarily at the field of Canadian Political Science, but informed by engagements with Indigenous Studies, literatures on racial capitalism, and Global Histories. The overarching aim of the project is to provide a theoretical framework by which to study multi-scalar struggles taking place within and against the Canadian state from an explicitly anti-imperialist perspective. The insights of this project should also be of interest to the broad left, both in Canada and beyond. The dissertation begins with a call to situate the Canadian state, and its practice of “settler imperialism” as part of multi-scalar system of global racial capitalism. Key to understanding this is the mobilization of Stuart Hall’s concept of the “historical bloc” as a tool to grasp political mediations, and to refuse the too-easy analytical reification of structures or their practices of difference making. Part two of the dissertation interrogates the politics of solidarity “from below” by engaging “activist archives,” composed of “allyship toolkits,” zines, and pamphlets. These activist archives reveal two (at least analytically) distinct theories of change operating through the discourses of allyship and decolonization. While to differing degrees, they point to the work of politics below the state. In the case of “allyship” discourses this dissertation finds a normative individualism and an understanding of power as an object rather than something collectively exercised, leading to a charity model where solidarity is seen as an external relationship. In contrast, the decolonization literature understands how solidarity can proceed from an interested position towards building a relationship of shared concern, it substitutes a deference model for one defined by “relational autonomy” in the process of “worldmaking.” The final portion of this dissertation makes an in- depth case-study of Indigenous-led opposition to the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline project. Tracing out a number of strategies of hegemony, counter-hegemony, and grassroots struggles, the aim is to show a number of interrelated sites and tactics of anti-imperialist struggle grounded in a defence of both shared place and the self-determination of Indigenous nations. / Graduate / 2023-08-25

Canada is widely regarded as a liberal, multicultural nation that prides itself on a history of peace and tolerance. Oftentimes set up in contrast to the United States, Canada’s history of colonialism has been popularly imagined as a gentler, necessary, inevitable, and even benevolent version of expansion and subjugation of Indigenous populations. In recent decades scholars in the social sciences and humanities have challenged the rhetoric of Canada as a consistently benevolent and peaceful nation. They have pointed to the discontinuity between Canada’s rosy image, drawn from foundational nation-building myths of benevolence, and the deeply rooted colonial narratives of necessity and inevitability that underpin those nation-building myths. This discontinuity manifests itself in far reaching patterns of social and economic disparity between Indigenous and settler populations over time across the nation. This reality is acutely seen in the Canadian West, as Canada’s historic frontier. This thesis re-problematises narratives of Canadian nation-building from a regional perspective. It is argued that positioning the West as the frontier peripheral to Canadian ‘civilisation’ is part of a broader settler colonial logic that sees the contemporary manifestation of disparity between Indigenous and settler populations as emanating from uniquely backward, peripheral places in Canada, rather than challenging the fundamental benevolence of the Canadian nation. Through a close reading of two trials pertaining to an instance of multiple perpetrator sexual assault that occurred in Saskatchewan in 2003, I demonstrate how the complex web of interlocking systems of domination that oppress and privilege in trials do not emanate from the backwardness of the place in which they occurred, but are rather indicative of broader societal processes and power relations indicative of settler colonialism. This thesis argues there is a conflation between western Canadian identity, and settler identity, owing to the foundational nation-building myths in which the West became Canadian. In moving forward, this thesis proposes an acknowledgment of the settler colonial nature of westward expansion and suggests practicing openness to considering different ways westward expansion might have been understood and experienced. Key to this process is learning to listen, learning to hear, learning to believe, and learning to see oneself implicated in the stories of those who experienced westward expansion differently from how it is popularly constructed in settler society. I begin here by proposing the complainant’s voice in the trial be heard, and be believed. Her voice and her silence provides insight into understanding the oppressive power of settler-colonialism.