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Tee Peez, Totem Polz, and the Spectre of Indianness as Other

The purpose of this thesis is to destabilize notions that representations of ‘Indians’ as they appear in contemporary Switzerland, Germany, and France are benign. Rather, Europeans in this region rely on ‘playing Indian’ and consuming Indianness to understand themselves as white modern subjects. I demonstrate how this operates through two case studies and argue that colonialism persists through symbolic dialectical processes between North America and Western Europe. Colonial discourse, and regimes of representation, concerning Indianness circulate across geographical locations. I link these symbolic representations to ongoing material struggles of Indigenous peoples for self-determination and land rights. Switzerland’s foreign investments and free trade with Canada for natural resources on unceded Indigenous territories implicates them in a neoliberal colonial paradigm that continues to dispossess peoples of their land. I turn to Indigenous artists and international solidarity networking as potential strategies that address both symbolic and material processes of colonization.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/32447
Date19 July 2012
CreatorsMaxson, Natalie
ContributorsRazack, Sherene
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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