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From Birchbark Talk to Digital Dreamspeaking
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--Description taken from "From Birchbark Talk to Digital Dreamspeaking"--
The thesis addresses the interconnectedness of Aboriginal media practices; historically changing government policies; Aboriginal social and political movements; and the local situations of reserve and urban Aboriginal peoples in Canada. It is premised on the idea that in order to understand the cultural transformations associated with the rise of modern Aboriginal society, it is necessary to assess the development of Aboriginal communications media and their impact, and to draw out the ways that colonial processes underwrite contemporary media practices. Focusing on the communicative aspects of Aboriginal agency, it documents colonialism as a form of communication, and tracks Native communicative agency on a broad historical and socao-cultural scale. It attends to the centrality of people and their social relations, rather than to media texts or technology. It offers an analysis of media as a social form and media production as a crucial form of social action. It examines the “cultural mediations” that occur through Aboriginal media production. My principle concern is with Aboriginal strategies of indigenizing, or diminishing the massness of, communications media through narrowcasting.
Highlighting media practices and technologies as sites of hybridity and creative adaptation, I assert that the Native mediascape serves as a locus for the production of localizing, nationalizing, and modernizing discourses. The popular version of the narrative of Canadian colonialism conveys the idea that European colonizers made readers of listeners and that agriculture, literacy and more recently, “the media” were imposed on hapless Indian communities by the state. My analysis draws attention to the ways that technologies of literacy, printmaking, radio and television are actively and selectively appropriated, renovated and redeployed by Native peoples themselves. I show that by mobilizing Aboriginal audiences to imagine local communities and to forge social identities that are predicated on Aboriginally-authorized discursive constructs, Indigenous media activists are contributing to the articulation of divergent modernities and a new social order.
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From Self-Determination to Community Health Empowerment
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--Description taken from "From Self-Determination to Community Health Empowerment"
Poor health status and the need for mainstream medical care are two of the many consequences of colonialization affecting Aboriginal communities today. Health services offered to Aboriginal people by the Canadian government have evolved from under-funded medical relief lacking strategic direction to comprehensive primary care. While the Aboriginal health profile has improved as a result, Aboriginal populations are still suffering from health inequalities. Political gains made by Aboriginal nations in Canada in the progression towards Aboriginal self-determination and self-government, combined with the acceptance of a health promotion and illness prevention model in the Canadian health system in general, have had a tremendous impact on Aboriginal health service development. The transfer of the control over Aboriginal health serviced to Aboriginal people with the goal of improving Aboriginal health status is now an accepted concept with both Aboriginal and Canadian governments. However, the mechanisms by which selfdetermination is supposed to lead to improvements in health status are still poorly understood and largely undocumented. Based on research of the Aboriginal health system in the Manitoulin District of North Central Ontario, this thesis identifies two inter-related processes, community-based health research and health service integration, that have great potential to contribute to the goals of selfdetermination. This study examines the mechanisms by which increased Aboriginal community-based self-determination in health can support service integration and local health research. This research also examines the impact of these processes, both positive and negative, on Aboriginal community health and health empowerment. The mechanisms by which these processes occur are analyzed through case studies of the Aboriginal health services systems on Manitoulin and Aboriginal community-controlled research projects on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and children’s dental health. This thesis argues that self-determination must be supported by appropriate community processes such as partnership development and capacity building in order to facilitate improvements in community health. Community-controlled health research and inter-sectoral health service integration are necessary to support the goal of self-determination and have great potential to improve Aboriginal community health and community health empowerment.
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Frontier Justice
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--Description taken from "Frontier Justice"--
I define "frontier justice" as the ordering of frontier according to the normative values of settler colonialism. Detailing materials surrounding the 1885 North-West Rebellion, I examine "colonial governmentalities" that shaped early colonial strategies in Canada's North-West Territories. Developing on ideas of Foucault's, I argue that colonial governmentalities balance techniques of sovereign as well as biopolitical power in the process of ordering the frontier. In particular, this demonstrates how indigenous populations are incorporated by processes of state formation and categorized along a continuum of "good" and "bad" conduct. While the settlement of the Canadian prairies is often depicted through myths of "empty origins" or as a "bloodless revolution," the transformation of the North-West was replete with violence and injustice. Reviewing archival records helps interrogate practices at work in the North-West and, in revealing how frontier justice is not remote or historical, demonstrates the continuity of these rationalities in the colonial present.
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Gentleman Joe McKay
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A photo of Gentleman Joe McKay on a horses., The man beside Joe McKay is not Chief Mistawasis.
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History of Battleford Industrial School for Indian
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*Abstract taken from Page Two of History of Battleford Industrial School*
The purpose of this historical study is to examine the devel- opment and effect of educational policies that established, supported, and closed Industrial Schools for Indians and, in particular, the Battleford Industrial School which existed in the North-West Territories from 1883 to 1905 and continued in the Province of Saskatchewan to 1914.
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Housing as a Determinant of Health in The Sayisi Dene First Nation, Tadoule Lake, Manitoba
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--Description taken from "Housing as a Determinant of Health in The Sayisi Dene First Nation, Tadoule Lake, Manitoba"--
This thesis is an exploration of housing as a social and environmental determinant of health and draws example from one Manitoban First Nation community. Aboriginal people across Canada suffer a disproportionate burden of morbidity and mortality relative to the rest of the country. Literature on the social determinants of health is reviewed with emphasis on the role of housing conditions in achieving and maintaining good health, followed by the historical context for Canadian Aboriginal settlement patterns and the current housing crisis. Local history and the results from a 2010 housing survey of the Sayisi Dene First Nation are described. Crowding, in-home water availability, housing design, and building materials are identified as risk factors for health problems, whereas occupant behavior appears to have little effect on conditions. Recent popular challenge to the longstanding and ongoing effects of colonialism sheds light on the degree to which all Canadians accept these pervasive circumstances.
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Imagining Drumbytes and Logging in Powwows
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--Description taken from "Imagining Drumbytes and Logging in Powwows:A History of Community Imagination in Canadian-Based Aboriginal New Media Art"--
This thesis proposes a history of community imagination within the Aboriginal new media field in Canada. Aboriginal new media art is an artistic field that emerged in the mid-1990s, when Aboriginal contemporary artists and cultural producers adopted the Internet to articulate a presence online. A significant aspect of Aboriginal new media art is its commitment to develop, perform and represent community through technological means.
The central argument of this study is that Aboriginal new media art is an artistic field where community is imagined and practiced. This work of imagination does not passively reflect cultural relations of production and reproduction, but mediates these relations, affecting the development of the field. At a theoretical level, this study develops a program that bridges the gap between studies of community imagination and imagined communities. To this end, it engages with an interdisciplinary body of work that encompasses the sociology of culture, cultural studies, community informatics and research on online communities and sociality. At a methodological level, this thesis reconstructs the development of community imagination through the discursive analysis of online projects as well as interviews with Aboriginal new media artists, government art officials and Aboriginal curators. As a result, the history of 315366community imagination is divided in three moments, each defined by a hegemonic model of community imagination: community empowerment, community as online performance and community as poetics.
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Imperialism, Colonialism and Structural Violence
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--Description taken from "Imperialism, Colonialism and Structural Violence"--
During the 19 century, British imperialism and Canadian colonialism aspired to subdue,
subjugate and assimilate the Plains Cree (cf. Tobias 1992:148). This particular brand of
colonialism employed Indian policy - a form ofstructural violence—rather than military force. I
argue that structural violence was both legitimized and supported by cultural violence. The
distortion of history is a prime example of cultural violence. That Canada followed an honorable
and just policy in its dealings with Plains Indians (cf. Tobias 1983:519) is the contemporary
residue of a myth created during colonial times in political circles to justify the dispossession of
Aboriginal lands and resources.
In the 19l Century, Cree leaders, Piapot and Big Bear, who were perceived as threats to
Canadian "progress," were routinely publicly maligned. The "official" historical literature often
uncritically reflected these prevalent ethnocentric views ofthe day. Critical historical theorists,
however, have offered a number of opposing views. This thesis focuses attention on the
literature which takes a more critical and culturally informed approach to Canadian nationbuilding. It places a discussion ofstructural constraints at the centre of an exploration ofthe
strategies Plains leaders used to resist a variety ofIndian policies including reserve settlement.
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Imposed Identities
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--Description taken from "Imposed Identities:The Colonial Construction of Indigenous Masculinity"--
This thesis examines how images of Metis and First Nations men have been constructed and circulated by media discourse in Canada. I begin by examining the social, political and economic structures of the French Metis and show how
their lifestyle as middlemen was greatly altered by governmental policies. I then explore the inception of stereotypical images of First Nations and Metis men. Beginning with Paul Kane, I argue that these image makers failed to accurately
distinguish between differing Indigenous groups and began a tradition wherein inaccurate depictions of Indigenous men were the norm. Next, I engage such depictions in early North American popular culture and argue that, in this
medium, these images carried an ideological perspective rooted in a colonial bias regarding what constituted civilized and savage. Finally, I examine my grandfather's unpublished novel as a case study in how formative these
stereotypes can be and introduce the notion of Shame Discourse to articulate how the pressures of Indigenous masculinity force some Indigenous men into a state of cultural compromise. Throughout, I use the term Indigenous masculinity as a
way to articulate this cluster of stereotypes and acknowledge the common experiences of disparate Indigenous groups.
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In Whos Intest? Government-Indian Relations Northern Saskatchewan and Wisconsin, 1900-1940
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--Desscription taken from "In Whose Interest? Government-Indian Relations Northern Saskatchewan and Wisconsin, 1900-1940"--
American and Canadian Indian policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generally focused on "civilizing" Indian peoples. In other words, the government wanted a more sedentary, less dispersed Indian population who would likewise require less land for traditional hunting and gathering activities and might be more easily assimilated when time and circumstance required. Such policy, however, was best suited to agricultural regions. In forested regions or other areas which were not suitable for commercial cultivation, conflict arose as Aboriginal groups tried to maintain their traditional practices while other interest groups sought to access the same resources. Increasing use of these non-agricultural areas by sport hunters, commercial fishing industries, logging enterprises, tourists, and in some cases prospectors and land speculators, grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These interests not only competed for the same resources from which the Indian population secured its subsistence, but they also influenced the governments of the United States, Canada, Wisconsin, and Saskatchewan to regulate traditional Indian hunting and gathering activity.
Conservation commissions in both the United States and Canada went about the business of re-shaping the public perception of the acceptable use of fish and game. Traditional subsistence activity had little, if any place in these new fish and game management strategies. This was the case even though Indians in both northern Saskatchewan and Wisconsin negotiated treaties which they believed upheld their access to vital resources. The conflict over resources became acute in the early twentieth century when governments in both places actively interfered with traditional activities. Such interference had the most dire consequences for the Indian people in both areas.
The case studies presented here illustrate the historical antecedents of conflicts which still exist today. The Indian concern for continued access to natural resources has rarely been heard in its historical context. This study places the historic confrontation between Indian subsistence resource users and government resource-managing agencies in the context of the early twentieth century conservation movement. The two areas studied here have striking similarities. The governments refused to uphold treaty promises and rarely listened to the Indians' demands for continued access to natural resources. This study explains how governments managed resources in their own interest and relates not only the struggle for access to resources, but also how Indians responded to government interference in their way of life. It is important to move beyond a comparative analysis of two similar tribal populations in a cross-border analysis. By examining two disparate tribal groups who negotiated similar treaties in two different eras but in distant geographic locations, a better understanding of governmental conservation motives and actions, as well as the impact of such governmental activity on Indian people, may be achieved. This study is a unique look at the impact of the early conservation movement on the subsistence needs of Indian peoples in North American non-agricultural regions.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report 1897
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This document is an end of year report from 1885, Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1879
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This document is an annual Report from 1879., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1880
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This document is the year-end report for 1880., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1881
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This document is the end of year annual report from 1881., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1882
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This document is a year-end annual reports from 1882., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1883
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This document is the end of year annual report from 1883., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.
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Indian Affairs Annual Report, 1883
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This document is a year-end report from 1893., Only pages dealing directly with Mistawasis are shown, visit Library and Archives Canada for full document.