Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Canoeing through Resurgence
Anishinabai are jiimaan people. The traditional building of wiigwaas jiimaan is a part of a resurgence project that is restoring and maintaining cultural connection to our homelands, the water, and community members. An approach to cultural resurgence, such as the wiigwaas jiimaan, is an attempt to generate a better connection to our homeland, self- determination, and forms of healing within a cultural context. Through diverse research methodologies, this project will open new doors to cultural resurgence methods, Indigenous knowledge and the story telling of the wiigwaas jiimaan. Over the summer of 2018, I built a wiigwaas jiimaan in my home community of Temagami First Nation. It is from this experience that this research shaped. Through the approach of storytelling to my reflective notes, while incorporating an Indigenous knowledge and resurgence methodology. It is important that when you are reading this, that you keep an open mind, sit comfortably and enjoy the interweaving of story and research. The thesis creates a better understanding of resurgence practices, the history of the Teme- Augama Anishinabai, my story and experience with the wiigwaas jiimaan, and the rebuilding of my community through this cultural initiative. Moving forward I hope that this research continues and evolves to other communities, who look for healing and cultural reclaiming through the land. Miigwetch. Author Keywords: Culture, Healing, Land-Based, Resurgence, Temagami First Nation, Wiigwaas jiimaan
Following ininaahtigoog Home
Indigenous peoples’ sur-thrivance in global, settler colonial, historical, and nation-specific economic contexts is a broadly studied subject that fails to emphasize Indigenous economic sovereignty. Indigenous knowledges regarding the land-based relationalities which formulate an aspect of Indigenous economic sovereignty is lacking. So too is knowledge on Indigenous womxn’s land and water-based relationalities from which her economic sovereignty flows. Writing within and for Anishinaabeg sur-thrivance in Anishinaabewaki, this research examines Anishinaabeg womxn’s relationship with the sugar bush during the spring harvest as a site of gendered nation-specific economic sovereignty. Epistemicide has attenuated land-based knowledges in gendered ways; and, missionary and settler colonial processes in Canada, the U.S., and within Anishinaabeg communities have alienated Anishinaabeg womxn from inherent land and water-based relationships. By employing an Anishinaabeg methodology of “critically returning to ourselves” that is oriented towards Anishinaabe approaches to history and Anishinaabe ways of seeing history as worlds, this research recovers information about womxn’s sugar bush relationships. This recovery begins with literary, documentary, and oral sources. Through anishinaabe feminist interpretation, I reveal that womxn’s sugar bush relationships engender whole worlds that are animated and generated by her legendary connections with the natural and spiritual world, her social-economic commitment and savvy, and her enduring labour. I further interpret that her connections, her savvy, and her labour is mediated with variable aspects of settler colonial gendered influences such as patriarchy, omnipresent heterosexuality and/or gender binaries, marriage, class, and values attributed to womxn that are inconsequential to sur-thriving in land and water-based worlds. In conclusion this research tells three distinct, but connected, “sticky and sweet [story] strands” which illuminate the significance, beauty, complexity, and un-romance of Anishinaabeg womxn’s relationship with the sugar bush. Simultaneously, it prompts Anishinaabeg to reflect on the worlds we have lived in, are living in now, and want to create in terms of land-based relationships and relationalities. In effort to disrupt and bring attention to the restrictions and distortions that several hundred years of missionary, settler colonial, (hetero)patriarchal, heterosexist, and capitalist forces have had on Anishinaabeg gender and relational formations, my method in writing (i.e. spelling) is to prompt consciousness of gender and relational fluidity and diversity. This approach presses for Anishinaabeg committed orientation towards the necessities and possibilities of correcting and transforming imposed and internalized settler gender and relational formations and structures. This research builds on a body of literature about Indigenous womxn’s relationship with land and water in Turtle Island in order to signify and illuminate Anishinaabeg womxn’s dynamic and varied relationship with the sugar bush. It contributes to Indigenous research methodology, Indigenous and Anishinaabeg women’s history, Indigenous women’s labour, and Indigenous literary studies. Author Keywords: Anishinaabeg Studies, economic sovereignty, Indigenous feminism, Indigenous relationship with land, Indigenous women, sugar bush

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