Graduate Theses & Dissertations

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Keeping Circle
In the 1980’s, Hollow Water First Nation citizens created a healing movement to address community issues from an Indigenous perspective resulting in the development of the Community Holistic Circle Healing (CHCH) in 1989. The CHCH organization developed a Community (Restorative) Justice process as an alternative to a Western-based Justice approach to address issues such as domestic violence and sexual abuse. The CHCH organization addresses justice from a healing perspective (rather than the Western approach’s punitive/surveillance model) and includes the offender and offender’s family, the victim and the victim’s family, as well as the community to identify issues, develop plans, implement healing activities, and evaluate the outcome so that the root systemic issues affecting community can be addressed holistically. Hollow Water First Nation is much more engaged in addressing the roots of why the offence occurred and looks for Anishinaabek approaches to resolve community-defined issues. Western society tends to implement a symptomatic approach to violence deterrence through punishment rather than address issues through a healing process. My research looks at the complex history of the healing movement, the operation of the CHCH organization and the personal values that emerged from the healing movement, and Hollow Water’s next iteration of organization from the children of the people that began the healing movement. These people are now aged around mid-40’s and have seen their parents engage in a community justice movement, saw their parents develop their own way to address community issues through the emergence and operation of the CHCH organization, and now, themselves, have developed highly critical and creative skills around the workings of community development. I use Berger and Luckmann’s seminal 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality, Hallowell’s perspectives on the Anishinaabek culture in his anthropological research conducted in Beren’s River, Manitoba during the 1930’s, Max Weber’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1915), interviews with the original activists, and my experiences living in Hollow Water for 4+ years (from 1997 to 2001) to give an account of the history of the healing movement and its consequent personal transformation of the people engaged in examining their thoughts, values and behavioural processes. I use the Learning Organization Theory, developed by Peter Senge (a management professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline, interviews of CHCH staff and other community organization staff members, as well as, Indigenous authors, such as, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) and Michael Hart’s Seeking Mino-Pimatisiwin (2002) to provide an understanding of Indigenous concepts as they apply to the process of CHCH’s healing/learning operations. From these sources and interviews, I provide an account of Hollow Water’s Healing Movement which includes the decline of the CHCH organization from late 1990s to 2020. Given the current hyperpolitical environment in Canada, Hollow Water’s next generation of community member activists are perhaps about to reclaim power and establish empowered relationships as the Indigenous Renaissance unfolds. Author Keywords: Community Healing Movement Process, Hollow Water First Nation, Indigenous Axiology and Praxis, Learning Organization, Restorative Justice, Systems-Thinking
Oil is Thicker than Justice
This thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the extractive industry operating out of the Alberta tar sands region to determine how environmental violence is enacted against Indigenous women, girls, and queer or Two-Spirit peoples in the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation and beyond. Through an analysis of existing literature in the field, a case study on the Lubicon Lake Nation and a policy analysis of the Calls for Justice from the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, this thesis draws links between industrialization, capitalism, the heteropatriarchy, and colonialism. Finally, this thesis offers a pathway to resurgence, through the subversion of colonial gender and sexual norms, and collective action to reclaim Indigenous territory as an alternative to state-sponsored solutions and policies. Author Keywords: Colonial heteropatriarchy, Environmental violence, Land Back, Lubicon Lake, Tar sands, Violence against Indigenous women
How Did We Get Here? Exploring Socio-Political Influences in Canadian Penitentiaries
This thesis examines how political and social issues have molded and alteredCanada’s penal system since the nineteenth-century. From early Anglo-Canadian society to Joseph Archambault’s 1938 Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, the Canadian penal system waxed and waned against social and political tides. As rehabilitative justice took hold throughout the developed world in the early twentieth century, Canada attempted to shift its justice ideologies only to find that punitive justice had created strong footings. This made reform challenging to implement. Author Keywords: Archambault Report, Canadian penal system, Canadian prisons, prison press, prison systems, prison writing
Perspectives on Poultry
The contemporary denigration of poultry combined with the intensification of industrialized animal agriculture has deepened divides between humans and poultry, creating a disconnect that holds implications for both parties and the sustainability of North American food systems. This study explores how people with poultry keeping experience perceive these animals, how their views are influenced and how these narratives may intersect with themes of sustainability. Surveys and interviews aimed at small flock keepers and commercial farmers within an area of Central Ontario revealed that poultry sentience was widely recognized among participants. Overall, this study’s findings disrupt commonly held notions that poultry are one-dimensional beings and highlight the mutual benefits that can come when the distance is lessened between humans and poultry. This research contends that reimagining human-poultry relationships could improve our ability to consider and challenge dominant systems that perpetuates unsustainable food production and negatively affects both animal and human life. Author Keywords: history poultry keeping, human-animal studies, human-poultry relationships, keeper attitudes, poultry sentience, sustainable food systems
Paper Chase
"The Paper Chase: A Survey of Student Newspapers on Ontario Campuses in the 1960s" is a regional study of three University campuses in Ontario — the University of Toronto, Queen's University and Trent University — and examines each of these institutions’ respective student newspapers, The Varsity, The Queen's Journal, and The Arthur as a primary source analysis. In broader terms, this thesis looks to theoretically historicize the themes of "life," "love," and "liberty" on Ontario campuses in the 1960s. Its central question is whether Ontario's youth experienced a cultural revolution like that portrayed in popular memory of the period, which profoundly appears in other sixties cultural interpretations in Canada and the United States. By framing student life through student newspapers' gamut, this thesis calls into question the lionization of some cultural decade elements. It determines students were, in fact, in some ways much more conservative in their outlook than earlier literature or the popular memory of the period suggests. History has much to say about students who rebelled. This thesis focuses on those who did not. Author Keywords: Conservatism, Counterculture, Queen’s University, Sixties, Trent University, University of Toronto
Examining Strategies of New Public Management in Homelessness Policy
This research is a critical analysis of coordinated access as an approach to addressing homelessness focusing on Peterborough, Ontario as a case study. This study is situated in scholarship that explores the presence of strategies of New Public Management in social service and healthcare delivery. Balancing the methods of Smith’s (2005) Institutional Ethnography and Bacchi’s (2009) What is the Problem Represented to Be approach I investigate the way that Federal, Provincial and Municipal homelessness policies organize themselves as instruments of power and I connect this analysis to the accounts of staff working within the homelessness response system. I discover the frame of vulnerability through which homelessness is addressed to be an individualizing mechanism that facilitates the downloading of responsibility for social welfare to local governments without adequate resources. I argue that the consequence of an under resourced system is that only the most extreme forms of suffering can be addressed, and the tools used to decipher who is most vulnerable do not account for structural inequalities. Author Keywords: Coordinated Access, Homelessness, Homelessness Policy, Institutional Ethnography, Neoliberalization, New Public Management
Unsettling Inner Landscapes
Recent climate scientists, Indigenous resurgence scholars, and psychologists have variously indicated that we need a transformation of consciousness in order to address the cultural and spiritual forces at the root of our current environmental, interpersonal, and individual crises of disconnection. My research is in direct response to diverse calls for this paradigm shift, including the words of Elders such as the late Grandfather William Commanda who encouraged settlers such as myself to ‘remember our original instructions’. Through an anti-colonial and trauma-informed lens, my goal has been to strategically inform my roles and responsibilities in healing the disconnection and abuses in what I term the trilogy of my relationships to self, others, and Land. This study is both a critical auto-ethnography and as well as a theoretical engagement with Indigenous resurgence, settler colonialism, and sustainability discourses. I share dialogues with Anishinaabe-kweg in my community with whom I have established relationships and the results of our discussions focus on holistic models of transforming settler consciousness. What emerges is an emotional, uncertain, and yet radically hopeful narrative that points to the urgency of centering Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous relationship models while endeavouring to reconstruct a sense of identity and belonging along more accountable lines. Recovering a sense of my Celtic epistemology and story work is offered as a strategic exemplar of how settlers might begin to remember and co-create more balanced, respectful, and reciprocal relationships with and within place. Nurturing an embodied spiritual practice of deep listening, critical self-reflection, and collective action is discussed as potentially central to sustaining a decolonizing praxis for white settler Canadians more broadly. Author Keywords: Critical auto-ethnography, Critical Spirituality, Decolonization, Indigenous-settler relations, Original Instructions, Settler colonial studies
Indigenous Knowledge in Contemporary Public Education
This study provides important perspectives and guidance for educators in Ontario to assist in integrating Indigenous content into public education programs – both in schools and other community educational settings. It explores how Indigenous worldviews provide unique insights for holistic education and learning how to live sustainably in place. The study also focuses on approaches to education, comparing Eurocentric and Indigenous philosophies and pedagogies, as indicators of differing value systems. Through a combination of literature review and personal interviews with eleven influential Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators in the Peterborough area, the study explores the potential for Indigenous perspectives to enhance the wellbeing and personal learning journey of all students, regardless of their backgrounds. The research concludes with recommendations for educators on how to begin integrating Indigenous Knowledge throughout programming in appropriate, respectful ways that celebrate diversity, develop positive relationships and build healthier, more sustainable communities. Author Keywords: Education, Environment, Indigenous Knowledge, Pedagogy, Reconciliation, Worldviews
“It's like getting a new car without the manual”
This study explored teacher infusion of Indigenous curriculum content through interviews with ten non-Indigenous teachers of social studies and history. The interviews centered on teacher perceptions of preparedness to implement Ontario’s recent TRC curriculum revisions, which include more about the contributions, histories, cultures, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples. A brief analysis of Ontario’s First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Education Policy Framework is included, alongside critiques of the Eurocentrism at the heart of education systems. The interviews revealed that many of the teachers were committed to Indigenous education and learning more, but they felt unprepared and lacked resources to teach Indigenous curriculum content with confidence. This study highlighted the critical role of settler teachers in Indigenous education and the importance of teachers undertaking settler unsettling in order to be effective and appropriate in Indigenous curriculum delivery. Individual changes must occur alongside educational system decolonization with a particular focus on teacher preparation. Author Keywords: cognitive imperialism, Indigenous Education, Ontario, settler educator, settler unsettling, TRC curriculum
An Application of Virgilio Enriquez's Indigenization Method on Filipino-Canadian Discourse
In Disturbing Invisibility (Coloma, McElhinny, Tungohan, Catungal, Davidson, 2012), the most comprehensive book on Filipino-Canadian studies to date, issues were identified in the afterword as to how Filipino-Canadian studies relates to indigenous identity. This thesis attempts to address this issue by applying Enriquez’s (1992) Indigenization Method onto Filipino-Canadian discourse. It attempts to do this by: exploring the colonial context and history in the Philippines and its effect on the formation of a Filipino indigenous identity; exploring Filipino indigenous thought as described by Enriquez (1992) in his seminal book From Colonial to Liberation Psychology; understanding Filipinos in Canada with the inclusion of literature from Filipino-American studies and the Filipino Indigenization movement; and how orienting Filipino-Canadian discourse with the indigenous concepts brought forward by Enriquez might look like, with emphasis on how Filipino-Canadian discourse could interact with Indigenous issues relating to Indigenous People in Canada today. It becomes clear that the Filipino Indigenization movement has reached grassroots Filipino organizations in Canada, and that uncritically ignoring their own Filipino indigenous roots would be denying themselves the unique cultural gifts that those roots provide. As being both Filipino and Canadian, Filipino-Canadians who seek to reclaim their indigenous roots would find that the indigenous concept of kapwa (“the self in the other”) would encourage an examination of issues pertaining to Indigenous People in Canada as commonalities exist in their experiences with colonization. Author Keywords: Canada, discourse, Filipino-Canadians, indigenization, indigenous, Philippines
Tourism Around Yellowknife
Yellowknife, which began as a gold-mining town in the 1930s, developed into a modern city and the territorial capital. Yellowknife is a popular destination for tourism with yearly growing numbers that reflect aurora viewers, business travel, general touring and visiting friends and relatives. Consequently, tourism in the Yellowknife area is increasing in volume and is of growing economic significance. Municipal and territorial governments actively advance its expansion, with the City’s 2015-2019 Tourism Strategy directed at infrastructure and service enhancement. While diamond tourism, as envisioned in 2004, did not progress, the Indigenous population in the territory is developing and executing community-based tourism plans. Utilizing Grounded Theory, this study demonstrates that governmental and stakeholder support proves dedication and commitment to the local tourism industry for years into the future. Yellowknife and its citizens take firm measures to attract increasing numbers of visitors in recognition of the value of tourism to their community. Author Keywords: Aurora borealis, Diamond industry, Government involvement, Northwest Territories economy, Tourism, Yellowknife
Struggling for a New Left
This study examines the emergence of the New Left organization, The New Tendency, in Windsor, Ontario during the 1970s. The New Tendency, which developed in a number of Ontario cities, represents one articulation of the Canadian New Left’s turn towards working-class organizing in the early 1970s after the student movement’s dissolution in the late 1960s. Influenced by dissident Marxist theorists associated with the Johnson-Forest Tendency and Italian workerism, The New Tendency sought to create alternative forms of working-class organizing that existed outside of, and often in direct opposition to, both the mainstream labour movement and Old Left organizations such as the Communist Party and the New Democratic Party. After examining the roots of the organization and the important legacies of class struggle in Windsor, the thesis explores how The New Tendency contributed to working-class self activity on the shop-floor of Windsor’s auto factories and in the community more broadly. However, this New Left mobilization was also hampered by inner-group sectarianism and a rapidly changing economic context. Ultimately, the challenges that coincided with The New Tendency’s emergence in the 1970s led to its dissolution. While short-lived, the history of the Windsor branch of The New Tendency helps provide valuable insight into the trajectory of the Canadian New Left and working-class struggle in the 1970s, highlighting experiences that have too often been overlooked in previous scholarship. Furthermore, this study illustrates the transnational development of New Left ideas and organizations by examining The New Tendency’s close connections to comparable groups active in manufacturing cities in Europe and the United States; such international relationships and exchanges were vital to the evolution of autonomist Marxism around the world. Finally, the Windsor New Tendency’s history is an important case study of the New Left’s attempts to reckon with a transitional moment for global capitalism, as the group’s experiences coincided with the Fordist accord’s death throes and the beginning of neoliberalism’s ascendancy. Author Keywords: Autonomist Marxism, Canada, Labour, New Left, Rank-and-file Organizing, Working-Class History

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Format: 2024/03/28