The Case of the Americas and Australia Pacific Region" symposium. 2Talks at the symposium unflinchingly documented the systematic application of diverse UN-defined genocidal techniques on Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Pacific.As a reminder, Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." The five broad techniques include:
How do different discourses lead to changes in understandings of the world, identity, meaning and practice in Indigenous politics in Canada? This article introduces the poststructuralist the-ory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Canadian Indigenous studies and demonstrates that it is a unique and effective theory for understanding this question. It finds that in the last few decades, two principal discourses regarding Indigenous peoples and colonialism have circulated in the Canadian body politic-namely, (1) "reconciliation" and (2) "Idle No More." These discourses shape the identities of both Indigenous peoples and settlers, construct under-standings of the world, and determine the meaning of related political struggle, leading to real world practice and politics. The reconciliation discourse has at times been effective at becoming a dominant discourse and has often been able to constitute the meaning of important terms such as 'decolonization.' It serves to pacify Indigenous resistance to colonialism. Counter-he-gemonic discourses on reconciliation such as 'Idle No More' have been able to challenge that discourse. Academic literature, newspaper articles, YouTube videos, podcasts developed by In-digenous scholars, public letters and speeches delivered by Canadian politicians are analyzed to examine the utterances and enunciations of the two discourses.
This study investigated involved a review of trends from five Statistics Canada databases on criminality, victimization, custody in correctional services, adult admissions to community services, and general labour force levels in the 6 years following the release of the December 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. Although there did not appear to be a general decline in criminality, victimization, or overall custody of Indigenous persons in Canada from 2015 to 2021, minor improvements in the nature of intra-community victimization, admissions to community services to serve sentences, and increased employment among Indigenous persons in Canada were observed. Discussion focuses on the short- and long-term implications of the TRC report with respect to meaningful impacts on the lives of indigenous people in Canada.
While the Income Tax Act provides structure to philanthropic activity in Canada, an Indigenist reading of it shows that it is also a part of state-building at the expense of inherent Indigenous governance systems. By shaping philanthropic gift giving, this paper shows, the act plays a role in precluding inherent Indigenous leaders from accessing fiscal support based on their own political authority.
Organizational histories in Canada have traditionally been written by longstanding members or devoted employees, or, alternatively, by historians or other academics interested in the corporate, institutional, and organizational history of Canada.These organizational histories have been written predominantly by and about white males, and usually describe through a self-referential, white, male, middle-class lens how privileged members of Canadian society have organized themselves for various purposes.As a result, histories of Indigenous feminist organizations advocating for social, economic, and political change and equality for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Indigenous persons are largely overlooked or simply absent in Canada's institutional, corporate and organizational record.In the case of the history of Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak-Women of the Métis Nation, this narrative gap in the historical record arguably constitutes an ignoring of "Métis women's visible contributions to the contemporary landscape of the Métis, and wider Indigenous, politics… [and] entrenches the sexist erasure of Métis women, which is a hallmark of patriarchal colonization" (Adese 2021, 118).However, the following brief history of Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak-Women of the Métis Nation (LFMO-WMN) is not a story of Indigenous feminist organizational victimization at the hands of the colonial patriarchy.Rather, it is an uplifting, strengthsbased story of a National Indigenous Women's Organization advocating, with persistence and pride, for the equality of Métis women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Métis through a distinctions-based, gendered, intersectional approach reflective of the cultural and feminist values of the Women of the Métis Nation.Reviewing the history of LFMO-WMN therefore offers a counterbalance to the historical omission of Métis women in Canada and provides a modest contribution to the historiography of organizational histories in Canada.It also contributes to Indigenous public policy discourse by highlighting the place, space, and impact of this small but mighty entity in upholding Indigenous feminist organizational strength in Canada.
In light of Bill C-92, which establishes a framework for Indigenous communities to exercise legislative authority over child and family service provision, this article addresses the contested regulation of employment and labour relations in Indigenous social service workplaces. It approaches this subject by looking back at NIL/TU,O Child and Family Services Society v. B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union, a case in which employees at a First Nations child and family services provider attempted to unionize. NIL/ TU,O set in motion a legal battle over the jurisdiction of Indigenous labour relations that ultimately reached the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in 2010. The SCC determined that the labours of the workers at NIȽ TU,O Child and Family Services are a matter of provincial jurisdiction because they fall outside of the “core of Indianness,” a contested legal concept used to determine exclusive federal legislative power over ”Indians and Lands reserved for Indians.” Using Indigenous feminisms and a feminist political economy approach, we argue that this decision rests on gendered appraisals, and indeed obfuscations, of social reproduction – that is to say, the labour involved in the daily and intergenerational care and reproduction of people. Bill C-92 necessitates revisiting the case history in NIL/TU,O because the regulation of labour relations are unaddressed in the new Act. We suggest that the uncertainty surrounding jurisdiction over Indigenous labour has the dual potential of, on the one hand, being used for exploitative or dispossessive purposes, or, on the other hand, taken up as an opening for greater self-determination by Indigenous peoples.
Founded in 1999, Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak (LFMO) raises the voices and interests of Métis women across the Métis Motherland. With steadfast work by
Grocery shopping is one of the most necessary everyday practices when it comes to being food secure. Food security is frequently spatially imagined along two axes – access and health. I highlight the specific conditions of existence for food insecure citizens in Winnipeg to demonstrate the incommensurability of how food insecurity is imagined and intervened upon, or not, through municipal policy. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Studies scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorizations of white possession, I establish a framework of white possessive securitization to interrogate the dynamics between policy, policing, and securitization of space that results in Indigenous people being subjected to multiple modes of policing when grocery shopping. With white possessive securitization, I trace how individual settler citizens operate as self-governing subjects to police Indigenous people in the city while carrying out the aims of white patriarchal sovereignty – to secure private property. I provide three vignettes of the intersections of municipal policy and the policing of food by focussing on municipal budgets, securitization of public-private space, and grocery stores. These vignettes delineate how policing in grocery stores interfere with Indigenous food security and are inseparable from inflated municipal policing budgets, austerity measures that reduce community services, increased surveillance, threats of violence, and the undiscriminating implementation of the rule of law by individual settler citizens who through rationalities of governmentality are the police.
I want to share my unique perspective on being the first (and thus far only) Métis Inclusion Coordinator in a post-secondary institution, even though Métis make up 40%-55% of Indigenous students on campuses across the Métis homeland, which ranges from Ontario through to British Columbia.I begin
The IGP Program is a uniquely positioned research and teaching unit---. This article describes the philosophy, principles, pedagogy, and practices of the IGP Program, its fourteen-year history, and its most recent contributions in the subject area of Indigenous governance. The IGP governance framework and the IGP research method emerge from community responsive research and custom programming partnerships. These models and related learnings are introduced to provide academics with a set of tools to teach Indigenous governance, establish community-based research partnerships that are enduring and respectful, and provide holistic and transformational public education to a myriad of organizations and change oriented leaders.
Using data from the 2016 Census, this study examined the level of education–job mismatch (over-qualification, in particular) in the Canadian labour market among Indigenous women workers aged 25 to 64 who received post-secondary education. Their rate of over-qualification was compared with that of Indigenous men as well as non-Indigenous workers. In doing so, this study aimed to shed some light on the effect of post-secondary education on labour market outcomes by investigating whether Indigenous men and women benefit equally from their post-secondary education. Compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts and Indigenous men, Indigenous women workers with university-level education (bachelor’s degree or higher) were less likely to be over-qualified. Conversely, Indigenous women workers with post-secondary education lower than university level were more likely than non-Indigenous women and Indigenous men to be over-qualified. This pattern persisted after sociodemographic factors were controlled for. The results suggest that, among those with a post-secondary education, higher levels of education were especially advantageous to Indigenous women.
This paper argues for the value of a comparison of the Métis national movement with the Catalan national movement. It pays special attention to the matter of federalism (especially the writings of Harry Daniels and the recent court rulings about Catalonia's status and bid for independence), of small communities that have been "carved out" (especially the Métis Settlements of Alberta and the microstate of Andorra) and the existence of communities that cross borders (especially the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota and the Catalan communities of France).
Sámi society is an undergrowth in Alta society… You got to know the codes, know people.If you don't know it, then you don't see it.You need knowledge to recognize the signs.People who aren't familiar with this, they don't understand what's being talked about.Sámi in Alta often know about each other.I observe that people can say they knew about us, about our family-but we didn't necessarily know about them.The Sámi also know about those who, for everything in the world, don't want to be Sámi. (Sámi informant, Alta [Áltá], Finnmark County, Norway)During the last four years, I have been part of a group working on the book An Urban Future for Sápmi?Indigenous Urbanization in the Nordic States and Russia (Berg-Nordlie, Dankertsen, and Winsvold forthcoming), as part of a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council's Programme for Sámi Research. 1 Our project has explored various consequences of the urbanization of an Arctic Indigenous people, the Sámi nation, whose population and homeland-Sápmi-has been divided by the states of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.The team of researchers involved in the book has consisted of people from various ethnicities, states, and disciplines: Astri Dankertsen (Sámi sociologist, Norway), Marte S. Winsvold (Norwegian political scientist), Anna Afanasyeva (Sámi historian from Russia, living in Norway), Chris Andersen (Métis sociologist, Canada), and myself (Sámi historian, Norway).Through the course of the project, we have encountered a wide range of experiences and issues related to Sámi urbanization and urbanity.In this commentary, I will limit myself to discussing only one aspect of Sámi urban life: urban Sámi invisibility.In the following, I will make some observations about Sámi invisibility and ways of becoming visible, with an eye to the importance of historical narratives.
The release of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report titled “Honouring the Truth and Reconciling for the Future” has evoked a persistent call within learning institutions to Indigenize education, decolonize systems of power, and reconcile Indigenous–settler relations and knowledge. Within this context, the TRC’s “Calls to Action” are frequently invoked by institutions attempting to achieve just action. While reconciliation remains a complex, political, and settler-driven endeavour, there has been an effort to “fill the gap” with Indigenous presence, knowledge, and students within academic institutions. Given the limited research on the gendered aspect of reconciliation, our paper contributes to this conversation by examining the impact of the “filling effort” on our critical community work and the ways in which we as Indigenous women engage in reconciliation. By this, we mean the ways we live and understand reconciliation by looking inward toward each other as women, to learn from each other, and to lift each other up. Through a relational accountability methodology and mixed methods (Wilson 2008), we draw strength from our relational and resurgence approaches in an effort to capture our commitment, challenges, and transformative vision of reconciliation as Indigenous women in the academy.
