While there is an abundance of research on Indigenous healing in the context of residential schools and intergenerational trauma in Canada, very little has been written specifically about community-based sexual assault services providing Indigenous-specific supports for survivors of sexual assault. "Visioning our Healing" begins to remedy this gap through a research partnership with one of the few mainstream sexual assault centers (SAC) in northern Ontario that provides culturally specific supports to Indigenous women, men, and Two-Spirit people. Using photo voice and other forms of storying with Indigenous clients of the SAC, "Visioning our Healing" provides thematic analysis of Indigenous pathways to healing and discusses how the SAC might continue to develop its Indigenous support services. Our report identifies key strengths, promising practices, and organizational challenges in decolonizing community and social services and funding.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) used the periodical Indians at Work to forward reforms and policies of the New Deal era. Seen primarily as a vehicle to transmit the views of John Collier, Roosevelt's commissioner of Indian Affairs, the periodical has often been overlooked as a source for understanding the perspectives and concerns of tribal communities. But many Indigenous authors appear in the magazine, and highlighting these contributions adds to the significance of Indians at Work. Critically, Indigenous authors conveyed meaning through culturally specific forms of expression that were recognizable to various audiences. Authors employed these discursive strategies to assert their authority to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers and to counter dominant historical narratives. Seen in this way, Indians at Work is a vital primary resource that illuminates how Indigenous communities were positioning themselves in a moment of significant political, social, and economic change. Local authors demonstrated a keen awareness of documentary power and used this form to challenge existing ideas and tropes about what it meant to be Indigenous in the early twentieth century.
The role of community control over education is an often-overlooked aspect of the history of Native American self-determination, sovereignty, and treaty rights movements, especially in Alaska Native history. Existing scholarship consistently implies that prior to the signing of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, Native Peoples had limited success in achieving sovereignty and control in any area, let alone in education. However, many Alaska Native communities successfully implemented community control over education well before 1975. Analysis of Alaska Native voices in newspapers, state and federal government documents, and the writings of educators and school administrators shows that not only did Alaska Native communities and leaders implement programs of community control over education, but also that education itself comprised a key component in the larger movement for political self-determination. Education thereby served as a primary mechanism by which Alaska Native communities resisted and reversed generations of erasure and cultural assimilation, achieving new levels of self-governance.
Ho-Chunk leader Hapoguwiga (Glory of the Morning) led her village in Wisconsin during a pivotal era of Ho-Chunk history. However, narratives crafted by settlers decenter her legacy, working to legitimize settler colonial occupation and identity. These narratives participate in and inspire settler affect- physical and emotional attachment to place identities-and further settler myths of Indigenous consent regarding land occupation. Jonathan Carver's Travels through the Interior parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768, illustrates the formation of Eurocentric nation-building narratives that dismiss Native American governance and relationships to land. Within the text, Carver describes Hpoguwiga as the "queen" of her village yet diminishes her role as a sovereign leader. This colonial imaginary strengthens settler attachment to place and erases Ho-Chunk presence. The twentieth-century play Glory of the Morning (1914) by William Ellery Leonard, serves a similar function by focusing on her consensual relationship with a French trader to reinforce a myth of settler belonging. This play describes Hpoguwigaas her husband's "sq**w," erasing her role as a Ho-Chunk leader and autonomous woman. As a historical figure, Hpoguwiga embodies Ho-Chunk presence amidst settler encroachment. In contrast, Carver's travel writing and Leonard's play reveal how settler affect shapes her presence in settler memory to sustain the myth of Indigenous consent to land occupation.
During the U.S. Occupation, Teruya was designated the Black District of Okinawa because of U.S. racial prejudice. The prevailing literary and scholarly representations of the Black District portray it as a place of ecological, social, and moral ruination-yet ruin is not all there is to see. In this essay, I propose a "yuntaku reading method" as an Indigenous feminist methodology to read against and beyond ruination, putting literary analysis in dialogue with the Okinawan cultural and social form of yuntaku (Uchinaaguchi: chit-chat, gossip, conversation). Drawing on a close reading of Jun Kishaba's short story "Dark Flowers" (1955) and yuntaku with Teruya residents, I argue that even as tropes of ruination allowed Okinawans to critique the transpacific coloniality and racial logics underpinning the U.S.- Japanese settler militarist structure, they demonstrated a refusal to allow ruination to be the sole condition of their social and psychic lives. By reading against ruination, a yuntaku reading method reveals the complexities of living with/in occupation. Ultimately, by conceptualizing the literary and the everyday, I suggest that Okinawans, through their everyday actions, transformed Black-Okinawan relationalities into fertile ground for articulating other possible futures, enacting everyday sovereignties between ruin and rebellion in Okinawa's Black District.
