Tradition, Solidarity and Empowerment: The Native Discourse in Canada
Tradition, Solidarity and Empowerment: The Native Discourse in Canada

Author: Steffi Retzlaff

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 3838255224

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“This study represents a significant step towards understanding an important social phenomenon in Canada at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Throughout much of the twentieth century the life of virtually all Aboriginal people had been marked by a set of policies directed from Ottawa. These had contributed to undermining both their traditional cultures and also the familial bonds vital for the development of a positive self-image and a healthy relationship with other members of society, as also with society as a whole. The negative impact of such policies is now very widely recognised and documented. The study does not set out to shed further light on this set of causes and effects. What it does do, successfully, is investigate a number of the linguistic strategies based partly on aboriginal discursive models, partly on positive presentation of a range of topics handled very differently in Euro-Canadian media, and partly on the propagation and consistent use of key items of terminology, some of which have begun to enter at least some of the Euro-Canadian media and strands of political discourse.”Prof. Robert Gould Carleton University OttawaThe analytical framework employed in this study is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is said to focus on relevant social, cultural and political problems and processes. Accordingly, its task is both deconstructive and constructive. However, the emphasis of research in CDA is mainly on ‘problems’ and the deconstructive moment, which aims at revealing hidden and not-so-hidden linguistic strategies and how dominant discourses are appropriated or ‘naturalized’. The analysis presented in this book runs counter to this generally employed CDA practice. It pays attention to constructive moments. The focus is on counter-discourses as they are used by Aboriginal people in Canada to resist ingrained hegemonic practices, to build and develop new power relations as well as social and political identities.

Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada
Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada

Author: Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2010-09-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0887553990

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Indigenous media challenges the power of the state, erodes communication monopolies, and illuminates government threats to indigenous cultural, social, economic, and political sovereignty. Its effectiveness in these areas, however, is hampered by government control of broadcast frequencies, licensing, and legal limitations over content and ownership.Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada explores key questions surrounding the power and suppression of indigenous narrative and representation in contemporary indigenous media. Focussing primarily on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, the authors also examine indigenous language broadcasting in radio, television, and film; Aboriginal journalism practices; audience creation within and beyond indigenous communities; the roles of program scheduling and content acquisition policies in the decolonization process; the roles of digital video technologies and co-production agreements in indigenous filmmaking; and the emergence of Aboriginal cyber-communities.

Indians Playing Indian
Indians Playing Indian

Author: Monika Siebert

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2015-02-27

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0817318550

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"In Indians Playing Indian, Monika Siebert explores the appropriation, or misappropriation, of Native American cultural heritage for political and commercial ends, and the innovative ways in which indigenous artists in a range of media have responded to these developments. Contemporary indigenous people in North America confront a unique predicament. As legal and diplomatic practice in the early twenty first century returns to the recognition of their status as citizens of historic sovereign nations, popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities on the par with other ethnic Americans. This popular misperception of indigeneity as culture rather than as a historically developed political status sustains the myth of America as a refuge to the world's immigrants and a home to successful multicultural democracies. But it fundamentally misrepresents indigenous people who have experienced a history of colonization rather than a tradition of immigration on the continent. Contemporary indigenous cultural production is caught up in this phenomenon of multicultural misrecognition as well. The current flowering of indigenous literature, cinema, and visual arts is typically taken as evidence that Canada and the United States have successfully broken with their colonial pasts to become thriving nations of many cultures, where Native Americans, along other minorities, enjoy full freedom to represent their cultural difference"--

Craft and Heritage
Craft and Heritage

Author: Susan Surette

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1350067598

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This collection of 19 original essays argues for a critical and sustained engagement between the fields of craft and heritage. The book's interdisciplinary and international array of authors consider how heritage and craft institutions, policies, practices and audiences encounter the constraints and opportunities of production, recognition and exhibition. Case studies spanning 125 years raise and address questions concerning authenticity and commodification, innovation and improvisation, diasporas and decolonization, global economies and national and professional identities. Authors also analyse mechanisms through which craft mobilises and has been harnessed by heritage processes and designations. Examples range from an Irish village at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the role of chronopolitics in contemporary Vietnamese pottery, to the invisibility of crochet within Swedish heritagisation processes and the application of game theory in a ceramics museum. With section one considering citizenship and identity, section two sustainability and section three dynamic craft in cultural institutions, Craft and Heritage interrogates how craft objects, makers and processes intersect with current heritage concerns and practices.

Healing Traditions
Healing Traditions

Author: Laurence J. Kirmayer

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 9780774815246

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Aboriginal peoples in Canada have diverse cultures but share common social and political challenges that have contributed to their experiences of health and illness. This collection addresses the origins of mental health and social problems and the emergence of culturally responsive approaches to services and health promotion. Healing Traditions is not a handbook of practice but a resource for thinking critically about current issues in the mental health of indigenous peoples. The book is divided into four sections: an overview of the mental health of indigenous peoples; origins and representations of social suffering; transformations of identity and community; and traditional healing and mental health services. Cross-cutting themes include: the impact of colonialism, sedentarization, and forced assimilation; the importance of land for indigenous identity and an ecocentric self; notions of space and place as part of the cultural matrix of identity and experience; and processes of healing and spirituality as sources of resilience. Offering a unique combination of mental health and socio-cultural perspectives, Healing Traditions will be useful to all concerned with the wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples including health professionals, community workers, planners and administrators, social scientists, educators, and students.

Magic Weapons
Magic Weapons

Author: Sam McKegney

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2011-03-10

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0887553397

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The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Magic Weapons is the first major survey of Indigenous writings on the residential school system, and provides groundbreaking readings of life writings by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit) as well as in-depth critical studies of better known life writings by Basil Johnston (Ojibway) and Tomson Highway (Cree). Magic Weapons examines the ways in which Indigenous survivors of residential school mobilize narrative in their struggles for personal and communal empowerment in the shadow of attempted cultural genocide. By treating Indigenous life-writings as carefully crafted aesthetic creations and interrogating their relationship to more overtly politicized historical discourses, Sam McKegney argues that Indigenous life-writings are culturally generative in ways that go beyond disclosure and recompense, re-envisioning what it means to live and write as Indigenous individuals in post-residential school Canada.