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Abstract: Even though Indigenous women are the fastest growing prison population in Canada and around the world, scholarship regarding the storytelling of incarcerated Indigenous women is extremely limited. My dissertation centers the stories of Indigenous women within Tightwire, a prisoner produced newsletter that was published between 1972 and 1995 within the former Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, Ontario. I aim to document Indigenous women’s storied truths and lived experiences within Canada’s prison system which include, for example, the criminalization process as it relates to Indigenous women, the solidarity expressed by the Native Sisterhood that resulted from their experiences of inequality at P4W, as well as their dreams for Indigenous and social justice. Importantly, I balance my analyses between instances of colonial trauma (including experiences of incarceration) with stories of hope and imagination (such as ideas for achieving Indigenous justice). This practice enables me to avoid damage-centered research while still considering the very real effects of intergenerational trauma and ongoing colonialism. As an interdisciplinary criminologist, I integrate critical feminist criminology, Indigenous studies, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of punishment to explore Indigenous women’s experiences of criminalization and victimization as well as their resistance and resilience. By bringing incarcerated Indigenous women’s knowledges and perspectives to the fore, my work endeavours to combat the negative effects of stereotypical representations of Indigenous and criminalized peoples – especially incarcerated Indigenous women. To this extent, my dissertation aims to create positive change that helps improve Indigenous lives. It also supports ongoing calls of Indigenous communities for settler accountability, reconciliation, and decolonization.

Abstract: For some moving toward reconciliation is controversial; for others acting on decades of talk about reconciliation is long over-due. Debates about Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples have the potential to build or break apart Canada. Institutions of higher education in Canada have a critical role to play in challenging the reproduction of colonial narratives, leading the way responsibly by re-creating academic systems, centering anti-colonial epistemologies and ontologies, and decolonizing teaching and curricular practices. Building on my master’s thesis research into Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs), this doctoral study contributes to a significant gap in scholarly knowledge on educational development in support of Indigenizing and decolonizing university teaching and curricular practices. In this doctoral study, I inquired into the experiences of faculty members who had participated in one of two, year-long cohorts of a FLC on Indigenization (which were held in the academic years 2016-17 and 2017-18). This FLC program on Indigenization was facilitated by an educational developer and an Indigenous Studies professor at a Canadian university and in partnership with local Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and community members. Using narrative inquiry, I asked: What are the experiences of Canadian university professors who participated in a FLC on Indigenization of their teaching and curricular practices? At this relatively early stage in scholarly work on the subject of reconciliation in higher education, especially within the field of educational development, the stories of experience of the university educators who participated in that FLC program are the most impactful source of data available. Through one-on-one research conversations, I explored the FLC experiences of three non-Indigenous, settler professors. As they told and retold, lived and relived their stories of experience, the meaning they make of their learning journeys emerged, and we entered into further exploration of how they subsequently transferred that learning into efforts to decolonize, Indigenize, and move toward reconciliation in their teaching and curricular practices. Owing to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, I met with research participants through an online video communication platform for a series of individual research conversations held in 2020 and 2021. Working individually with John, Anthony, and Molly (pseudonyms), I engaged with each of them in a co-composing process to arrive at three narrative accounts based on their respective field texts and my reflective research memos. Thinking with these narrative accounts and through the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space of temporality, sociality, and place, I identified five resonant threads: 1) ongoing learning: towards empathy and social-mindedness; 2) the strengths of the FLC facilitators; 3) epistemological and ontological dissonance; 4) unsettling settlers; and 5) the urgency of settler action. These resonant threads provide insights into particular experiences that reverberated across John’s, Anthony’s, and Molly’s stories of experience and that resonated with my learning journey into decolonizing and Indigenizing. I closed this work with a return to the personal, practical, social, and theoretical justifications for the study, as well as an exploration of new wonders that have emerged from the findings.

In 1923, the leadership of the Soviet Union set forth resolutions announcing their commitment to supporting the development of national communities throughout the Union. These resolutions decentralized decision-making and opened a relatively unfettered intellectual space for national development. The policy lasted through the end of the 1920s when the Central Party became disillusioned because of national communities' demands for more autonomy or independence. The Central Party believed national development should be directed toward building a socialist country, but some national communities were wary of Moscow’s influence. As a result, the Party began to target the national communities in the late 1920s and turned to terror in the 1930s to centralize power. I argue that the trajectory of the Ukrainian writers in Kharkiv from 1925 to 1934 offers a very personal but also analytically fertile example of changing Soviet policies. Their story sheds light on a generation of hopeful revolutionary writers that experienced two very different realities as the Stalin-led Soviet Union tried to consolidate its power: wide-ranging creative opportunities followed by unfathomable terror. The lives of Mykola Khvylovy, Ostap Vyshnya, and Mike Johansen, and the creation of Slovo House, where they came to live, demonstrate how writers in Kharkiv freely worked to develop a system where Ukraine’s fledgling culture and economy could progress within the Soviet system. The Slovo House, which the writers completed in1930, transformed from their dream home to their prison. The trajectory of the writers, and their eventual arrests and murders, highlights the Soviet state’s transformation from a relatively decentralized state with an emphasis on nationalization to a centralized state machine.

Abstract: Since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action (Canada, 2015), there has been a movement to include Indigenous voices, epistemologies, and ontologies into institutions and systems to support Indigenization. The goal of the research is to gain insight into the practices of Indigenous scholars incorporating Indigenous knowledge into the academy, learning from the highlights, struggles, and challenges along the way. The research objectives are to: 1) capture the story of each Indigenous scholar's journey in finding their own identity and coming to know Indigenous knowledge, 2) capture the ways Indigenous scholars foster environments that encourages learning about relationality, culture, Indigenous knowledge and identities, and 3) reflect on the ways that their stories are shaping/informing my understanding of Indigenous identities and knowledge within the academy. Using TribalCrit theory and critical ethnography, Indigenous scholars’ stories, including my own, explore challenges, success and strategies for incorporating Indigenous knowledge. Interviews were conducted with five participants, all holding academic appointments at the same post-secondary institution at the time. Transcripts were analyzed using latent content analysis. The iterative process of data collection, transcription and coding led to codes, sub-categories, and categories, as well as excerpts that supported each. After interviews were complete, I developed the themes and conclusions from the data analysis. Emerging themes include the journey to the academy; enacting TribaCrit through small acts of self-determination and sovereignty; and strategies for TribalCrit practitioners in the academy. Strategies adopted by Indigenous scholars that pave the way for future scholars include creating a safe and welcoming space for Indigenous students; following the path and breaking new ground; and community and reciprocity. In conclusion, TribaCrit practitioners are motivated to transform the academy to be more welcoming to Indigenous students; many are making strides to realize this transformation instead of it being only a hope.

This dissertation examines the understudied relationship between Christianity and Ewe musical practices in rites, recreational, and rulership. It explores not only how Christianity transformed the world of Ewe music, but also how Ewe worlds of music ultimately influenced the way in which Christianity is practiced in Ghana. The dissertation investigates church musical traditions that emerged under the influence of missionaries and later in the postcolonial church. Furthermore, it examines the naming and puberty rites of the Ewes and analyzes the musical and liturgical changes that Christianity introduced into these cultural practices. Regarding recreation, it focuses on two genres: Bɔbɔɔbɔ and Gabaɖa. Finally, it turns to the relationship between Christianity and music performed for traditional rites and chiefhood. Engaging with scholarship from ethnomusicology, African studies, religious studies, and linguistics anthropology, this project takes an interdisciplinary approach to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Ewe music of Ghana.

This study explores the twentieth-century Christian indigenization movement in East Asia through a case study of Jiang Wenhan of China and Takeda Kiyoko of Japan, two leading scholars and Christian activists in their respective countries. Drawing primarily on their own writings and recorded activities, both published and unpublished, my narratives include their interactions with Christian leaders and public intellectuals in six aspects – theological, missiological, political, ethical, sinological, and ecumenical – to pinpoint what social-political actions Asian Christians took in response to the unsettling changes and the ecumenical movements of their times. This study also highlights the historical encounters with Christianity in China and Japan to uncover the roles of Asian Christians in the reconstruction of Christianity in East Asia after World War II. It focuses on how Christianity, as a centerpiece of Western civilization, was perceived and received in China and Japan, each with its own distinctive culture, and how this “foreign” religion took root in Asia through confrontational encounters, including the global and the local process of cross-cultural transmission between the “universal” and the “particular” in confrontation, adaptation, competition, coexistence, and mutual influence. As part of globalization, Christian indigenization in East Asia sharpened the churches’ awareness of standing in a dynamic interaction within a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. The profound impact of state-religion hegemony in China and Japan not only created the unique characteristics of local churches and Christian communities but also made two important bases for Christianity: a non-denominational Three-Self church in China and the multi-denominational churches in Japan. From this point of view, Christianity, after repeated endeavors, has finally integrated into East Asian nations. In helping to transform Christianity into an indigenized Asian religion, Jiang Wenhan and Takeda Kiyoko, each in their own way, have made Christian faith more accessible to the common people and Christian churches more acceptable in society. Their interactions with each other and their practices in the indigenization movement, with their Sino-Japanese Christian solidarity crossing a broad terrain from Shanghai to Tokyo, stood as one of the most significant achievements of Asian Christianity in the twentieth century.

Internationalization of higher education is no longer a peripheral strategy for most universities and colleges, now positioned to influence multiple layers of institutions. Intercultural learning as a positive and necessary outcome has bolstered the importance of internationalization; in Canada, intercultural learning has increasingly been institutionalized as an organizational strategy. More recently, Indigenization, or the engagement with Indigenous knowledge and peoples, has been taken up by higher education institutions in Canada. These strategies are grounded in differing educational philosophies, values, and motivations but are implemented simultaneously. This dissertation examines one Canadian higher education institution and the intersections of its strategic priorities of internationalization, interculturalization, and Indigenization. Utilizing case study methodology with interviews, document review, and observation as data collection methods, I examine the following research questions: 1) How do faculty and staff conceptualize the university’s international and intercultural efforts and motivations? 2) How does the institutional priority of increasing intercultural understanding engage with the internationalization and Indigenization organizational strategies of the university? 3) How do staff and faculty across the university understand the intersection of Indigenization and internationalization? Through this dissertation, I make two primary arguments. First, internationalization’s implementation through a business framework has motivated a movement toward interculturalization to further academic learning on campus and temper more the neoliberal outcomes of internationalization. This relationship has established a lasting link between the two strategies. Second, the growing engagement of higher education in Indigenization efforts has brought about intersecting strategic priorities and a hope that interculturalization can support and further Indigenization. However, the Indigenization project is supported and motivated by Indigenous autonomy and sovereignty, not by Western organizational frameworks. Further possibilities of engagement require an uncoupling of business and economic motivations for internationalization and interculturalization to open both to the possibility of transformation.

Abstract: Across Canada, post-secondary institutions are embarking in policy-driven strategies to engage Indigenization and internationalization of their campuses. These strategies are tied to national and provincial policies with multiple intent, ranging from increasing fee-paying international student enrolment to enacting recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Policy analysis of these policy emphases in higher education are typically treated separately, where in practice, they are often lived concurrently by faculty, staff and students, in their day-to-day work. This interpretive research study explores the tensions and intersections of these policy and strategy emphases as they are lived by faculty, staff and students. Drawing from a post-intentional phenomenological methodology, this study seeks examines the question: What is it like to engage in transformative intercultural practice in higher education and how can a deeper understanding of this practice inform Indigenization and internationalization policy-making in the post-secondary sector? Transformative intercultural practice is a term developed to reflect the scope and intent of deep, integrative and transformative approaches to Indigenization and internationalization in higher education, including teaching, helping or leading individuals or groups of students, staff or faculty in a manner that assumes shared responsibility for creating the conditions for critically aware engagement in the pursuit of meaningful inclusion, equity, reconciliation and social justice on campus and beyond. Research involved interviews and focus groups with 23 faculty, staff and students, as a phenomenologically oriented study, drew further insights from academic literature, poetry, film and theatre. Each analysis chapter interweaves insights upon the deliberation, enactment and co-creation of transformative Indigenization and internationalization, culminating in three broad themes: the importance of beginning with belonging; gathering with intention/attention; and, honouring freedom. Analysis of the deliberation of transformative Indigenization and international leads to a discussion on what it can be like to experience refusing, acknowledging and inviting what and who is (being) spoken of in relation to (un)speak-able known, unknown and hidden entities in spaces of deliberation on Indigenization and internationalization. From this perspective, enactments of transformative Indigenization and internationalization are shown to involve (at)tending to and allowing for the experiences of one’s own and others’ sense of vulnerability, imminence/immanence and purposefulness in spaces of (up)rooting that come with initiating and cultivating transformative intercultural practices. The co-creation of such spaces of deliberation and enactment of transformative Indigenization and internationalization is shown to engage us in the lives of our colleagues and students in ways that can be deeply personal. In the evolving certainties and enduring liminality of our work, it is also shown how the demands of kindness can often intercede, revealing our inherent responsibility for one another, through the sharing of difficult life events and traumatic histories, in dealing with highly charged situations with serious implications, and in seeking to overcome what would seem to be irreconcilable differences.

In the early twentieth century, family reform became a matter of national importance in China. This dissertation addresses a Protestant Christian movement to “Christianize the home,” which sought to thus reform Chinese society and indigenize Christianity. Chapter one discusses the formation of the Christianize the Home Committee of the National Christian Council of China (NCC). As part of a transnational organization, the Home Committee responded to both Chinese and American culture and beliefs. This responsiveness afforded an opportunity for women’s leadership, and those in the Home Committee maximized upon that opportunity between 1922 and 1938. In chapter two, I analyze publications from missionaries and Chinese Christians about ancestor worship. Their debate led some to reject evolutionary hierarchies of civilizations and instead parse the good from the bad in Chinese and Western cultures, trying to save both Chinese culture and Christianity in a modernizing milieu threatening to both. My third chapter shows how the idea of fulfillment theory became widespread. This idea that divine inspiration had shaped non-Christian religions led many to consider the unique strengths that Chinese culture could contribute to world Christianity. In chapter four, I examine practical approaches to reconciling filial piety with Christianity and a competing vision of family spirituality that came from the United States. In the fifth chapter, I examine model Christian families in two pieces of fiction published in 1930s China. In both, women’s education and service within and outside of the home builds the home’s spiritual power. Both emphasize the agency of children, and both show a partially extended family in which filial piety is reflected. That the Home Committee’s visions of the Christianized home included conservative elements like respect for the family structure, affirmation of filial piety, and a tempered patriarchy helped it to be accessible and to resonate with treasured Chinese family values. The expansive, flexible ideal of the Christian home made it a place of creative power where character is formed and where women lead, a place characterized by improvement. This progressive institution was suited to weather the storms of the twentieth century and contribute to Christianity’s success in China.

This paper seeks to add to our understanding of how the global is made local even in online spaces. This work further challenges theorists of virtual worlds to critically examine their own assumptions about the value of the virtual and its relationship to the actual world. The 'this-world' perspective of classical Chinese philosophy offers a new way to conceptualize the virtual and the actual--not a virtual that simulates the real, not overlapping social worlds, not an interconnection of two worlds, but one continuous experience.

Understandings of the Marshall Islands require attention to the interplay of multiple discourses of tradition, modernity, chiefs, development, and democracy from multiple sources that critically interact and mutually construct the Marshall Islands. This multi-sited, multi-vocal ethnography explores the reproduction and transformation of historic power relationships between Marshallese chiefs and commoners who incorporate and "indigenize" foreign discourses and resources into culturally informed models and practices of authority. In relationships of unequal power, such as that defined by the Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, dominant global discourses about culture and progress enable both local and transnational hegemonies. These discourses are contextually analyzed as they are invoked and challenged in Nitijela [parliament] debates, in evaluations of the Compact of Free Association, in elites' autobiographical reflections on Marshallese-American relationships, and in foreign media representations. Historical shifts in the political and economic powers of Marshallese chiefs through three colonial administrations, and the growth of a commoner elite class since World War II further highlight the ways foreign resources are appropriated for specific local purposes that transform understandings of power and authority. With discourse as both object and method of analysis, the agency of local actors is both foregrounded and contextualized. Simplistic characterizations of chiefs, elites, commoners, and foreigners' are complicated through close attention to the ways local loyalties, colonial histories, political rivalries, and global discourses inform and frame expressions of Marshallese identities.