_UNIV 3088: Transformation Now

Indigenous women were essential to the twentieth- century Indigenous political movement in British Columbia, yet their roles have oft en been marginalized in the scholarship of Indigenous politics and in the public imagination. Existing literature obscures women's political involvement by depoliticizing women's work, focusing on sensational moments of action, or collapsing women's politics within the broader narrative of male- dominated political organizations, rendering women's activities invisible. Attending to the ways in which Indigenous women situated and articulated their political identities, I argue that Indigenous women's organizations between the 1950s and 1980s were not only highly political but also explicitly, strategically, and sometimes problematically tied to Indigenous understandings of motherhood and family. Further, as Indigenous women's feminist politics evolved and took on new meanings, motherhood did not give way to individualistic "women's rights," as in other global movements. Instead, the two remained intertwined, shifting according to local circumstances.

This work builds upon Elizabeth Archuleta's (Yaqui) term “ethos of responsibility” by contextualizing it within the #NoDAPL movement and applies a cultural rhetorics methodology to constellate an understanding of an ethos of responsibility utilized by Indigenous women water protectors in the #NoDAPL movement, as seen in video-recorded interviews selected from the #NoDAPL digital archive. This study attempts to understand the rhetoric of Indigenous women water protectors through the lens of Indigenous feminism(s), Indigenous rhetoric(s), and Dakota/Lakota/Nakota history and worldviews. When speaking from an ethos of responsibility, the water protectors featured in this study locate agency in traditional teachings and in the experience of Indigenous women, including responsive care in/to the interconnectedness of life, the special role of women in the care of water, and the collective survival of Indigenous women in colonial and patriarchal violence.

Settler colonial violence targets Indigenous women in specific ways. While urban planning has attended to issues of women’s
safety, the physical dimensions of safety tend to be emphasized over the social and political causes of women’s vulnerability
to violence. In this paper, we trace the relationship between settler colonialism and violence against Indigenous women.
Drawing on examples from community activism and organizing, we consider how Indigenous feminism might be applied to
planning and point toward approaches to planning that do not replicate settler colonial violence.

An article exploring This article examines the pitfalls and potentialities of the recent inclusion of indigenous nations in the strategic videogame series Europa Universalis and Civilization. By making protagonists of dynamic indigenous nations—and putting them on the same plane as the nations of Europe and Asia—newer entries in these series encourage players to think of indigenous polities as sovereign, active, and independent. This is a seeming break from earlier iterations that portrayed them as alien Others. However, both series remain reliant on settler colonial mechanics of play, portraying Native nations as dynamic, future-oriented, and modern only via universalized, Eurocentric metrics of achievement, and participation in the conquest of an "empty" world. The newer versions of Europa Universalis and Civilization encourage players to consider aspects of indigenous sovereignty, but remain freighted with a colonizing vision that "sees" only national and imperial power as legitimate. These games allow for indigenous sovereignty only within that lens. While there is potential within the genre to communicate messages of indigenous sovereignty and dynamism in ways unusual in popular media, these game series (and the genre of which they are a part) remain mired in settler colonial assumptions.

An article reviewing 6 articles by or about Native Americans.

A Polygon article exploring Indigenous video games and their creators.

We know about the rapid loss of our world's plants, animals and wilderness but few of us are aware of the parallel, perhaps more rapid and equally devastating, extinction of our planet's human cultural diversity and ongoing cultural genocide. The Vision Quest-University of Wyoming (VQ-UWYO) project addresses the physical occupation of Arapaho lands and the concomitant erasure of Arapaho culture as evidenced by the critically endangered status of the Arapaho language. VQ-UWYO is an augmented reality (AR) mobile place-based learning game that teaches Arapaho language and culture on the UWYO campus. The affordances of mobile technology in general and mapping and locative technologies like the global positioning system (GPS) in particular are present-day extensions of the European colonial enterprise of map making which named, mapped and thereby claimed ownership of the entire world. VQ-UWYO uses these same technologies to push back against the tide of cultural genocide and re-anchor Arapaho place names, language and culture to the UWYO campus. The foundational assumption that the land that is now the UWYO campus was a terra nullius to be freely taken, occupied and used is being challenged in order to begin to heal generations and centuries of colonialization and oppression perpetrated on first peoples in general and upon the Arapaho Nation in particular. The VQ-UWYO project seeks new ways to speak the truths of the past so that we as individuals and as a campus community can finally stand on equal ground.

A poem by Marilou Awiakta

Environmental education (EE) in Canadian schooling is driven by anthropocentric and Eurocentric scientific ideals which perpetuates
the idea that we are separate from Nature, rather than a living part of Her. As we continue steadily down the path of the climate crisis, our future depends on much more than environmental science and hollow prescriptions for eco-friendly behaviour. If we truly want to activate young people in an impactful and lasting way, as a matter of urgency, we must first reconnect young people with their inherent spiritual connection to Nature. While Indigenous worldviews cannot be defined singularly across all Indigenous people, EE educators have much to learn from Indigenous people, who share common ways of being through inherently sustainable and loving relationships with the Earth long before colonization. This article presents a literature review drawing mostly from peer-reviewed journals within the last decade and distills essential social, political, and pedagogical arguments for the centring of Indigenous worldviews in EE in Canada. We suggest that shifting the current colonial paradigm entails making more room in public school curricula for Indigenous wisdom and worldviews, for understanding our spiritual connections to Nature, increased understandings of the inextricable link between EE and Indigenous peoples’ fight for justice and sovereignty in relation to their traditional ancestral territories, increased outdoor learning in Nature for students and the holistic integration of all subjects across curricula. We provide recommendations for how educators can respectfully take on the work of centring Indigenous worldviews and argue that these perspectives can help to inform how we equip students to understand and address the climate crisis as well as bring Canadian society closer towards meaningful healing for Indigenous people.

The importance of Indigenous knowledge systems for environmental decision-making is now widely recognized. In the context of collaborative approaches to environmental governance, scholars and practitioners have recognized that Western knowledge is not sufficient, and that ideas, practices, and knowledge from Indigenous peoples is essential. Collaborative environmental governance practice tends to make assumptions about how Indigenous knowledge systems can be incorporated into decision-making without reflecting satisfactorily on contrasting perspectives of Indigenous peoples themselves; these perspectives are partially captured in the Indigenous governance literature. This essay draws on empirical research in British Columbia, a place where First Nations have been approached by organizations involved in water governance to be involved in collaborative decision-making. The research reveals an important disconnect between the perspectives of Indigenous knowledge-holders and the people promoting “integration” of this knowledge into collaborative decision-making processes. We offer suggestions for reconciling collaborative approaches to water governance with Indigenous knowledge systems and the values and perspectives of Indigenous peoples.

In recent years, Indigenous ecological knowledge has been receiving increased attention due to its potential to help address the devastating impacts of climate change and environmental degradation. Indigenous peoples in various contexts have become engaged in collaborative research projects with scientists and other experts to build environmentally sustainable societies. Environmental education has been another site for incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing. This paper presents one such programme designed by the Bunun Indigenous group in Taiwan to support environmental learning and reconnection with the natural world of their group as well as other Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals willing to participate. While the programme's objective is learning with and from the natural environment (the lessons that can be adopted by non-Indigenous groups), its other objectives include re-building and strengthening Indigenous identities, cultures and ways of life, and potentially contributing to decolonisation of settler societies and reconciliation between groups.