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Canadian Literature, No 214 (2012): Canadian Literature

Background: There is a significant deficiency of national health information for Indigenous peoples in Canada. This manuscript describes the Community Profile Survey (CPS), a community-based, national-level survey designed to identify and describe existing healthcare delivery, funding models, and diabetes specific infrastructure and programs in Indigenous communities. Methods: The CPS was developed collaboratively through FORGE AHEAD and the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Health Canada. Regional and federal engagement and partnerships were built with Indigenous organizations to establish regionally-tailored distribution of the 8-page CPS to 440 First Nations communities. Results were collected (one survey per community) and reported in strata by region, with descriptive analyses performed on all variables. Results were shared with participating communities and regional/federal partners through tailored reports. Results: A total of 84 communities completed the survey (19% response rate). The majority of communities had a health centre/office to provide service to their patients with diabetes, with limited on-reserve hospitals for ambulatory or case-sensitive conditions. Few healthcare specialists were located on-site, with patients frequently travelling off-site (> 40 km) for diabetes-related complications. The majority of healthcare professionals on-site were Health Directors, Community Health Nurses, and Home Care Nurses. Many communities had a diabetes registry but few reported a diabetes surveillance system. Regional variation in healthcare services, diabetes programs, and funding models were noted, with most communities engaging in some type of innovative strategy to improve care for patients with diabetes. Conclusions: The CPS is the first community-based, national-level survey of its kind in Canada. Although the response rate was low, the CPS was distributed and successfully administered across a broad range of First Nations communities, and future considerations would benefit from a governance structure and leadership that strengthens community engagement, and a longitudinal research approach to increase the representativeness of the data. This type of information is important for communities and regions to inform decision making (maintain successes, and identify areas for improvement), strengthen health service delivery and infrastructure, increase accessibility to healthcare personnel, and allocate funding and/or resources to build capacity and foster a proactive chronic disease prevention and management approach for Indigenous communities across Canada. Trial registration: Current ClinicalTrial.gov protocol ID NCT02234973. Registered: September 9, 2014.

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Education. University of Regina. ix, 206 p. This research examined the lives of single-parent Aboriginal women of Northern Saskatchewan. This group of women was interviewed to give them an opportunity to share how they see their lives being produced for them. Aboriginal women’s marginalization has become normalized through the systems, practices, and institutions that have materialized through the Indian Act, Christianity, Indigenous knowledges, and colonial relations with non-Aboriginal society. Discursive practices located in these structures establish and maintain ideas of how and who these women are supposed to be. How these women are positioned is largely a product of our Canadian colonial history. Aboriginal women continue to be situated in binary oppositions of good/bad or chaste/promiscuous, and the assumption is that they are on the negative side of the binary. This is the starting point for many Aboriginal women that continues to justify their oppression. Aboriginal women are positioned as marginal in both mainstream society and Aboriginal communities; both systems produce the effect that it is normal to position them as secondary. Colonization in a Canadian context was established by placing value on race, class, and gender. The theoretical framework used in the analysis was derived from feminist poststructuralism. Discourse, power, and language are examined to analyze how bodies are positioned in particular ways. Interviews were conducted to examine the women’s language through a discourse analysis. The work of Michel Foucault informed this research. Foucault’s rules and norms served as a lens to demonstrate how Aboriginal women are produced as unimportant and inferior. The notion of rules and norms is a social production that requires effort, and in this way these rules and norms are continuously being reproduced. Because this group of women has a sense that rules and norms are being imposed on them, they also perform themselves in ways that run counter to the oppressive systems. These women perform themselves through an ethical practice of self by going to school and working toward a better future for themselves and their children. A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy *, University of Regina. *, * p. Student yes

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Education, University of Regina. x, 367 l. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucaultian Discourse Analysis, this study applies postcolonial theory to an examination of the discourses of wide-scale reading and writing assessments in Saskatchewan. The study provides answers to three questions examining how the discourses of wide scale assessments in reading and writing construct disadvantages for First Nations and Métis students and simultaneously construct advantages for white settler students. The research data includes the publicly available Assessment for Learning instruments, handbooks, pre-assessment materials, scoring guides and reporting documents for 2005 through 2010, a total of 177 documents. The analysis indicates that there are at least four distinct discourses within the Assessment for Learning materials that are made available for colonial knowledge production and power relations. These discourses can be identified as: linking reading and writing proficiency to becoming a successful and productive member of society; valuing the possession of a particular set of reading and writing strategies as indicative of reading and writing proficiency; espousing a set of common experiences and knowledge among all students at a grade level; and placing white settler English above all other varieties of English as the norm against which student work is measured, reinforcing the dominance of white settler language and culture over all other languages and cultures in Saskatchewan. The discourses of the provincial Assessments for Learning privilege students who come from white settler backgrounds while First Nations and Métis student interests are marginalized as are the interests of other linguistic minorities including Hutterian students and new Canadian students who do not speak the same variety of English as do the local white settler students. There are ways in which each of the four discourses can be troubled and countered and a set of 13 recommendations has been made to disrupt these discourses and put in their place new discourses that do not marginalize minority students. These recommendations include developing a set of shared beliefs around what the goals of education are and how achievement of those goals should be measured at a provincial level; arriving at a set of indicators and measures, acceptable to all stakeholders, to use in reporting on student achievement in reading and writing in Saskatchewan; constructing assessments that connect to curricular content common to all Saskatchewan students; providing student choice in assessment items; the development of a tool or set of tools for examining the discourses of all parts of the assessment materials for colonial knowledge production and power relations; and the review and revision of Saskatchewan curricula with a view to countering and troubling discourses found within the PreK-12 curriculum documents that are similar to those identified in the assessment materials. A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy *, University of Regina. *, * p. Student yes

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Regina. vi, 130 l. Daniel Wolfe has been represented by the news media as one of Saskatchewan and Manitoba’s most “notorious gang members.”1 Wolfe first made headlines at the age of 31 after he instigated a fatal home invasion in the rural community of Fort Qu’Appelle, northeast of Regina.2 Later that year, while on remand at the Regina jail, Wolfe and five other Aboriginal inmates staged an elaborate break-out which received extensive national media coverage.3 Two years later Wolfe was killed in prison. His death, although tragic, was regarded by media and experts as an “obvious conclusion” to a gangster’s story.4 Through an interdisciplinary approach consisting of interviews with key participants and a discourse analysis of print, radio, TV, and online new sources, I examine the media spectacle of Daniel Wolfe as a case study concerning the implications his story had on media representations of the Aboriginal gangster on the prairies. “That’s the Life of a Gangster”: Analyzing the Media Representation of Daniel Wolfe interrogates how Daniel Wolfe’s story is used by media, police, and politicians to perpetuate fear of Aboriginal men. I examine: 1) The role the media plays in the Aboriginal gangster is a current monolithic mis-representation of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. For this thesis I take a three pronged approach: Firstly, I conduct an analysis into the media representations of Wolfe to examine the racialization of gang crime and the production of a moral panic. Secondly, I investigate how stereotypes of Aboriginal gang members such as Wolfe are reproduced and embodied by Aboriginal youth through an analysis of media represented links between Aboriginal bodies, hip-hop, and crime. Thirdly, I examine how agency and healing are being practiced through processes of storytelling by members of Wolfe’s family. The intent of this thesis is to contribute to and challenge the current conversation regarding the growing Aboriginal population and its perceived link with a so-called ‘growing Aboriginal gang problem’ on the prairies. Student yes