Storied Truths: Contemporary Canadian and Indigenous Childhood Trauma Narratives

This dissertation reconceptualizes generic distinctions between fiction and testimony in accounts of childhood trauma. Scholars such as Leigh Gilmore have argued that while writers of trauma stories are burdened by legalistic definitions of evidence and anxieties about truth-telling, they nonetheless push at the limits of autobiography, often scuffing the border between fact and fiction, in their effort to bring their traumatic stories into language. There has not, however, been a sustained effort to understand and legitimize the place of fiction in testimony, particularly in cases of adult narrations of recovered memories of childhood traumas. My research addresses this lacuna by querying the dynamic relationship between fiction and testimony in both autobiographical and fictional accounts of childhood trauma. This work is motivated by my desire to open up a scripto-therapeutic space for trauma survivors to incorporate stories and use their imaginations to narrate traumatic truths rather than strictly evidentiary truths. In Chapter One of my dissertation, I explore Sylvia Fraser’s My Father’s House (1987), a pioneering memoir of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. I consider this controversial work as a case history of testimony caught between fact and fiction. Chapter Two extends my discussion of the controversy over the truth-status of Fraser’s traumatic memoir to an analysis of the ways in which three Canadian novels similarly challenge conventional boundaries of genre and representation in their fictional articulation of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), and Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996). In Chapter Three, I argue that Indigenous writers specifically employ fiction and storytelling as forms of testimony outside of sanctioned Western discursive arenas such as courtrooms and the media. This chapter explores three residential school narratives: Vera Manuel’s play, Strength of Indian Women (1998), and two novels, James Bartleman’s As Long as the Rivers Flow (2011) and Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls (2002)

"One thing can look like another": The Aesthetics and Performance of Trauma in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees explores Canada’s gothic colonial past as it intersects with the postcolonial present, and it demonstrates that fiction can contribute to how trauma is theorized. Although the novel engages with gothic conventions and tropes, trauma finds its expression through magic realism. Through visual media, music, and performance, the novel offers a series of traumatic memories as always and only representations of the original encounter; as the experience of trauma confronts the limits of both representation and understanding, magic realist techniques represent the trauma as both real and imaginatively constituted. In line with Cathy Caruth’s view of the “bewildering encounter with trauma” as prompting recognition of “the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential,” Fall on Your Knees suggests that the performative and aesthetic aspects of traumatic memory open up questions about the reliability of narrative representation

A Petrographic Analysis of the Basal Member of the Kootenai Formation

The basal member of the Kootenai formation in south­western Montana is typically a fine to medium-grained salt and pepper sandstone and chert-pebble conglomerate. The section between Delpine, Montana, and Melrose, Montana, generally thickens and markedly coarsens to the West

Exhibiting Mexicanidad : the National Museum of Anthropology and Mexico City in the Mexican imaginary

textThis dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the ongoing and evolving relations between the construction of nation and cultural production at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA, or the Museo) in Mexico City. The MNA plays a key role in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of representations of Mexico’s pre-colonial past and its existing indigenous populations as components of contemporary Mexican nationhood. Historically, the Mexican state has used anthropological knowledge to inform and implement policies enacted to cement the ties of an ethnically diverse population to the nation, define and preserve national patrimony, and promote heritage as an economic resource. The dissertation explores the MNA as an arena for the expression of the tensions generated by these sometimes disparate agendas. I argue that the MNA, rather than simply reproducing and maintaining official understandings of the relationships between citizens and nation, also provides a space for the negotiation and transformation of these relationships.Anthropolog

May 2003 Land use and planning report, no. 3

May 2003.Originally published under series title: Agricultural and resource policy report, APR 03-03

March 2003 Land use and planning report, no. 2

March 2003.Originally published under series title: Agricultural and resource policy report, APR 03-02.Includes bibliographical references

Habitat Restoration as a Key Conservation Lever for Woodland Caribou: A review of restoration programs and key learnings from Alberta

The Recovery Strategy for the Woodland Caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou), Boreal Population in Canada (EC, 2012), identifies coordinated actions to reclaim woodland caribou habitat as a key step to meeting current and future caribou population objectives. Actions include restoring industrial landscape features such as roads, seismic lines, pipelines, cut-lines, and cleared areas in an effort to reduce landscape fragmentation and the changes in caribou population dynamics associated with changing predator-prey dynamics in highly fragmented landscapes. Reliance on habitat restoration as a recovery action within the federal recovery strategy is high, considering all Alberta populations have less than 65% undisturbed habitat, which is identified in the recovery strategy as a threshold providing a 60% chance that a local population will be self-sustaining. Alberta’s Provincial Woodland Caribou Policy also identifies habitat restoration as a critical component of long-term caribou habitat management. We review and discuss the history of caribou habitat restoration programs in Alberta and present outcomes and highlights of a caribou habitat restoration workshop attended by over 80 representatives from oil and gas, forestry, provincial and federal regulators, academia and consulting who have worked on restoration programs. Restoration initiatives in Alberta began in 2001 and have generally focused on construction methods, revegetation treatments, access control programs, and limiting plant species favourable to alternate prey. Specific treatments include tree planting initiatives, coarse woody debris management along linear features, and efforts for multi-company and multi-stakeholder coordinated habitat restoration on caribou range. Lessons learned from these programs have been incorporated into large scale habitat restoration projects near Grande Prairie, Cold Lake, and Fort McMurray. A key outcome of our review is the opportunity to provide a unified approach for restoration program planning, best practices, key performance indicators, and monitoring considerations for future programs within Canada

Off-Road Vehicle Recreation in the West: Implications of a Wyoming Analysis

Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Obesity Economics for the Western United States

Health Economics and Policy,