The Science of Settler Colonialism: A Canadian History of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis

This dissertation interrogates the history of the thrifty gene hypothesis, or the idea that Indigenous bodies are genetically predisposed to type-II diabetes. Though the hypothesis has been rejected by the scientific community at large as well as the very scientists who invented it, it continues to inform Canadian state literature and clinical guidelines in 2018. Thus, in an attempt to historicize (rather than debunk) the failed but long-lived hypothesis, I trace its origins through four successive chapters focused singularly on major figures in its production. All of these figures are white male scientists who travelled to Indigenous communities, made scientific observations, and contributed to a colonialist discourse of Indigenous disappearance by suggesting that Indians or Aboriginal people were biologically unfit to survive contact with (settler) colonial societies despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. Thus, while my main critique in this dissertation concerns the reproduction of a baseless and racist hypothesis within the registers of Canadian healthcare administration, I am also heavily exercised with documenting a history wherein southern settler scientists have travelled to northern Indigenous communities, extracted blood, bone marrow, and other biological materials, and used their scientific observations to cast Indigenous bodies rather than settler structures as the root cause of high-rates of chronic disease across the Canadian north. Troublingly, I note that the University of Torontos Sioux Lookout Project was deeply embedded in these histories of settler colonial science. Thus, on the basis of the history reviewed in this dissertation, I argue that the post-war professionalization of Canadian genetics, endocrinology, epidemiology, as well as nutritional and metabolic sciences has as a historical condition of possibility the settler colonial creation of the reserve system and the production of an isolated Indigenous population that faces chronically high rates of nutrition-related diseases

Forensic Memory Analysis for Apple OS X

Analysis of raw memory dumps has become a critical capability in digital forensics because it gives insight into the state of a system that cannot be fully represented through traditional disk analysis. Interest in memory forensics has grown steadily in recent years, with a focus on the Microsoft Windows operating systems. However, similar capabilities for Linux and Apple OS X have lagged by comparison. The volafox open source project has begun work on structured memory analysis for OS X. The tool currently supports a limited set of kernel structures to parse hardware information, system build number, process listing, loaded kernel modules, syscall table, and socket connections. This research addresses one memory analysis deficiency on OS X by introducing a new volafox module for parsing file handles. When open files are mapped to a process, an examiner can learn which resources the process is accessing on disk. This listing is useful for determining what information may have been the target for exfilitration or modification on a compromised system. Comparing output of the developed module and the UNIX lsof (list open files) command on two version of OS X and two kernel architectures validates the methodology used to extract file handle information

Foreclosing Accountability: The Limited Scope of the Seven Youth Inquest in Thunder Bay, Ontario

Between 2000 and 2011 seven students from First Nation communities across northern Ontario lost their lives while attending high school in Thunder Bay. These losses of Indigenous life became the subject of a joint provincial inquest that concluded in the summer of 2016. In this article the author offers a critical examination of the scope of this inquest as well as a broader chronological review of its proceedings. The focus is on the ways in which the presiding coroner shaped the scope of the inquest to include things like the alcohol consumption of the students and to exclude things like the quality of police investigations. The issue of First Nation Jury Representation and its role in delaying the inquest for several years is also contextualized. Ultimately, it is argued that the Seven Youth Inquest conforms closely to what Sherene Razack (2011; 2015) has written about the colonial function of inquests into the deaths of Indigenous peoples: mainly that such proceedings stage decontextualized narratives of First Nation dysfunction that are hostile to structural analysis and unlikely to animate opportunities for institutional accountability. Finally, it is argued that non-Indigenous coroners – who are trained in forensic pathology but lack training in federal Indian policy, treaty rights, and Indigenous histories – are unqualified to preside over provincial inquests into the deaths of First Nation people. In fact, this training (or lack thereof) may facilitate setting woefully limited scopes and therefore reproducing victim-blaming of First Nation youth in Canadian courtrooms.RésuméEntre 2000 et 2011, sept étudiants Autochtones ont trouvé la mort alors qu’ils poursuivaient des études secondaires à Thunder Bay. Ces derniers venaient de plusieurs communautés des Premières Nations à travers l’Ontario. La mort de ces jeunes Autochtones a été le sujet d’une enquête du coroner de la province de l’Ontario qui a été conclue à l’été 2016. Les auteurs de cet article offrent une explication critique de la portée de cette enquête ainsi qu’une analyse chronologique plus vaste des procédures. Le thème principal est la façon dont le coroner qui présidait l’enquête a orienté sa portée afin d’inclure, entre autres, la consommation d’alcool des étudiants tout en excluant d’autres éléments tels la qualité des enquêtes policières. Le problème de la représentation des Premières Nations sur la liste des jurés et le rôle que cela a joué sur le retardement du procès pendant plusieurs années sont aussi mentionnés. De plus, l’enquête sur la mort de ces sept étudiants se rapproche beaucoup à ce que Sherene Razack a écrit au sujet du rôle colonialiste des enquêtes qui touchent la mort des personnes autochtones (2011 ; 2015). Son argument principal étant que ces procédures mettent en scène des récits décontextualisés du dysfonctionnement des Premières Nations qui vont à l’encontre de l’analyse structurale et qui rendent la possibilité de démontrer la responsabilité institutionnelle peu probable. Pour finir, ils disputent le fait que les coroners non autochtones ne sont pas qualifiés pour présider les enquêtes provinciales liées à la mort des personnes autochtones. Bien qu’ils aient la formation nécessaire en médecine légale, ces derniers manquent de formation quant aux Lois sur les Indiens, aux droits issus des traités et à l’histoire des Autochtones. En effet, cette formation (du moins, ces lacunes) faciliterait la fixation d’une portée manifestement limitée, permettant, par conséquent, la condamnation répétée de la victime chez les jeunes des Premières Nations dans les salles d’audience canadiennes.Mots clés: Enquête du coroner; colonialisme de peuplement; loi sur les Indiens; éducation des Premières Nations; études autochtones; histoire des traités; Thunder Bay

Acquiring OS X File Handles through Forensic Memory Analysis

Memory analysis has become a critical capability in digital forensics because it provides insight into system state that cannot be fully represented through traditional media analysis. The volafox open source project has begun the work of structured memory analysis for OS X with support for a limited set of kernel structures. This paper addresses one memory analysis deficiency on OS X with the introduction of a new volafox module for parsing file handles associated with running processes. The developed module outputs information comparable to the UNIX lsof (list open files) command, which is used to validate the results