Patrick Moore
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
In this dissertation I examine the modes of post-rupture claiming, maintaining, and re-shaping of the Kaska homeland, primarily through Kaska language practices, including ordinary interactions, storytelling performances, and various forms of political action. The Kaska are northern Dene (Athabaskan) people, residing primarily in the eastern part of what is now known as the Yukon Territory, and northern British Columbia in northwestern Canada. Dene kēyeh – Kaska land — is the tenacious thread, intricately woven through all aspects of Kaska life, ensuring its cohesiveness and continuity. Dene kēyeh and all the imaginings associated with it permeates everything, including the way people think about and understand their language and how it can be revitalized and maintained. I focus on the Kaska’s contemporary relational and restorative responses to mitigate the disruptive impacts of colonial violence and the ongoing linguistic, political, and economic marginalization. I highlight how these linguistic and semiotic interventions work to assert Kaska people’s rights to their land, which includes rights to their language and cultural practices. In this post-rupture reckoning, my primary goal is to illuminate the many ways the Kaska language has continued to live a remarkably vibrant life, despite the many forces that work diligently to devalue it, attempting to make it disappear. Consequently, the aim of this ethnographic account is not to tell a story about a language in decline. Instead, I focus on the persistent continuance of diverse linguistic practices creatively mobilized by Kaska speakers to attend to their contemporary realities and communicative needs, accomplishing a host of social and political goals. Keeping these “unexpected” vitalities of the Kaska language in mind, I reflect on what these responses can tell us about the future of the Kaska language, and how they might shape and inform future language revitalization movements, and the Kaska language’s trajectory more broadly. Finally, I describe how people envision their future going forward and the concrete actions they are committed to take to carry their language forward for generations to come.
View record
The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.
View record
This dissertation examines how individuals and communities “move on” after two decades of war and mass internal displacement in rural Acoliland, Northern Uganda (~1986-2008). Based upon fieldwork from 2004 to 2012, it explores the multi-generational angst regarding youth’s disconnection from, or disinterest in, tekwaro (Acoli indigenous knowledge) in the conflict and post-conflict years. Attending to the ways that everyday inter-generational practices engendered by a return to the land activate a range of social relationships and engagements with tekwaro, I assert that these interactions re-gather different generations in the rebuilding of social, political, and moral community. I first re-narrate the history of one rural sub-clan, and explore how ngom kwaro (ancestral land) is their prime idiom of relatedness. Detailing experiences of displacement during the recent war, I acknowledge the tic Acoli (livelihood work) necessary for survival upon their return to the land as a vital framework for inter-generational engagement. I then consider adults’ and elders’ preoccupation with the decline of woro (respect) and cuna (‘courtship’ processes) within the IDP (internally displaced persons’) camps. Exploring how cuna affects relations and their organization, I examine contemporary cuna processes as important frameworks for inter-generational interaction. I finally consider how the responsibilities and relationships activated through kin-based communal governance organizations (sub-clans, lineages) are key to understanding both tekwaro and relatedness, and examine the creation of one sub-clan’s written constitution as another significant framework for inter-generational negotiation, participation, and engagement. I emphasize that these engagements with tekwaro work to elaborate and re-elaborate relatedness, and thus serve as important practices of social repairing, grounded by communal stewardship of the land. Rather than addressing specific transgressive violences experienced during the war years, the results of this research suggest that social repair–the striving for the restoration of sociality–implicitly concerns resistance of the seeping, inscribing, relational effects of those violences. Rather, a return to the land, and the system of land tenure itself, provokes inter-generational participation that serves to make and remake relatedness, orienting social relations away from the fragmenting, unprecedented, Acoli-on Acoli violence (Oloya 2013) experienced during the years of war and displacement.
View record
Arising from and sustained within the context of colonialism, the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia has long been a source of significant conflict between indigenous people and settler governments. Due to its significantly complex political and legal background, it is difficult to reach a clear and comprehensive understanding about this matter, and gaining insight into the indigenous perspective about it is even more challenging. Explicitly considering the broader framework of colonialism in exploring the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia, this dissertation places its focus upon detailing the indigenous perspective in relation to opposing political and legal government positions. Such a study is important in order to adequately understand the perpetuation of the conflicts between indigenous peoples and governments over the outstanding land issue. The research approach relies upon the examination of archival data, along with representations of indigenous oral history narratives, and attendance at indigenous political gatherings. In particular, this research project relies upon information gathered from both indigenous elders and political representatives through interviews and political meetings to form the basis of indigenous perspectives on the outstanding land issue. The findings from this research provide evidence that a discernible pattern of denial and disregard has been established and maintained by successive settler governments and that these patterns are purposefully perpetuated. The political, legal, and regulatory systems devised for power and control over indigenous peoples have effectively shaped the ‘taken for granted assumptions’ of the outstanding land issue. Indigenous perspectives on the ownership of their territories have been consistently maintained through oral history narratives over several generations. The central contribution that can be drawn from this research rests upon the revelation of how indigenous perspectives on the outstanding land issue were actively and continuously suppressed as part of the dispossession process. The significant findings include an in-depth disclosure of how purposeful political and legal procedures accompanied by expansive regulatory mechanisms have served to control how the outstanding indigenous land issue in British Columbia has been actively shaped, understood, and maintained over time through deliberate processes and procedures of colonialism.
View record
Everyday communication in minority languages continues to experience decline around the world, even given efforts to reverse these processes. As language shift progresses the products of language documentation, including the oral histories and the unique cultural information they contain, become increasingly important. Archives are commonly used to store these resources, but the design and functionality of archives often fails to address language community interests in protecting their capacity for self-determination and other core cultural beliefs. I find that most existing language archives examples lack sufficient controls to maintain culturally based sharing protocols, enable contextualization of resources, provide opportunities for local collaboration and support educational dissemination. Lack of capacity to manage use of and access to language resources in an archive can contribute to an erosion of sovereignty for the language community. Partially in response to the cultural incongruence of existing archive options, community-based and participatory archives are on the rise. In this dissertation I critically evaluate the capacity of endangered language archives to operate in concert cultural beliefs, including the maintenance of sovereignty and demonstration of indigeneity. The identification of language ideologies is a useful lens to determine the cultural compatibility of archives and their practices. I present research with people from Indigenous communities in Washington State, Alaska and California. In addition, I describe interviews with managers and directors from international language archives and small community based ones. My research makes use of the Mukurtu CMS archive platform to both test this tool and its applicability for language preservation. Control of language resources enables tribes to reassert their capacity for cultural resource management as part of their self-determination.
View record
Many Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal organizations are using digital media to revitalize their languages and assert control over the representation of their cultures. At the same time, museums and academic institutions are digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to originating communities. As the use of digital media becomes standard practice both in the production of ethnographic objects and the “virtual repatriation” of cultural heritage, new questions are being raised regarding copyright, intellectual property, ownership, and control of documentation in digital form. In this dissertation, based on collaborative ethnographic multimedia production work with the Doig River First Nation (Dane-ẕaa) in northeastern British Columbia, I follow the transformation of intangible cultural expression into digital cultural heritage, and its return in the form of a digital archive to Dane-ẕaa communities. I explore how new access to digitized ethnographic documentation has facilitated local media production, and argue that these productions are acts of remediation of digital cultural heritage that resignify the products of ethnographic research in Dane-ẕaa communities. Through the lens of the collaborative production of the Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit Dane Wajich–Dane-ẕaa Stories and Songs: Dreamers and the Land, I show how local control over efforts to safeguard intangible heritage resulted in the implementation of a documentary methodology that modeled the appropriate transmission of culture in Dane-ẕaa social practice. The participatory production process of the virtual exhibit also facilitated expressions of Dane-ẕaa intellectual property rights to cultural heritage. Using the example of the digitization of photographs of early twentieth-century Dane-ẕaa nááchę (dreamers’) drums, and the community’s subsequent decision to remove them from the virtual museum exhibit, I explore how new articulations of Dane-ẕaa rights to control the circulation and representation of their digital cultural heritage are guided by knowledge of Dane-ẕaa nááchę, traditional protocols for the handling and care of material culture, and by contemporary political concerns and subjectivities.
View record
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
This thesis addresses how stakeholders of Kaska, a Dene Athabaskan language spoken in northeastern British Columbia and the southeastern Yukon, have incorporated videoconferencing technology into their long-distance language documentation, revitalization and education practices. Many speakers and communities of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages who live in remote regions are at a disadvantage simply because of their remoteness, which has limited their ability to access funding, form partnerships and work with language researchers. In turn, historically such Indigenous languages — their speakers, their stakeholders and their projects — have been under-resourced. This thesis discusses how a team of Kaska language workers have used a professional videoconferencing platform to regularly engage in long-distance collaborative language projects between Watson Lake, Yukon, and Vancouver, British Columbia. While language projects often focus either on documentation or revitalization of a language, in these videoconferencing sessions project collaborators are able to integrate these two activities. The incorporation of this technology in their language work has had several positive by-products for project collaborators, including strengthened personal relationships, a heightened sense of connectedness to language, land and each other, and an interdependence on each other that also distributes authority, all of which have formed a community of practice that has made this language team into invested collaborators. Ultimately, this research suggests that in certain circumstances, videoconferencing technology can be used to support language documentation, revitalization and education, as well as the people who undertake such projects, in a myriad of ways that extends beyond the intended outputs of the projects themselves.
View record
The aim of this project is to investigate Lapita-age human and faunal remains recovered from the 2007 excavation of Tonga’s founder site of Nukuleka (2838+/-8 BP) using stable carbon and nitrogen analysis. Results were then used to evaluate the two main Lapita subsistence theories: the strandlooper hypothesis, which states that Lapita people focused primarily on easily foraged marine and terrestrial resources (Groube 1971), and the horticultural hypothesis, which states that Lapita people migrated with a transported landscape, indicating a reliance on horticultural activity (Burley 1998). Unfortunately, after human remains selected for this research were isotopically analyzed, it became apparent that the vast majority of the samples were poorly preserved and none of the samples were suitable for use in this project. Only one of the fourteen samples yielded viable collagen and it had a δ¹³C signature of -16.0‰ and a δ¹⁵N signature of 10.4‰. Upon review of Burley et al.'s (2010) Nukuleka excavation report it was found that this sample was likely historic in nature and was rejected for use in this project. In consideration of the poor collagen preservation of sampled human remains, environmental factors that may have lead to the degradation of the Nukuleka samples are discussed, as well as potential approaches archaeologists could use in future isotopic investigations. To continue with the goal of this project, previous dietary isotopic research in the South Pacific is reviewed, and used as a comparison tool in the evaluation of Nukuleka subsistence strategies. Based on evidence from sites in Remote Oceania, it is likely that Lapita settlers at Nukuleka were employing a subsistence strategy consistent with Groube’s (1971) proposed strandlooper hypothesis.
View record
This research contributes to an emerging field of literature examining cultural disjunctures in which traditional and contemporary ways of life and perceptions of cultural knowledge are being disassociated from each other. This study examines the disjuncture associated with the perception of Dene Kēyeh, ‘The Peoples Country’, a region of Kaska Dene traditional territory, as contemporary neoliberal ideologies compete with traditional Dene K’éh philosophies and worldviews. Employing an ethnographic and indigenous framework using participatory observations and in-depth interviews, I explore this disjuncture through my own personal experience as well as the knowledge of other members and stakeholders of Dene Kēyeh. In exploring the causes and effects of this disjuncture, my thesis develops a specific history of colonialism, trauma and healing among the Kaska Dene of Dene Kēyeh. I utilize theories of discourses of power, affective emotion, post memory and postcolonialism to illustrate how the outcome from one example of the oppressive processes of colonialism, Indian Residential Schooling, has contributed to multigenerational trauma and cultural identity loss and contesting landscape perceptions of Dene Kēyeh. The study identifies the affective outcomes of trauma from colonization and its transmission across generations while also exploring indigenous relationships to the land as being essential for the healing of such trauma and the prevention of its future transmission. Through this investigation of residential schooling in Dene Kēyeh and its impacts on landscape perception, I argue that past and present day experiences of Dene Kēyeh are essential to such intergenerational healing and should be used to reframe the existing dialogue about how we, as a people, should interact with Our Land – Degun.
View record
This paper explores how “History” is represented within the diaries of the 19th century Northwest Coast translator Arthur Wellington Clah. Through exploring and deconstructing the language used to compose the diaries, this paper demonstrates how a new methodology can be employed for the purpose of understanding how a representation of the world can be reconstructed. Through understanding the “grammar of experience” this work attempts to uncover the structuring principles used to give order to the world. This analysis shows how representation can be translated into the visual field, with events within the written text being decomposed into images whose “meaning” and structure can be described in terms of elements within an artistic composition. This work looks at how an indigenous diarist of the Tsimshian people in British Columbia develops and represents his own sense of what “History” is, through hybridising two systems of ordering reality. This paper shall explore the ways in which different structuring principles interact and shape the vision of the world and go on to shape the represented world within the text.
View record
This thesis examines the concept of “motherhood” in the works of renowned Iranian poet Parvin E’tesami (1907-1941). E’tesami’s poetry bequeaths inspiration to Iranian women who search and have searched for the possibilities of revealing their true selves in the face of oppressive cultural practices and political machinations. E’tesami was one of the first poets in the recent history of Iran to advocate an equal and empowered place for women. Through the concept of “motherhood,” she probed female identity, emphasizing and endorsing women’s fostering position, maternal instincts and unique nurturing capabilities. E’tesami expanded the consciousness of a vast number of Iranians by illuminating the roles of women in the political, social and religious spheres. She depicted the female essence through biology and natural characteristics, but at the same time her verse embraced the seemingly contrasting idea of the social construction of women. The notion of “motherhood” in E’tesami’s poems offers Iranian women the foundation for a common voice or a collective goal, but also stimulates the inward—individualized—revitalization of the autonomous self for each reader based on personal beliefs and aspirations. By reconstructing the normative practices of motherhood, E’tesami’s poems generate awareness that helps redraw female consciousness and thereby initiate agency, helping women become agents of resistance who challenge the dominating powers. E’tesami produced a poetic language that is personal and realistic, juxtaposing the uproar of an artist with the anguish of Iranian women. This humanist and feminist approach to poetry introduces readers to liberal themes that challenge social and religious ideals through direct and specific examples of mothers’/women’s positions in Iran.
View record
This thesis analyzes generational differences that create social and linguistic ‘disjunctures’ (Meek 2010) influencing revitalization ideologies among members of the Dene Tha First Nation of northern Alberta. Unlike many First Nations people in Canada, most Dene Tha adults still speak their language, Dene Dháh, the Dene language, fluently. Individual fluency among younger generations, however, varies as language shift to English has begun to affect the extent to which children learn and use Dene Dháh. Dene adults and Elders observe increasing disinterest among younger people in maintaining their heritage language and culture, and they often contrast these observations with their own experiences of learning about traditional customs and values. Nostalgia for the past, and romanticizing a “proper” Dene way of living and behaviour, is commonplace among older generations of the Dene Tha. I argue that, although young people are criticized for their disinterest in the Dene language and culture, their narratives, which I describe as ‘counter-narratives’ following McCarty et al. (2006), suggest deeply felt concerns about the future of their language and culture. In particular, youth are developing eclectic ways of blending traditional culture and contemporary practices that may not necessarily fit with “proper” Dene ways, as understood by Elders. Their ‘counter-narratives’ instead reveal youths’ interest in maintaining and ‘modernizing’ their own language and culture.
View record
This thesis examines the concept of “motherhood” in the works of renowned Iranian poet Parvin E’tesami (1907-1941). E’tesami’s poetry bequeaths inspiration to Iranian women who search and have searched for the possibilities of revealing their true selves in the face of oppressive cultural practices and political machinations. E’tesami was one of the first poets in the recent history of Iran to advocate an equal and empowered place for women. Through the concept of “motherhood,” she probed female identity, emphasizing and endorsing women’s fostering position, maternal instincts and unique nurturing capabilities. E’tesami expanded the consciousness of a vast number of Iranians by illuminating the roles of women in the political, social and religious spheres. She depicted the female essence through biology and natural characteristics, but at the same time her verse embraced the seemingly contrasting idea of the social construction of women. The notion of “motherhood” in E’tesami’s poems offers Iranian women the foundation for a common voice or a collective goal, but also stimulates the inward—individualized—revitalization of the autonomous self for each reader based on personal beliefs and aspirations. By reconstructing the normative practices of motherhood, E’tesami’s poems generate awareness that helps redraw female consciousness and thereby initiate agency, helping women become agents of resistance who challenge the dominating powers. E’tesami produced a poetic language that is personal and realistic, juxtaposing the uproar of an artist with the anguish of Iranian women. This humanist and feminist approach to poetry introduces readers to liberal themes that challenge social and religious ideals through direct and specific examples of mothers’/women’s positions in Iran.
View record
This thesis analyzes generational differences that create social and linguistic ‘disjunctures’ (Meek 2010) influencing revitalization ideologies among members of the Dene Tha First Nation of northern Alberta. Unlike many First Nations people in Canada, most Dene Tha adults still speak their language, Dene Dháh, the Dene language, fluently. Individual fluency among younger generations, however, varies as language shift to English has begun to affect the extent to which children learn and use Dene Dháh. Dene adults and Elders observe increasing disinterest among younger people in maintaining their heritage language and culture, and they often contrast these observations with their own experiences of learning about traditional customs and values. Nostalgia for the past, and romanticizing a “proper” Dene way of living and behaviour, is commonplace among older generations of the Dene Tha. I argue that, although young people are criticized for their disinterest in the Dene language and culture, their narratives, which I describe as ‘counter-narratives’ following McCarty et al. (2006), suggest deeply felt concerns about the future of their language and culture. In particular, youth are developing eclectic ways of blending traditional culture and contemporary practices that may not necessarily fit with “proper” Dene ways, as understood by Elders. Their ‘counter-narratives’ instead reveal youths’ interest in maintaining and ‘modernizing’ their own language and culture.
View record
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.