Making History Heal: Settler-colonialism and Urban Indigenous Healing in Ontario, 1970s-2010

This thesis focuses on the interrelationship between Canadian colonial histories and Indigenous healing. I begin by problematising how colonialism is invoked in contemporary scholarship on Aboriginal health and healing, and arguing for more precise historical methods and a more relational understanding of colonial processes. Historicising Indigenous agency is integral to this analysis. Whilst colonial continuities in contemporary Canadian public policy discourse is an important theme, I also attend to social movements, institutions, professions, and political and economic forces beyond the state. Indigenous healing as a socio-political movement itself has a history dating at least to the late 1960s. Urban Indigenous healing discourse is characterised by linking present-day suffering to collective historical losses, and valorizing the reclamation of Indigenous identity, knowledge and social relations. Drawing on urban Indigenous social histories from Kenora and Toronto, I consider the urban healing movement as an example of Indigenous resistance influenced by the international decolonization and North American Red Power movements, but which over time has also engaged with dominant institutions, professions, policies, and discourses, such as the concept of trauma. My analysis considers professionals and patients invoking historical trauma as political agents, both responding to and participating in broader shifts in the moral economy. These shifts have created the conditions of possibility for public victimhood to become a viable strategy for attracting attention and resources to suffering and injustice. The thesis highlights the centrality and complexity of self-determination in urban Indigenous healing, drawing on historical and ethnographic analysis from three southern Ontario cities. I analyse how the liberal multiculturalism paradigm dominant in health policy and health care settings contributes to mental health professionals’ failure to recognise Aboriginal clients and issues. I argue that characterising pan-Aboriginal and ethno-national healing as approaches in opposition to one another produces an insufficiently nuanced analysis in the context of urban Indigenous subjectivities and social relations, where both approaches are valuable for different reasons. The thesis urges greater attention to the role of languages and local histories, and to the threat which dominant policy discourses on residential schools and mental health pose to the maintenance of distinct ethno-national histories, epistemologies and traditions in urban Indigenous healing.Ph