Browsing by Author "Dawson, Leslie"

Now showing 1 - 13 of 13
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    Birth places, embodied spaces: Tlicho pregnancy stories across the generations
    (2017) Dawson, Leslie
    The forced culture changes of colonization in Canada affected Indigenous societies at different points in time; colonization of the Tlicho (formerly Dogrib) region in the Northwest Territories (NWT) was considered to have been relatively recent. The profound changes to the lives of the Tlicho can be heard in the stories across the generations. To investigate the impact of colonization on Tlicho maternal health, I collected pregnancy and the birth stories from Tlicho women of different generations. 1 Generations were further expanded with the addition of Joan Ryan's work with Tlicho Elders in Whati, NWT, and Pertice Moffitt's discussions with younger Tlicho women in Behchoko, NWT. I collected pregnancy and birth stories from ten Tlicho women between the ages of sixty through ninety in the Tlicho communities of Behchoko and Whati over the summers of 2013 and 2014. The women met with me in their homes and most shared their stories in Tlicho with the aid of an interpreter. Grounded in women's narratives, particularly of Tlicho Elders and a traditional midwife, their stories reveal changes in the lived experiences of pregnancy and birth as reflecting different sociohistoric locations within histories of colonization-from birth on the land with community and midwives, to the beginnings of settlement and birth in the mission hospital in Rae, and to lone evacuation to Yellowknife for medicalized birth in a biomedical hospital.
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    Constructing ethical learning spaces through interdisciplinary dialogue
    (2021) Dawson, Leslie; Robinson, Jack
    First piloted in 2017, MacEwan University’s Interdisciplinary Dialogue is a collaborative teaching and learning project that addresses topics relating to social justice across disciplines. In 2019, in collaboration with kihêw waciston Indigenous Centre, the Dialogue expanded its intercultural learning through a partnership with University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills and explored truth and reconciliation through a focus on Indigenous research. Building on Willie Ermine’s concept of ‘ethical spaces’, this article highlights how ethical learning spaces were created through Indigenous-led educational forums followed by an online student Interdisciplinary Dialogue. The Dialogue positioned students to explore histories of colonial relationships and their attendant harmful research practices; and to centre Indigenous knowledges and methodologies as foundational to Indigenous research. Students questioned oppressions in western pedagogy, and they envisioned a pedagogy of mutual respect for Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. This article focuses on the online discussions conducted by students in the 2019 Dialogue. It shows how students understood that they were participants in disrupting colonial discourse in academia, reframing education for reconciliation, and expanding the construction of ‘ethical spaces’ across the University and beyond.
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    “Food will be what brings the people together”: constructing counter-narratives from the perspective of Indigenous foodways
    (2020) Dawson, Leslie
    Learning Objectives: 1. Readers will reflect on how discourse may serve the interests of the dominant colonial groupwhile undermining the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. 2. Readers will explore the connection of different worldviews to the meanings and rituals assigned to food, eating, and mealtime. 3. Readers will relate the importance of constructing counter-narratives based in local Indigenous foodways for Indigenous well-being, identity, and food sovereignty.
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    Indigenous bodies and experimentation: the nutrition experiments conducted within the residential schools
    (2019) Greene, Liam; Toop, Rhianna; Zimmerman, Katie; Dawson, Leslie
    The digital story embraces a subjective approach to display the conditions that led to, occurred during, and were produced in the nutrition experiments conducted in various residential schools. Both the immediate and ongoing (intergenerational) damages are discussed to display the horrific nature of the residential schools. Further, the contemporary action taken by both Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, as a result of the nutrition studies becoming public, is shown. Interdisciplinary Dialogue Project.
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    Indigenous gender identities and ideologies: two-spirit identity in colonized North America
    (2019) Brown, Ian; Rychliski, Rebekah; Rodgers, Ben; McKinnon, Chase; Dawson, Leslie
    Our digital story explores the concept of two-spirit among Indigenous peoples in North America. Following a review of different two spirit identities amongst a variety of First Nations, we highlight the violence against two-spirit peoples as a result of colonization and contemporary movements to reclaim two-spirit identities within the broader contexts of healing and decolonization. Interdisciplinary Dialogue Project.
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    Innovative and affordable acts of pedagogy: open education show and tell
    (2020-02-18) Hall, Robyn; Foster, Alison; Dawson, Leslie
    The use of open education resources to facilitate teaching and learning has increased steadily at MacEwan University over the past several years. Featuring examples of initiatives led by MacEwan instructors, this presentation will highlight open resources that faculty members have successfully developed and implemented with the goals of sharing student work beyond the classroom, expanding access to learning, and enabling flexible course design. Participants will be asked to consider ways that they too might embrace open resources in their own course development, identify potential benefits and challenges of implementation, and learn about available on-campus support.
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    Islamophobia
    (2017) Seifeddine, Nasreen; Twa, Jennifer; Scott, Jami; Hay, Samantha; Dawson, Leslie
    Our group digital story focuses on where the idea of Islamophobia comes from. We examine Islamophobia within a North American view. We bring forth the history, and what being Muslim really looks like / means and how the refugees are portrayed in the media.
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    "Only then will the buffalo return”: disrupting obstetric violence through Indigenous reproductive justice
    (2022) Dawson, Leslie; Suntjens, Terri
    In June of 2019, after enduring a C-section delivery at a Kamloops hospital, an Indigenous couple welcomed their first child. However, their joy was short lived, as child welfare workers came to take the baby, saying they had a report of neglect, ninety minutes after the baby was born. Although the maternal grandmother managed to initially hold off the child welfare workers, two days later, they returned to apprehend the infant while the mother slept due to a hospital admin-istered sedative. When she woke up, her newborn baby was gone (Ridgen). This story of Baby H, as the infant has come to be known, is one that many Indigenous women, children, and communities have experienced within the Canadian medical system and is one of the many forms of obstetric violence Indigenous women face. Indigenous women in Canada experience obstetric violence in the form of reproductive oppressions associated with birth alerts and baby apprehensions, such as that described above, and forced evacuated birth, when women from rural and remote communities are forced to leave their communities to birth in urban centres away from their support networks. These reproductive oppressions are couched in risk discourse and inscribe meanings on Indigenous maternal bodies as at risk or, in postnatal contexts, on Indigenous infant bodies as at risk. Fundamentally, these inscribed meanings privilege biomedical knowledge and deny Indigenous ways of knowing and being and make the impoverished worlds created by ongoing settler colonialism invisible.
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    Residential schools and the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical traumas inflicted on indigenous peoples
    (2019) Kanagasuriam, Selina; Cayre Maglanoc, Kristee; Warfa, Hamdi; Abdinoor, Meimuna; Dawson, Leslie
    This digital story focuses on highlighting the trauma that the Indigenous communities endured during their time in the residential school system and following it. Indigenous peoples put emphasis on the holistic approach when it comes to aspects such as healing, education, etc. In this story, the holistic approach was also utilized to bring to light the painful truths of Indigenous suffering, by focusing mainly on the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional wounds Indigenous peoples faced and continue to face even today.
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    Stolen sisters
    (2019) Kuzio, Katelyne; Fleury, Jade; Garcia, Jessa; Dawson, Leslie
    “Stolen Sisters” is a powerful digital story which outlines the colonial impacts on Indigenous people which has contributed to the contemporary issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG). “Stolen Sisters” provides information about current colonial perspectives of Indigenous women and how they need to be addressed, reflected upon, and challenged. Through Indigenous Knowledge surrounding the traditional roles of women, the meaning of the word ‘woman’ in the Cree language, and telling the stories of Indigenous women, “Stolen Sisters” aim is to provide education to the collegial public. Interdisciplinary Dialogue Project.
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    Syrian refugee crisis
    (2017) Abyan, Umulkhayr; Abyan, Umukalthuum; Mohamed, Narmien; Abdi, Maymuna; Dawson, Leslie
    This digital story shows how Syria was before the civil war, during the civil war and after it, it also includes everything they had to deal with from Islamophobia to the struggles of fleeing their country to the misconceptions people have about Syrian refugees. The digital story sheds light on some of the issues Muslim Syrian refugees face when resettling in Canada.
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    The hidden embodied stories behind diabetes as racialized health disparities
    (2021) Dawson, Leslie
    Learning Objectives: 1. To describe how the concepts of whiteness and racialization can influence interpretations of health and disease. 2. To outline the DOHaD model and discuss how the concept of embodiment can better reflect the lived experiences of oppression. 3. To explore historic examples of racialized views of diabetes and reflect on factors that can influence the high rates of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada today.
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    The patriarchal stain on women’s health: medicalization of depression
    (2023) Lauer, Alexa; Dawson, Leslie
    An increasing trend in Western culture is the use of antidepressants to regulate emotions and the bodily response to experiences of distress brought on by social unrest. The application of pharmaceutical treatments to states of unrest is reflected through the medicalization of depression which appears most prominently among women. In this paper, I argue that the medicalization of depression among women results from societal pressures, gender discrimination, and sexual violence on the female body. Through a feminist lens, I discuss how patriarchal and capitalist institutions of power create social ills that become inscribed on women’s bodies as “female problems” or “hysteria.” Rooted in the male gaze, these institutions develop biases and stereotypes against women that ultimately financially benefit the pharmaceutical industry. By emphasizing the theoretical framework of medical anthropologists Margaret Lock and Nancy Schepher-Hughes, I reveal how patriarchal and capitalist structures exert control over the female body entering public spaces and transform the social experiences of discrimination, objectification, and sexual violence into individual mental illness to be cured through antidepressants.