A Broadsheet for the Examined Mind
Every dispatch filed for INST 201, gathered in one place for revision.
The Indian Act is often described as outdated, but it still shapes status, band membership, reserve land, and governance. This dispatch explains how a nineteenth-century statute became a living architecture of belonging — and why reform is not the same as abolition.
The pass system had no basis in the Indian Act, yet it regulated First Nations movement across the prairie West for decades. This dispatch explains how the system worked, how people resisted it, and why its archive is so difficult to reconstruct.
Treaty 7 is often described as a land cession, but the Elders’ narrative treats it as a relationship with ongoing obligations. This dispatch explains what was negotiated at Blackfoot Crossing in 1877, why the written and oral records differ, and what “original intent” means for treaty rights today.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West turned Indigenous people into spectacle for settler audiences. This dispatch examines how performance produces ideas about Indigeneity — and how Indigenous performers have used the same stage to contest those ideas.
Indigenous knowledge is not a collection of folklore to be added to Western science. This dispatch examines Leroy Little Bear’s ‘jagged worldviews,’ Kyle Whyte’s critique of crisis epistemology, Deborah McGregor’s environmental justice, and the Buffalo Treaty’s politics of restoration.
Indigenous feminism is not Western feminism with a different flag. This dispatch examines how colonialism reorganised gender, why the ‘F word’ remains contested, and how Indigenous women writers and activists have made gender justice part of sovereignty.
Blood quantum turns belonging into a racial fraction, but Indigenous identity is also kinship, community, land, language, and self-determination. This dispatch examines the colonial logic of classification and the contested politics of ‘Pretendian’ claims.
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s Angry Inuk shows how international campaigns against the seal hunt overrode Inuit political authority and threatened food security. This dispatch examines the film alongside Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s argument that Indigenous sovereignty is ontological, not merely legal.
Museums present themselves as objective custodians of culture, but their collections were built through colonial acquisition. This dispatch examines repatriation, the politics of display, and the digital archives that are extending the fight over Indigenous data into the present.
