Round Dancing the Rotunda: Decolonizing the University of Ottawa

Abstract

As the number of Indigenous people/s in Canadian cities is increasing, more research in the field of decolonization is needed to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of how to decolonize urban settler space. This thesis takes a critical qualitative and decolonization approach to investigate how Indigenous people/s experience urban settler space by using a case study of Indigenous students at the University of Ottawa. Through sharing circles, personal interviews, and reflexive journaling, I centre my participants’ experiences and perceptions of the University of Ottawa campus as space. In the first results chapter (Chapter 3), I present my participants’ perceptions of the built environment of the campus and in turn identify the contours of a settler space. In the next chapter (Chapter 4), I examine the participants’ experiences of the campus as a social space. Their responses reveal that settler spaces are imbued with settler norms – what I call settlernormativity – that often reproduce unequal settler-Indigenous relations in and through space. Drawing from my participants’ views on how to decolonize campus space, in Chapter 5, I propose acts of decolonization in space-time as a strategy to decolonize settler urban spaces.