The Indigenous Experience and Cultural Renewal, Decolonization, and Transformation in the Ottawa Area

Abstract

This research is an ethnography of 30 people on Indigenous experiences, place-making and the cultural practices that are used to construct meaning and cultural renewal that leads to healing and decolonization in the Ottawa, Ontario area. The research explores the lives of those who reside in the city and have never lived in traditional territories, and those who continue to have roots there.These practices are observed through the lens of the three bodies of the individual, social, and body politic. Identity has moved beyond legacies of essentialized and bounded notions which in actuality are multiple and fluid. The study revealed themes of a continuum of experiences and practices including: territorialists who reside in the homeland; returners who have the Indigenous diasporic experience of longing for a homeland; learners who have been displaced from