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Land Acknowledgement

Kamloops, British Columbia

This dissertation was researched, conducted, and written on the unceded traditional territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwépemcúl’ecw, the traditional and ancestral lands of the Secwépemc Nation. Thompson Rivers University, the institution where this study took place and where I taught for twenty-five years, sits on Secwépemc land. I am grateful for the ongoing generosity of this territory, which has held me, my work, and my learning for more than two decades.

The Secwépemc are a sovereign people with deep and living connections to the lands, waters, and places of the Interior Plateau. Their stewardship of this land precedes and exceeds the institution that now occupies it. The university I studied, the architecture of exclusion I documented, and the international students whose photographs fill these pages all exist within a structure built on unceded territory. This recognition holds the ethical complexity of researching “belonging” within a settler-colonial institution without resolving it. It holds that complexity is a persistent question throughout the analysis.

I write with awareness that institutional precarity, the subject of this inquiry, has its own colonial genealogy. The malperformative inclusion I name in this dissertation, where institutions perform awareness of exclusion while maintaining the conditions that produce it, operates within a broader structure of settler colonialism that continues to dispossess Indigenous peoples of land, language, and livelihood. The international students I worked with face their own forms of displacement, yet their precarity differs fundamentally from Indigenous dispossession. I hold both realities without collapsing them into equivalence.

I acknowledge this land as an ethical commitment rather than a formality: to remain awake to the relationship between the inclusion I advocate and the sovereignty that remains unresolved.

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Land Acknowledgement

Syilx (Okanagan) Territory

I live and work on Syilx (Okanagan) territory. The Syilx Okanagan people have cared for these lands, waterways, and ecosystems since time immemorial. Their relationship to this place is one of reciprocity, stewardship, and deep belonging, a relationship that predates and exceeds the colonial boundaries drawn across their homeland.

Much of this dissertation was written at my kitchen table on Syilx territory, where twenty-nine photographs from four international students were first spread across the surface, clustered with coloured Post-it notes, and connected with red yarn. The kitchen table analysis that produced the initial thematic findings of this study took place on land that carries its own stories of belonging, displacement, and the ongoing work of making home.

I came to this territory as a settler. My family history includes French-Acadian roots reaching back to the 1500s, distant Mi’kmaq ancestry through Acadian–Mi’kmaq interrelations, and an Austrian grandfather who crossed an ocean in search of possibility. These threads shape how I understand precarity, migration, and institutional belonging, yet they confer no claim to Indigenous identity. I hold this positioning with humility, recognizing that the ground beneath my kitchen table holds obligations I am still learning to honour.

I acknowledge this territory with the understanding that the concepts at the heart of this dissertation, regenerative sufficiency, the mindset of enough, and the ethic of reciprocity drawn from Kimmerer (2013) and Wilson (2008), resonate with Indigenous principles of relationality that I engage as ethical guides rather than as frameworks to be extracted. The Secwépemc principle of Kw’seltktnéws, “we are all related,” appears on banners at Thompson Rivers University. One of my participants photographed it and asked, “Who reads this wall? Who changes what they teach because of it?” That question disciplines every page of this dissertation.

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Land Acknowledgement

Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia

Royal Roads University, the institution granting this degree, is located on the lands of the Xwsepsum (Esquimalt) and Lekwungen (Songhees) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. The grounds of Hatley Park, where the university stands, hold deep significance for the Xwsepsum and Lekwungen peoples, and their presence on this land is ongoing and sovereign.

I completed this doctoral programme through Royal Roads as a distance learner, gathering on those grounds for residencies that shaped my thinking and sharpened my practice. The School of Leadership Studies, where this dissertation was supervised by Dr. Brian White and examined by Dr. Eugene Thomlinson and Dr. Kyla McLeod, provided the scholarly home that Thompson Rivers University could never fully offer me as a contract faculty member. The irony is visible: the institution I studied for its architecture of exclusion was the same institution where I taught for twenty-five years, while the institution that enabled me to theorize that exclusion was one I visited only briefly, carrying my work home to Syilx territory each time.

I acknowledge this land with gratitude for the intellectual community it sustained and with awareness that the academy itself, including the degree I am earning, exists within colonial structures that these acknowledgements name yet fail to dismantle.

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Dedication

For the students who sit at empty tables
and the teachers who notice.

For those who document what institutions prefer to overlook.

For everyone whose resilience subsidizes failures they never created.

For Gamma, whose silence spoke louder than any photograph.

For Mary, who reminded me never to surrender.

For Tom.

And for my ancestors,
who taught me that belonging is made, never simply given.