Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Miller, Andrea

Abstract

This thesis examines Indigenous environmental justice discourse within the context of the U.S. carceral settler-state to advance a conceptual framework I name discursive frontierism. I use rhetorical analysis informed by critical and cultural theory to help make visual—and visible—the ways in which colonial frontierism operates in discursive spaces. I analyze the language of the carceral settler-state, including embodiment and affect as communicative language, as well as the language of Indigenous and Indigenous-led resistance. In the first half of the thesis, I argue that the language of the settler-state discursively constitutes Indigenous peoples as criminals and colonial subjects in order to justify their removal. The second half of this analysis finds the language of Indigenous land and water protectors to model and declare “survivance”—an active and continuing “sense of presence over absence” that both renounces dominance and victimry, and preserves traditional knowledge systems and ancestral connections (Vizenor 2018). I conclude that discursive iterations of Indigenous survivance meaningfully thwart the U.S. state’s efforts to advance occupation of discursive territory and further settle the discursive frontier.

Extent

89 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Thesis (MA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2022.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00013961

Format

pdf

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