A QUIET THEFT: AN INVISIBLE ARCHITECTURE OF ELITE BELONGING

Abstract

This thesis explores how Indigenous relational frameworks, once the living foundation of land, learning, and belonging, were not merely appropriated but strategically stolen and repurposed within settler institutions such as elite summer camps, scouting movements, and outdoor leadership programs. Guided by Indigenous scholarship and Elder Dr. Duke Redbird’s teachings, and grounded in historical and archival research, the study traces a dual trajectory: while Indigenous children were violently removed from their families and punished for practicing their own traditions, settler children were being nurtured within systems that extracted these same frameworks to cultivate belonging and privilege. What emerges is structural theft, the deliberate displacement of Indigenous relational knowledge into settler networks of power. Through narrative inquiry and critical reflection, this work reframes education as a site of relational extraction and argues that reconciliation demands return: of land, of learning, and of the rights of Indigenous Nations to self-determination.