Fourth World rising: Michael Humeniuk, The Fourth World in the global Village: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism, Media, and Exchange in the Global Sixties, PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Fourth World rising: Michael Humeniuk, The Fourth World in the global Village: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism, Media, and Exchange in the Global Sixties, PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This dissertation investigates how advancing media⎯print, radio, and television⎯became an integral part of Indigenous political resistance and cultural revitalization in the decades following 1960. This period witnessed an increase in global communications technology. As technologies developed and contributed to globalization, they were utilized, adapted, and re-worked by Indigenous peoples and other colonized peoples to take their struggles for self-determination international. The dissertation argues that not only did these technologies allow Indigenous peoples to produce works that spoke to their concerns, but they also allowed other like-minded peoples to join in their struggle. In an era of anti-colonial thinking, advances in print, communication, and travel allowed colonized peoples to communicate, cooperate, and exchange theories, rhetoric, and political methods. Furthermore, it allowed for a global network of support amongst this contingent of the global population encapsulated in Fourth World interventions into the “global village.” It centres Indigenous Fourth World political action in Canada within this global consciousness of anti-colonialism and political re-imagining. It argues that a level of cross-pollination occurred among political activists, particularly Indigenous activists in Canada and the United States, but also internationally, connecting these movements through their methods, goals, and shared history, and through the use of advancing communications technologies, including literature, print, radio, and travel. By focusing on questions of exchange⎯ideas, culture, theory, rhetoric, modus operandi, relationships⎯rather than a particular movement or singular locale, this dissertation demonstrates that Indigenous peoples both contributed to and drew from cooperation between anti-colonial and decolonial thinkers and activists to gain domestic and international recognition of their rights and used it as a system of support to gain concessions in Canada.

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