Claiming Back Their Heritage: Indigenous Empowerment and Community Development through World Heritage

Geneviève Susemihl

Oct 2023 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

This book provides a unique, in-depth look at three Indigenous World Heritage sites in Canada and their use for Indigenous empowerment and community development. Based on extensive ethnographic field studies and comprehensive narrative interviews, it shows how the three First Nation communities presented in the case studies enforce recognition of their collective rights to preserve their cultural heritage and assert their right to political, economic, cultural, and social self-determination. It also considers the prevailing universalistic discourses around World Heritage and the various ways in which they serve to either reinforce existing oppressive conditions regarding Indigenous communities and voices or provide opportunities to overcome them. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working on social and cultural histories, histories of colonialism, and in heritage and museum studies.

Winner of the 2025 Pierre Savard Award, awarded by the International Council for Canadian Studie for the best book written on a Canadian topic outside of Canada

About the author

Geneviève Susemihl is a senior researcher and lecturer of North American literature, culture and media at Kiel University, Germany. She obtained a PhD in North American literature and culture with a dissertation on the immigration of German-Jewish refugees to New York and Toronto in 2004 and a post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) in 2022. She was a stand-in professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Kiel University, an assistant professor at the Universities of Rostock and Greifswald, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Queen's Centre for International Relations at Queen’s University, and program manager and senior research associate at the Centre for Security, Armed Forces and Society at the Royal Military College of Canada. Her main areas of research are Heritage and Indigenous Studies. She has published extensively on Indigenous heritage, the construction of the American Indian in literature and culture, migration, and storytelling. She wrote the book Das indigeneKanada (The Indigenous Canada, 2023) and, together with Grit Alter, edited the book Teaching Canada I: Indigenous Peoples and Cultures (2023).