Sinclair, Erin2025-08-272025-08-272025-08-212025-08-212025-08-25http://hdl.handle.net/1993/39265Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people in Canada experience disproportionately high rates of violence. In response, Indigenous communities have called for increased education and awareness to address the systemic causes of this violence. Critical historical education is one effective intervention. A complement to such education may be storytelling. In my thesis, I examined the effects of critical historical education and storytelling on non-Indigenous peoples’ emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses to this issue. I conducted an online experimental survey with non-Indigenous undergraduate students (N = 499) to compare these two approaches using a 2 (Critical Historical Knowledge: none, critical historical passage) × 2 (Storytelling: none, personal story video) factorial design. Participants in the three intervention conditions either read a critical historical passage, watched a video in which a woman described her lived experience, or received both interventions. Participants in a fourth empty control condition only completed the dependent measures of empathy, political solidarity, behavioral intentions, and support for government action. First, I hypothesized that all interventions would outperform the control in eliciting empathy, political solidarity, behavioral intentions, and support for government action. Second, I expected that the effect of each manipulation would be stronger in the presence of the other in eliciting empathy, political solidarity, behavioral intentions, and support for government action. Third, I hypothesized that participants who received one intervention would report similar levels of empathy, political solidarity, behavioral intentions, and support for government action. Finally, I expected that empathy or political solidarity would mediate the effects of the interventions on behavioral intentions. To test these hypotheses, I conducted factorial ANOVAs, pairwise comparisons, and mediation analyses. Both the critical historical passage and the personal story video increased empathy and support for government action. The critical historical passage also increased political solidarity and behavioral intentions. The interaction of both interventions was not significant for any variable. The critical historical passage indirectly increased behavioral intentions through increases in both empathy and political solidarity. Overall, either intervention positively influenced emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral responses. While acknowledging limitations, I discuss the implications of these findings for historical knowledge and story interventions.engcritical historical knowledgeIndigenousbehavioral intentionssolidarityempathystory