Search

This thesis explores the vital role of history, traditional knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, artifacts, and language in shaping the identity and well-being of Indigenous communities. It emphasizes how these components are vital for the survival and growth of Indigenous cultures. Using the Blackfoot Confederacy as a case study, the research highlights the significance of these elements in maintaining cultural continuity and resilience. The analysis is grounded in literature authored from an Indigenous perspective, ensuring an authentic representation of the values and insights inherent in these communities. This work aims to bridge existing gaps in the literature by demonstrating the profound impact these cultural foundations have on the identity and well-being of Indigenous people. To address the scarcity of resources on this topic and its relation to identity and well-being, the thesis provides an Indigenous-centered history of the Blackfoot people. Evidence compiled illustrates the importance of history, traditional knowledge, and language in identity formation and health and well-being. Previous research indicates that individuals more connected to their culture—through language, historical understanding, interaction with cultural objects, and traditional ecological knowledge—exhibit better health, lower suicide rates, and feel more secure about their Indigenous identity. It is through our research that we hope this thesis serve as an example and guide for others struggling with identity loss as a result of colonization and assimilation tactics and to empower Indigenous individuals and communities.

Academic discussions of the globalization of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca have called attention to ayahuasca tourism and its tendencies toward exotification of Indigenous peoples, extraction of knowledge and resources, and the reshaping of ritual practices to appeal to market interests. These discussions tend toward fatalistic conclusions that ayahuasca tourism will inevitably result in the erasure of Amazonian lifeways. I draw on four years of hybrid ethnographic research in the Peruvian Amazon and in online discussion forums for ayahuasca and Amazonian shamanism to present the case of two Amazonian medicine centers who take an alternative approach to ayahuasca tourism, which I refer to as shamanic pilgrimage. By recontextualizing ayahuasca in its historical role as a support to other medicinal plants, Centro Takiwasi and Mushuk Pakarina leverage global interest in ayahuasca to access the economic advantages of the global tourism market while mediating against its deleterious effects. This is accomplished by requiring pilgrims who wish to drink ayahuasca to do so as part of a deeper practice of “being with plants.” This extended period of liminality forces engagement with Amazonian, animist epistemologies. I focus on the role that icaros (healing songs) play in structuring rituals and in facilitating relationality between pilgrims and non-human beings of the forest. Using Peircian semiotics, I analyze the process that healers go through to learn icaros, and I analyze the use of these songs in various medicine rituals that do and do not involve ayahuasca. I also employ semiotics to show that icaros carry the same types of meaning in ayahuasca ceremonies as they do in other rituals. However, they function differently as the synesthetic experiences that ayahuasca often induces collapse the typical order of semiotic processes, allowing healers to modulate the experiences and processes of healing of ayahuasca drinkers. I draw from neuroscientific studies of the past t

Since the early 1900s, Zapotec intellectuals from Juchitán, Oaxaca began to work towards their goals of preserving and revitalizing Zapotec language and culture through the creation, publication, and dissemination of various bilingual literary magazines. From Roads to Iguanas: Tracing Contemporary Zapotec Literature argues that these magazines are sites of resistance and (re)creation where the editors and contributing intellectuals enact kab’awilian strategies as they negotiate with the nation state, and create a pathway for their own historical, linguistic, and political autonomy, ensuring Zapotec futurities in the process. The first chapter, “‘Por la cultura Zapoteca’: Neza and Zapotec Intellectuals in Postrevolutionary Mexico” delves into the first bilingual newspaper created and published in 1935 Mexico City by a group of UNAM students. The publication is read in the context of the post-revolutionary nation-state, the students were heavily influenced by the nationalization of Indigenous culture and therefore made a claim to their Isthmus Zapotec identity with a focus on philosophy, history, and politics. The second chapter, “‘Retomando el camino’: Neza Cubi and the Start of a Cultural Movement” explores the second literary magazine, Neza Cubi, created in Mexico City in 1968 by two Juchitec intellectuals. This magazine makes a connection to the first and establishes a literary genealogy between the first generation of intellectuals and the current one, creates a Zapotec history in opposition to official national history, and begins to think through a Zapotec approach to politics in Juchitán. The third and last chapter, “‘La iguana no muere’: Guchachi’ Reza, Ethnic Pride, and Political Resistance” centers Guchachi’ Reza, the longest-running Indigenous independent bilingual literary magazine published in Latin America, from 1975-1998. This chapter explores the way that Zapotec intellectuals began to open their publications to other social movements happening in Mex

Indigenous-language immersion (ILI) is a form of schooling where all, or nearly all, classroom instruction in every subject area is conducted in an Indigenous language. This dissertation comprises three case study comparisons of neighboring pairs of ILI and English-medium school programs. The first case study examines two elementary schools in the same community. The second case study consists of two independent co-located schools serving elementary and intermediate grades. The third case study compares the ILI and English-medium programs at an intermediate school serving 6th-8th grades. Various academic achievement measures, including English language arts and math standardized assessment scores, are examined to quantify the contrasting associations between ILI versus English-medium instruction and student outcomes, after accounting for observed student background characteristics. On mainstream English-language measures of academic achievement, we find that with few exceptions, ILI students at the case study sites generally scored as high as, or higher than, their Indigenous peers who experienced English-medium instruction. At the same time, when assessed on their Indigenous language proficiency, the ILI students demonstrated consistent maintenance and growth across various Indigenous-language proficiency domains.

In 2006, the U.S. military announced transfer the Marine base in Okinawa to the island of Guåhan/Guam, a nearby U.S. territory that already holds an Air Force and Navy base. To make room for the Marines and their dependents, the Department of Defense has begun to construct additional firing ranges, barracks, and other forms of militarized infrastructure that would allow it to defend and maintain its interests in Asia and the Pacific. Rather than a homebase for U.S. militarized interventions, however, Guåhan’s Indigenous peoples- the Chamorros- have emphasized their collective genealogical ties to Guåhan’s lands and oceans. Thus, many Chamorro protectors have resisted the build-up, and critiqued the Chamorro politicians and Asian contractors who have worked with the military to further militarize the island. Much of the physical labor required by the U.S. military’s construction projects are performed by Filipino workers, because of their perceived historical connections and their earlier participation in Guåhan’s Cold War militarization. In this dissertation, I investigate the history of Filipino participation in colonial infrastructure projects that have dispossessed and dislocated Chamorros. Utilizing multi-lingual and multi-temporal archives and oral history interviews with Chamorro protectors and Filipino organizers, I trace the impacts of the Spanish empire’s nineteenth century practice of sending Filipino convict laborers and the U.S. military’s twentieth century recruitment of Filipino lawyers, surveyors, and construction workers, in identifying lands and waters for the military to build its bases. Through the framework of Indigenous feminist geography and queer of color critique, I question the extent to which carceral infrastructures and logics have contained Chamorro-Filipino relations. At the same time, I also point to possible moments when Chamorros and Filipinos found ways to resist the Spanish and U.S. empire’s control over their relationalities.

The genealogy of violence against Indigenous women is a product of settler colonialism ideologies. I will trace the intergenerational inheritances of toxic masculinity through memoirs and my own lived experiences. The essay interweaves a close reading of the book Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda, which dissects the multifaceted aspects of settler violence and gendered masculinity. The paper asks the reader to question modes of scholarship in studying biography, family and ancestral relations, and oral tradition. The form of this paper switches between scholarly and analytical framing through Bad Indians and then to a personal narrative. The personal narrative is essential in reflecting the different tropes of orality. Although the creative aspects reflect memoirs, a critical distinction is needed: the sense of collective and individual experience. Although my experience is centralized in my understanding, these stories are told through the generational and collective experiences of trauma through the colonial gaze and moments of Indigenous culture and survivance.

This dissertation examines the settler colonial, multispecies, and microbial politics of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in what is now British Columbia, Canada. Salmon aquaculture production systems enable 18 million Atlantic salmon to be raised in nets that are anchored to the seafloor in the coastal waters of British Columbia each year. Aquaculture is recognized as the fastest growing method of food production worldwide and is often positioned as a “blue revolution” capable of providing sustainable, affordable seafood in the midst of salmon population declines. In British Columbia, however, the raising of Atlantic salmon in critical Pacific salmon migration routes has engendered concerns about emerging industrial uses of the waterscape and the ability for farm-borne viruses to move between species. By investigating how industrial aquaculture is encountered, negotiated, and resisted on-the-ground, particularly by Indigenous communities in whose waters the practice is occurring, I instead propose that aquaculture is not a radical departure or a revolutionary break from the past, but is steeped within and dependent upon histories of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism that have long transformed salmon and waterscapes into sites of state and economy-building.Stemming from ongoing uncertainties regarding the potential for pathogens to transfer between Atlantic and Pacific salmon, this dissertation particularly focuses on historic, scientific, and political controversies that surround salmon viruses. In the absence of state monitoring for salmon pathogens like Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), Indigenous leaders and their allies travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor the daily operations of farms and gather underwater video footage from within farm sites. Campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections and document the spread of viruses and pollution also become part of broader political movement aimed at reclaiming territory and restoring Indigenou

Across the field of education—whether it is in policy making, higher education, or mainstream media—educational equity for Afrikan and Indigenous students is centered around the reformation of compulsory institutions that are rooted in settler-colonialism, genocidal violence, and the removal of colonized children from their communities. As a way of challenging these dominant beliefs, this study utilizes a critical ethnographic approach to investigate the violent history of settler-colonial schools and the historical development of militant education projects as a response to settler-colonial domination within colonized communities—with the focus being on one school in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, CA. The study combines critical ethnography, Black Studies, Indigenous Research Methodologies, and Pedagogies of Resistance to understand the development of these schools throughout history. Findings show that militant education projects and community-run liberation schools function to provide Afrikan and Indigenous children with a wholesome educational experience that prioritizes their safety, cultural knowledge, and socio-emotional well-being while simultaneously providing them the skills necessary to organize their communities for selfdetermination. Although the focus of this project is on a single school in North America (Turtle Island), this project utilizes historical analysis to place the school within the context of Afrikan and Indigenous liberation movements that have developed their own educational systems throughout modern history.

This text conducts an analysis of familial bear-human relationships in Sámi, Finno-Ugric, and Russian folklore, supplemented by material culture. It explores the image of the bear as a member of human and non-human communities and his roles in human society. This study draws from oral tradition from Sápmi, Finland, and Russia, focusing on the material and the theoretical framework it is presented in. Critical assessment of the approaches to the subject of bear-human relationships are a major part of this thesis. It attempts to adopt new frameworks more mindful of Indigenous perspectives and employs oral tradition as a primary historical source that, supplemented by archaeological evidence, can provide a clear view of past beliefs and practices. The main goal of this thesis is deconstructing past approaches to Indigenous knowledge and culture, with a special focus on Russian scholarship, and analysing human-bear relationships with Indigenous outlooks in mind., Denna text genomför en analys av familjära relationer mellan björn och människa i samisk, finsk-ugrisk och rysk folklore, kompletterad med materiell kultur. Den utforskar bilden av björnen som en medlem av mänskliga och icke-mänskliga gemenskaper och hans roller i det mänskliga samhället. Denna studie bygger på muntlig tradition från Sápmi, Finland och Ryssland, med fokus på materialet och den teoretiska ram som den presenteras i. Kritisk bedömning av förhållningssätten till ämnet björn-mänskliga relationer är en viktig del av denna avhandling. Den försöker anta nya ramar mer medvetna om inhemska perspektiv och använder muntlig tradition som en primär historisk källa som, kompletterad med arkeologiska bevis, kan ge en tydlig bild av tidigare föreställningar och praxis. Huvudmålet med denna avhandling är att dekonstruera tidigare förhållningssätt till ursprungsbefolkningens kunskap och kultur, med särskilt fokus på ryskt forskningtradition, och att analysera relationer mellan människa och björn med ursprungsbefolkningens synsätt i åtanke.

This text conducts an analysis of familial bear-human relationships in Sámi, Finno-Ugric, and Russian folklore, supplemented by material culture. It explores the image of the bear as a member of human and non-human communities and his roles in human society. This study draws from oral tradition from Sápmi, Finland, and Russia, focusing on the material and the theoretical framework it is presented in. Critical assessment of the approaches to the subject of bear-human relationships are a major part of this thesis. It attempts to adopt new frameworks more mindful of Indigenous perspectives and employs oral tradition as a primary historical source that, supplemented by archaeological evidence, can provide a clear view of past beliefs and practices. The main goal of this thesis is deconstructing past approaches to Indigenous knowledge and culture, with a special focus on Russian scholarship, and analysing human-bear relationships with Indigenous outlooks in mind., Denna text genomför en analys av familjära relationer mellan björn och människa i samisk, finsk-ugrisk och rysk folklore, kompletterad med materiell kultur. Den utforskar bilden av björnen som en medlem av mänskliga och icke-mänskliga gemenskaper och hans roller i det mänskliga samhället. Denna studie bygger på muntlig tradition från Sápmi, Finland och Ryssland, med fokus på materialet och den teoretiska ram som den presenteras i. Kritisk bedömning av förhållningssätten till ämnet björn-mänskliga relationer är en viktig del av denna avhandling. Den försöker anta nya ramar mer medvetna om inhemska perspektiv och använder muntlig tradition som en primär historisk källa som, kompletterad med arkeologiska bevis, kan ge en tydlig bild av tidigare föreställningar och praxis. Huvudmålet med denna avhandling är att dekonstruera tidigare förhållningssätt till ursprungsbefolkningens kunskap och kultur, med särskilt fokus på ryskt forskningtradition, och att analysera relationer mellan människa och björn med ursprungsbefolkningens synsätt i åtanke.

As a transnational indigenous group in the borderlands, the Kumeyaay people rely on a variety of health modalities, including biomedical and indigenous medicine, to improve their wellbeing and mental health. In this dissertation, I examine ceremonies and gatherings as healing spaces for some Kumeyaay people that provide experiences of unity based on ancestral traditions and values. My dissertation demonstrates how critical intertribal exchanges happen between Kumeyaay communities in the U.S. and Mexico related to language, ceremonies, and cultural knowledge. I argue that intertribal relationships have been significant to the restoration of dormant cultural practices and act as a community network to enhance the lives of indigenous peoples. Intertribal exchanges promote indigenous healing and allow for the co-creation of therapeutic processes which could lead to beneficial health outcomes. Positioned at the intersection of medical anthropology, global mental health, and indigenous studies, this research sheds light on the intricate dynamics between health, politics, and cultural knowledge production for transnational Native communities. This project amplifies the voices of indigenous community leaders and focuses on the contributions of indigenous knowledge for community-led healing.

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

Missoula, MT

Despite the mounting evidence that suggests The Aztatlán tradition in West Mexico was a major cosmopolitan region during the Postclassic period (AD 900-1521) with connections to the rest of what is now Mexico, archaeologists have characterized items in West Mexico as culturally distinct from the rest of Mesoamerica. Recently, endogenous, and exogenous material culture has been interpreted as movement and exchange of goods and ideas between subregions and surrounding areas, all of which mention physical contact and trade were involved between Aztatlán and elsewhere. This has included interacting with areas as far as the U.S. Southwest, as well as in Southeastern Mexico, through long-distance economic exchanges. Current macroregional population models for this geographic region have focused on these material exchanges. However, the question of geneflow between these regions that accompanied the trade routes has not been addressed. Genetic information from skeletal remains disinterred during excavations in the 1950s offers insights on determining population dynamics and regional connections. This thesis discusses the first use of mtDNA analyses and genetic biological sex estimations of the West Mexico skeletal remains to assess the factors that shape this genetic variation within the Aztatlán Core Region. This research has obtained all permissions necessary from the Mexican government and museum housing the human remains and highlights the benefits of international collaboration.

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

To date, genocide studies has maintained certain asymmetric typologies that demarcate physical from cultural forms of destruction and gendered violence as distinct from homogenous narratives of mass physical violence. In this dissertation, I argue that assumptions underlying these binaries are rooted in anthropocentrism. In genocide studies this translates into a narrow focus on physical human existence and destruction that overlooks the complex and multiple ways through which an ethnic or cultural group imagines itself, maintains collective identity, and renegotiates its social relations in and through genocide, as part of a human-ecological assemblage. Furthermore, this limited focus obscures the gendered embodiment of genocidal violence and the depth to which gendered bodies harbour pain and trauma. To date, if gendered violence is noted, most often it is relegated as secondary to the preservation of human life. I transverse these asymmetries to examine the dynamism of group life and the ecological and gendered materialities and social relations that give meaning to the individual and group’s existence. Protecting human life will always be a significant focus of genocide studies and prevention. However, when we isolate human beings from the multiple relations that bring meaning to their lives, we miss the opportunity to more fully grasp what makes genocide possible, what genocide destroys, and the complex harms it leaves in its wake. In this dissertation, I examine Khmer Cambodian and Anishinaabeg and Cree collective identities as dynamic and evolving relational assemblages. By doing so, I open genocide studies to several insights from Indigenous and settler colonial studies and feminist new material theories: 1) An understanding of the group and its attempted destruction beyond anthropocentric terms; 2) A non-linear and dynamic genocidal temporality; 3) A more expansive understanding of and response to gendered and relational harms in genocide. Importantly, the

Galaxies like Islands, Islands like Galaxies: Envisioning Futurity in Seascape Technologies examines Indigenous Futurisms as a political and aesthetic movement that bridges art-forms (literature, performance, comics, media) to combat “settler futurity.” Indigenous conceptions of temporality, contact, alternative worlds, apocalypse, and revolution are all themes/tenets of Indigenous Futurism and can be expressed artistically through multimedia forms. My project's methodology is defined by its engagement with moʻolelo, Kānaka Maoli storytelling. Moʻolelo as methodology envisions alternative futures that are liberated from a colonial matrix and challenge western epistemological conceptions of temporal progress. This dissertation features Native artists creating projects of cultural expression that reimagine uses for technology that are not predicated upon continued modes of capitalism and settler logics. Therefore, I develop a theoretical framework that employs anti-colonial/decolonial future-making actions and discourses or “futurities,” at the intersections between Indigenous aesthetics and science and technology studies. I engage spatio-temporal Kānaka frameworks by outlining the sections of my dissertation not in chapters—but in wā. The term Wā or Ta-Va (space-time) resonates throughout Oceania and is similar but different between cultures. In the Native Hawaiian context, wā means period of time, epoch, era, time, occasion, season, or age. It can also mean space, interval, or as between objects or time. Material, ephemeral, and affective registers are engaged: it can be thought of as the space between things or a rolling interval. Wā speaks to complex temporal overlays between engaging the space of the past, present, and future within this dissertation. As sea-voyaging in Oceanic cultures is central to life, I am outlining my chapters as wā as to signify movement between ideas—like traversing between mini-theoretical islands of thought. Similar to how the ocean is

This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Co

This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Co

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

This dissertation focuses on decolonizing the discipline of archaeology through archaeology as activism. It separates archaeology as activism into two specific strategies: vocational activism, or increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in archaeological training, and archaeology as activism, or making data useful to modern social activist movements. Borrowing from healthcare, I argue that integrating cultural humility—which emphasizes self-work—into training programs has the potential to help archaeologists challenge their norms, leading to less-biased interpretations of the past. Furthermore, I showcase the unique role and responsibility archaeologists from within a community play in decolonizing archaeology. As a Native Hawaiian archaeologist, I promote vocational activism in this dissertation by integrating Hawaiian studies into my research, calling for the reconceptualization of land in archaeological studies, particularly conceptualizing land as people, land as source, and land as ongoing connection and care, and rethinking how we interact with her (land). I then transition into my case study on water rights activism in Nā Wai ʻEhā, Maui. While the community has made significant headway in advancing Native Hawaiian water rights, I highlight how there is still a lack of hydrological data, something that is needed to change water allocation. In my methods, I set a foundation for further analysis by reconstructing the landscape and providing an estimate of taro quantity and water usage prior to the plantation period. I show potential ways that sugarcane plantations negatively impacted the environment by using maps, satellite imagery, and aerial photography to trace hydrological infrastructure changes and changes in the environment in light of the microclimate data from 1920 to 2007. From this analysis, it appears that sugarcane plantations drastically altered the environment by utilizing significantly more water than taro and decreasing the density

This dissertation considers cultural negotiations of climate change in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, especially the Inuit co-governed territory of Nunavut, Canada, through an analysis of material and conceptual “icescapes.” Icescapes are embodied encounters between humans and ice that are framed through performance (broadly construed to mean embodied, iterative, creative practices) and that create ecological relationships. This research focuses on interviews and 20th and 21st-century works of multiple mediums and genres, including film, literature, digital art, dogsledding, and biological research; it is methodologically rooted in performance, literary, and film studies, Indigenous studies, ecology/biology, gender and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies. This project contributes to understanding how global environmental concerns manifest within severely affected localities, increases awareness of the Canadian Arctic as a crucial part of American history and futurity, and models performance-based environmental research and advocacy. Performance has been an undertheorized form within the environmental humanities; this dissertation centers performance studies analyses which emphasize embodiment and illuminate modes of creative, immersive engagement with climate change as a conceptual and material process.Historically, dominant governmental and philosophical approaches to environmentalism in North America have been rooted in homogenizing visions of humanity. This dissertation works to correct for this deleterious generalization by attending to gender, race, and coalitional, transnational efforts toward environmental justice. This emphasis builds upon the insights of Kyle Powys Whyte, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and interlocutors in Iqaluit, Nunavut who have argued that climate change (and other environmental imbalances) are constitutively intertwined with pre-existing structures of inequity, including racial capitalism and settler-colonialism. Though it is ofte

In this stimulating contribution to Indigenous philosophizing, Burkhart promotes the elaboration of Indigenous metaphysics and epistemology in a tradition he locates both with his mentor Vine Deloria, Jr. and in the land. Simultaneously, in an assessment spanning from Thales and Aristotle to A. N. Whitehead and Arne Naess, Burkhart identifies some limitations of Western philosophy in comparison to Indigenous philosophy, particularly when Western thinkers are hampered by the narratives of coloniality that they reiterate.

The Mi’kmaw Nation has lived in Mi’kma’ki for at least 11,000 years. In the time of early colonial efforts in Turtle Island, the Mi’kmaq submitted Catholicism to processes of transculturation which allowed it to be meaningful and beneficial to them. The decision to adopt and adapt Catholicism was validated by the oral traditions of the Mi’kmaq. Since this time, Mi’kmaw stories have come to reflect the various ways that Mi’kmaw Catholicism is understood, practiced, and valued by this Nation. This dissertation employs Mi’kmaw stories primarily from the mid-to-late 1800s to investigate Mi’kmaw Catholicism. Indigenous methodologies are the foundation of this work. Postcolonial theory and story as theory are used to understand the Mi’kmaq’s perspectives of their religious tradition as well as the role that story played in its process of transculturation. Relationships between story and the uptake of Catholicism, Mi’kmaw identity, agency, resistance, and imagining a path to a just reality are explored. I believe that telling stories that incorporate Mi’kmaw Catholicism was a way to express the lived realities of the Mi’kmaq; a way to preserve voice and resist erasure. It seems that stories provided a location for the transculturation of Catholicism to occur, bringing both Mi’kmaq and Catholic actors into conversation with each other. Ultimately, I believe that stories allowed the Mi’kmaq to imagine a reality in which their religion, their families, and msit no’kmaq, all my relations, flourished.

The first trustees of Kamehameha Schools (KS), a group of five White, pro-annexationist entrepreneurs, attempted to engineer social solutions for the territory’s problem with Native Hawaiian youth. They proposed to cure rural and urban youth perceived to have unfit minds and unhealthy bodies. The trustees, administrators, and teachers enacted a curriculum designed to transform the ways Native youth thought about themselves and the world around them; worked in the modern, capitalist economic system; and lived with their families in their own homes. This project of deracination was built on a curriculum of military discipline, the inculcation of a Protestant work ethic, and the proper performance of masculinity and femininity. Bernice Pauahi established KS during a period of tremendous change as the booming sugar plantation economy led to dispossession of Natives from their land, competition with immigrant labor, and public policy which stripped Native Hawaiian monarchs of political power. These settler colonial forces complicated constructions of ability and disability, which were ascribed unevenly on subjugated peoples. Moreover, colonialism introduced foreign diseases which decimated the Native Hawaiian population, leading to the popular perception that Natives were an unhealthy, unfit, dying people. This dissertation is an institutional history of KS, exploring its evolution from an industrial boarding school to a modern college-preparatory institution for Native Hawaiians. It uncovers the varied methods KS used to solve the “Native problem,” and create “fit” Natives who knew how to “properly” think, work, and live.

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

This study is an anti-colonial response from the global South to an enduring epistemicide attempt in El Salvador, initiated by the Spanish invasion and occupation of Kushkatan in 1524, which has perdured for nearly five centuries through the dynamism of the modern/colonial logics of U.S. empire and new forms of war that are not over. This Nawat-Pipil project of cultural and spiritual repertoires is interested -- politically and discursively -- in a recovery of Indigenous critical theory through different cultural forms such as music, song, poetry, performance, agriculture, ceremony or what I refer to as “poetics of embodiment”, as concept-bearing practices that help us understand Indigenous presence in El Salvador, today. In this light, in Chapter 1, I make meaning of the current state of the Nawat-Pipil language through an analysis of three contemporary Nawat-Pipil songs using the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000), testimonio, critical ethnographic methods, Indigenous epistemologies, and the sacred energies of ejekat (aire/air) as methods to critically analyze the poetics and the politics of the sonority of a ‘moribund’ language. Despite the precarity of the Nawat-Pipil language today, Nawa-Pipil women are continuing to re-affirm Native presences in the Kuhskatan territories and beyond and defying the limitations imposed by the biopolitics of the state and the logics of neoliberalism. In chapter 2, I trace the forced migratory journey of a Salvadoran family to the U.S.-Mexico border. Through the coloniality of migration (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2015) and newspaper reports, I examine the connections between the media, racial capitalism, and the asylum-migration policies that, through the Steinle case (2015), re-activated a specific conjuncture of racism in the 2016 presidential elections, resulting in harsher migration controls that placed the family in the Rio Grande’s waters, resulting in their death. I conduct an Indigenous reading of their tragic drowning, using ancient stories, poetry, Indigenous epistemologies, and the sacred energies of tal (land) and at (water) to offer alternate readings of their tragic fate, to help us re-envision a more humane hereafter. In Chapter 3, I analyze the brutal murder and disappearance of policewoman Carla Ayala by several male police officers in 2017, in El Salvador. I juxtapose her heinous killing to the Nawat-Pipil story of creation, Nanahuatzin being retold through a play titled Nusiwapiltzin to show Indigenous conceptions of womanhood in ancient Nawa texts. Through the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007), I unpack the concept of feminicide, to shed light on the violences of the modern/colonial gender system that have resulted in El Salvador having one of the worst feminicide rates in the Western hemisphere, in contemporary times. The metatextual reading of Nanahuatzin through Nusihuapiltzin sheds light on the colonial connections between a woman’s body and the territory, and the sacred connections that exist between agriculture, astronomy, and womanhood.

In this dissertation I explore the connection between cultural expressions and the reconstruction of an empowered indigenous identity through the reaffirmation of their cultures and their own knowledge.For this purpose, I reviewed the work of community leadership and the texts produced by two indigenous intellectuals from the Colombian Andean zone. Los pensamientos del indio que se educó dentro de las selvas colombianas (The Thoughts of the Indian who was educated within the Colombian jungles), by Manuel Quintín Lame Chantre, belonging to the Nasa culture; and a variety of poetry and prose by Yanakuna poet Fredy Chikangana (Wiñay Mallki), which appears in his book Samay pisccok pponccopi mushcoypa (2010), in the volume Recordando mi origen (Remembering my Origin) (2021) of the Libro al viento collection and in the video Poesía en resistencia, May 28, 2021, on YouTube. For this research, I used a theoretical framework that prioritizes the concepts and worldviews of the indigenous cultures reviewed here. This study was also guided by decolonial thinking promoted by Latin American theorists of the Modernity/Coloniality network, as well as by decolonial thinkers such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Marisol De la Cadena, who help us understand and problematize the structures that condition our subjectivity, thought and knowledge. This research aims to contribute to making epistemic diversity visible and advocate for the creation of a pluriverse.

Difference is not an epiphenomenon of socio-spatial relations, but a genuine worldmaking driving-force, provided that it is the handling of difference that paves the way to specific interactions that end up shaping society and, ultimately, space. There exists not merely ‘a world of difference’ but a world because, and out of, differences. This article offers a neo-Hegelian analysis of the spatial basis of politico-economic and ethnic-social differences, making use of the striking example of anti-difference violence suffered by indigenous peoples under the hegemony of financial-rentier capitalism. There are two main pillars of socio-spatial difference, ethnicity and class, which co-determine each other and eventually result in hybrid, ethnoclass differences held by all humans and according to their specific and general circumstances. The socio-spatial trajectory of the Guarani-Kaiowa indigenous nation, in the center of Brazil, is emblematic of the dialectical basis of ethnoclass differences, and also of the political potentiality of difference., Diferença não é um epifenômeno das relações socioespaciais, mas uma verdadeira força motriz da construção do mundo, uma vez que é o manejo da diferença que abre caminho para interações específicas que acabam por moldar a sociedade e, em última instância, o espaço. Existe não apenas ‘um mundo de diferenças’, mas um mundo por causa e fora das diferenças. Este artigo oferece uma análise neo-Hegeliana da base espacial das diferenças político-econômicas e étnico-sociais, valendo-se do exemplo marcante da violência anti-diferença sofrida pelos povos indígenas sob a hegemonia do capitalismo financeiro-rentista. Existem dois pilares principais da diferença socioespacial, etnia e classe, que se co-determinam e, eventualmente, resultam em diferenças híbridas de etnoclasse vivenciadas por todas as pessoas e de acordo com suas circunstâncias específicas e gerais. A trajetória socioespacial da nação indígena Guarani-Kaiowa, no centro do Brasil, é emblemática da base dialética das diferenças de etnoclasse e da potencialidade transformadora da diferença., La diferencia no es un epifenómeno de las relaciones socioespaciales, sino un verdadero motor de la construcción del mundo, ya que es el manejo de la diferencia lo que abre el camino a interacciones específicas que terminan configurando la sociedad y, en última instancia, el espacio. No hay sólo ‘un mundo de diferencias’, sino un mundo por y fuera de las diferencias. Este artículo ofrece un análisis neohegeliano de la base espacial de las diferencias político-económicas y étnico-sociales, utilizando el ejemplo llamativo de la violencia antidiferencial sufrida por los pueblos indígenas bajo la hegemonía del capitalismo rentista-financiero. Hay dos pilares principales de la diferencia socioespacial, la etnicidad y la clase, que co-determinan y eventualmente dan como resultado diferencias híbridas de etnoclase experimentadas por todas las personas y de acuerdo con sus circunstancias específicas y generales. La trayectoria socioespacial de la nación indígena Guaraní-Kaiowá, en el centro de Brasil, es emblemática de la base dialéctica de las diferencias etnoclasistas y también del potencial transformador de la diferencia.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Native Americans and Indigenous tribes in North America faced systematic destruction of their cultures, genocide, and extreme abuse. With wars against Native Americans, forced relocation from their historic lands, and mandatory residential boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their parents, the social fabric of Native American communities was destroyed. These travesties were government sanctioned and enacted by churches. The American Indian Residential Schools serve as the most recent and egregious factories of abuse. The policies and actions enforced against Native Americans left a generation plagued by abuse leaving a broken society with intergenerational trauma. This paper will reflect on the role of the Government and churches, in the destruction of Native American culture and the imposition of trauma on their communities and will assess the role of the Government, Churches, and Tribes in the holistic restoration of Native American communities

This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Co

The Mi’kmaw Nation has lived in Mi’kma’ki for at least 11,000 years. In the time of early colonial efforts in Turtle Island, the Mi’kmaq submitted Catholicism to processes of transculturation which allowed it to be meaningful and beneficial to them. The decision to adopt and adapt Catholicism was validated by the oral traditions of the Mi’kmaq. Since this time, Mi’kmaw stories have come to reflect the various ways that Mi’kmaw Catholicism is understood, practiced, and valued by this Nation. This dissertation employs Mi’kmaw stories primarily from the mid-to-late 1800s to investigate Mi’kmaw Catholicism. Indigenous methodologies are the foundation of this work. Postcolonial theory and story as theory are used to understand the Mi’kmaq’s perspectives of their religious tradition as well as the role that story played in its process of transculturation. Relationships between story and the uptake of Catholicism, Mi’kmaw identity, agency, resistance, and imagining a path to a just reality are explored. I believe that telling stories that incorporate Mi’kmaw Catholicism was a way to express the lived realities of the Mi’kmaq; a way to preserve voice and resist erasure. It seems that stories provided a location for the transculturation of Catholicism to occur, bringing both Mi’kmaq and Catholic actors into conversation with each other. Ultimately, I believe that stories allowed the Mi’kmaq to imagine a reality in which their religion, their families, and msit no’kmaq, all my relations, flourished.

To date, genocide studies has maintained certain asymmetric typologies that demarcate physical from cultural forms of destruction and gendered violence as distinct from homogenous narratives of mass physical violence. In this dissertation, I argue that assumptions underlying these binaries are rooted in anthropocentrism. In genocide studies this translates into a narrow focus on physical human existence and destruction that overlooks the complex and multiple ways through which an ethnic or cultural group imagines itself, maintains collective identity, and renegotiates its social relations in and through genocide, as part of a human-ecological assemblage. Furthermore, this limited focus obscures the gendered embodiment of genocidal violence and the depth to which gendered bodies harbour pain and trauma. To date, if gendered violence is noted, most often it is relegated as secondary to the preservation of human life. I transverse these asymmetries to examine the dynamism of group life and the ecological and gendered materialities and social relations that give meaning to the individual and group’s existence. Protecting human life will always be a significant focus of genocide studies and prevention. However, when we isolate human beings from the multiple relations that bring meaning to their lives, we miss the opportunity to more fully grasp what makes genocide possible, what genocide destroys, and the complex harms it leaves in its wake. In this dissertation, I examine Khmer Cambodian and Anishinaabeg and Cree collective identities as dynamic and evolving relational assemblages. By doing so, I open genocide studies to several insights from Indigenous and settler colonial studies and feminist new material theories: 1) An understanding of the group and its attempted destruction beyond anthropocentric terms; 2) A non-linear and dynamic genocidal temporality; 3) A more expansive understanding of and response to gendered and relational harms in genocide. Importantly, the

This dissertation examines the Portage and Main (P&M) intersection and the metropolitan business district of Winnipeg. It looks at how that location has become a reified expression of the North-western plains’ colonial and settler colonial ideology. Between 1862 and 1913, P&M would grow to become the largest settled financial engine driving Canada’s economic expansionism across the North-western plains. It drove the settler commercial economy’s growth when it was first developing on the plains and continues to enable commercial expansionism today. Winnipeg’s P&M Central Economic District remains one of the most important places representing westward and northward commercial expansionism and the processes by which non-Protestants were dispossessed of land. By the 1880s, P&M had become a physical embodiment of the financial banking and exchange processes associated with Britain’s Protestant Reformation Tradition and the Banking Reform laws of the Second Great Reformation movement. Meanwhile, its commercial processes would dispossess the established Roman Catholic and tribal First Nations Indigenous peoples who have lived in the conjoined Great Forks region for millennia of their land and territory. In this dissertation, I argue that Protestant businessmen had built P&M as a physical reflection of the economic, social, and cultural architecture of the Second Great Reform and Banking Reform movements of Britain. In my first two chapters, I show that this Protestant Reformation movement's Victorian, Edwardian, and high modernist ideology cannot be divorced from the processes that have built Winnipeg's contemporary business district meanwhile dispossessing both the French Catholic and non-Protestant Indigenous people’s communities downtown. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the physical, ideological, and religious ideas which have reified settler commercial ideology into P&M’s infrastructure and architecture. I do this by looking at the development of the British Co

This thesis investigates the role of gender violence and sexual terror in westward settler expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. I posit that gender violence was not simply a symptom of war and colonization, but an integral piece of the American colonization strategy. Using studies of three locations during three different periods, I have found that the local, territorial, state, and federal governments all actively deployed sexual assault and other forms of gendered terror as methods of removing Indigenous peoples to reservations and rancherías, opening their lands to settlement and resource exploitation for the purpose of acquiring wealth and power for both individuals and the state itself. Through the lens of critical Indigenous feminist studies and utilizing the theories of Indigenous woman scholars, I have made connections between historical violence and the current crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, queer, trans, and two-spirit people, and, in particular, their abduction and murder, colloquially known as MMIWGQ2ST. While my research findings are oftentimes quite dark, I highlight the survival and resistance (survivance) of Indigenous women and girls and the hope on the horizon for decolonization, justice, and healing.

Med anledning av det i år är 100 år sedan Statens institut för rasbiologi (även kallat Rasbiologiska institutet) öppnades i Uppsala, arrangerar CEMFOR en digital minnesdag med berörda enskilda och grupper, organisationer och forskare. Minnesdagen arrangeras i samarbete med Forum för judiska studier (UU) och Centrum för forsknings- och bioetik (UU). Rasbiologiska institutet är en del av Sveriges historia, som inte får glömmas eller gömmas. Tid: 17/2 2022 9.00-17.30 Minnesdagen hålls online på grund av förnyade restriktioner. Det statliga institutet för rasbiologi öppnade i Uppsala 1922. 1956/57 upphörde själva institutet och delar av institutet upptogs av Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för medicinsk genetik. Arkivet från det rasbiologiska institutet handhas av Uppsala universitetsbibliotek. Minnesdagen är en fortsättning på de fyra dialogseminarier med berörda grupper som anordnades av CEMFOR under våren 2021. Dialogseminerierna uppmärksammade rasbiologin, det smärtande arvet och dess konsekvenser samt rasismen, som lever kvar än idag. Under 2022 planeras uppföljande seminarier. Vi utgår från metoder och etiska förhållningssätt som finns inom urfolksstudier, rasismforskning samt etiska regler som finns i svensk lagstiftning och hos forskningsfinansiärer samt i internationella konventioner och deklarationer om mänskliga rättigheter. Minnesdagen arrangeras av CEMFOR i samarbete med Forum för judiska studier (UU) och Centrum för forsknings- och bioetik (UU). Initiativtagare och projektledare: May-Britt Öhman. Finansiellt stöd har erhållits från forskningsprojekten: "Sijddaj máhttsat betyder "kommer hem", Vetenskapsrådet, Dnr 2021-03080, 6,120 MSEK. " 'Leva utan olja?!' Omprövande av relationer med land och vatten utifrån urfolks expertis", FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975, 7,5 MSEK, inom Nationella forskningsprogrammet om klimat., CEMFOR is organizing a digital memorial day of 100 years in the shadow of the Institute for Racial Biology. It is a part of Sweden's History that must not be forgotten or hidden. Time: 17/2, 2022. 9.00-17.30 (In Swedish only) The State Institute of Racial Biology was opened in Uppsala in 1922. In 1956/57 the Institute itself was discontinued and parts of the Institute were absorbed by Uppsala University, Department of Medical Genetics. The archives of the Institute of Racial Biology are held by the Uppsala University Library. In the spring of 2021, CEMFOR organised four dialogue seminars with interested groups. We focused on racial biology, the painful legacy and its consequences, and racism, which is still alive today. It is with these conversations that the work now moves forward. The memorial day is organized in cooperation with the Forum for Jewish Studies (UU) and the Center for Research Ethics and Bioethics (UU). Initiator and project leader: May-Britt Öhman. Financial support has been provided by the following research projects: "Sijddaj máhttsat means "coming home" in Lule Sámi, Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet, Dnr 2021-03080 "Living without oil?! - Rethinking relations with lands and waters with Indigenous Land Based Expertise for a transition towards a fossil free welfare Society, FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975, Within the National program on climate.

In the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, hundreds of white settlers were taken captive by Native American groups across the Old Northwest Territory. Reasons for their capture varied from revenge to adoption, however, the treatment they received greatly depended on the captive’s gender. While females were more likely to be kept alive and better-taken care of, males faced a greater probability of facing violence or even death, though torture was common among both groups. Many captives undertook participatory roles within their respective captive communities, with some deciding to assimilate completely into a new way of life. Captivity narratives that were penned as a result of these experiences demonstrate how survivors viewed their time in captivity and how it influenced their earlier perceptions of Native Americans.

The world is moving towards a media-dominated landscape, and yet Indigenous media remains marginalized. This project is in response to that ongoing trend. These three Indigenous-focused, non-fiction videos were produced to examine under-represented topics that are central to various subgroups within the local Indigenous population. The first video focuses on Salena Hill, an Apsáalooke woman from Pryor, MT whose Doctoral research explores the Apsáalooke Nation's expectations of returning college students. Salena discusses her use of Indigenous Research Methodology (IRM) and the story-based exchanges that formed the basis of her project. The second video focuses on joint conferences and field trips organized by The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana and the National Fire Science Network. Representatives from both groups explore the integration of Traditional Knowledge and western knowledge in wildland fire management. The third video focuses on the Payne Family Native American Center at the University of Montana and its significance to the local Indigenous community.

This thesis presents a detailed analysis of the Nsélišcn ‘Montana Salish’ demonstrative system. I propose that there are three features encoded in the demonstratives that I examined in this thesis: (i) proximity of the speaker in relation to the referent, (ii) common ground between the speaker and addressee, and (iii) visibility of the referent. I further propose that the Nsélišcn demonstrative system distinguishes three degrees of proximity: proximal, medial, and distal. Nsélišcn is a member of the Southern Interior branch of the Salishan language family. The data analyzed in this thesis was collected from native Nsélišcn speakers.

This special issue of Pacific Arts centers on the theme “Pacific Island Worlds: Transpacific Dis/Positions,” which was the topic of a two-day series of events held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in May 2018. This generative meeting explored Oceanic rootedness and mobility, grounded and expansive kinships, worlding, place-making, and colonial histories and their legacies. In important ways, it grew out of the “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge” symposium, also hosted by UCSC, nearly two decades earlier. “Pacific Island Worlds” was dedicated to the memory of Teresia Teaiwa, a graduate of UCSC’s History of Consciousness doctoral program (2001) who had passed away in 2017 and whose academic, activist, and creative work profoundly inspired Pacific studies scholars and artists around the world. Our introduction is a story of two conferences—moments, pauses, in an ongoing flow of historical, political, and intellectual activity.

This essay addresses contemporary migrations of Chamorus tied to the history of US military presence in Micronesia and the ways Indigenous culture and identity are negotiated through the Chamorro Cultural Festival (CCF) that has been held annually in San Diego, California since 2009. The analysis explores how diasporic Chamorus maintain close transpacific connections to the Mariana Islands while also establishing Chamoru communities abroad through the CCF. The festival simultaneously enacts Chamoru identities based in both mobility and rootedness and is a large-scale expression of how Chamorus create and express collective identities.

Since the early 2000s, the opioid epidemic has had a devastating sweep across Indian Country. The White Earth nation declared the epidemic as a public health emergency back in 2011. Since then White Earth has developed community-based harm reduction and culturally grounded models of intervention for substance use disorder that continue to influence Native Nations across the U.S. This project centers on Anishinaabe approaches to the ongoing opioid public health crisis but also elaborates on Anishinaabe forms of healing and resistance. My primary method was conducting oral histories with White Earth community youth workers and advocates. My research project asks: what are the cultural frameworks and practices that inform and shape substance abuse interventions in White Earth, specifically for Indigenous youth? My research and interviews revealed that culturally informed, intersectional approaches to Indigenous wellness and healing— healing across generations—require continual resistance to ongoing settler-colonial and white supremacist, heteropatriarchal violence.

In 2010, five people made an unusual find: an old gievrie, a South Sami drum. They found it in the landscape near the village of Røyrvik, in the Norwegian part of Saepmie, close to the national border with Sweden. According to Norwegian law, such a find should be reported, and the item handed over to the authorities. But the group left it where it was found. A process then started that led to a three-way agreement between the authorities of Norway, the Sami parliament, and the local Sami association, before the gievrie was handed over to a museum, the Vitenskabsmuseet, in Trondheim. It is still kept there today, in a storeroom, more than eleven years after the discovery. In this dissertation I use Indigenous Research Methodology, an approach that I find corresponds to the methods developed in local Sami centers during recent decades. It is a method where the local Sami people are involved in all parts of the research process from initiation to completion, and where the final outcome must also benefit them. Discussions with Sami people in the area and stories told by them reveal that the landscape lives and that the drum, the rock it was found in, and the ancestors connected to them have their own agency – a relational worlsview – meaning that as much as possible about their will must be investigated before any decision can be taken about whether the drum should be moved from its place of discovery. Because of a history of oppression, marginalization, and mistrust, and due to differences in culture, the Sami are hesitant to discuss these matters in public. But, silence is also significant for other reasons, apart from being situated in a subordinated position in relations of power. Not having a language for the issues in concern, not having any answers, culturally significant non-verbal communication instead of spoken language, a will to exclude unwanted participants: these are also reasons and methods. Western education is based on text while Sami training to a grea, Thesis defence also available via Zoom, link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/66293524988

Med anledning av det i år är 100 år sedan Statens institut för rasbiologi (även kallat Rasbiologiska institutet) öppnades i Uppsala, arrangerar CEMFOR en digital minnesdag med berörda enskilda och grupper, organisationer och forskare. Minnesdagen arrangeras i samarbete med Forum för judiska studier (UU) och Centrum för forsknings- och bioetik (UU). Rasbiologiska institutet är en del av Sveriges historia, som inte får glömmas eller gömmas. Tid: 17/2 2022 9.00-17.30 Minnesdagen hålls online på grund av förnyade restriktioner. Det statliga institutet för rasbiologi öppnade i Uppsala 1922. 1956/57 upphörde själva institutet och delar av institutet upptogs av Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för medicinsk genetik. Arkivet från det rasbiologiska institutet handhas av Uppsala universitetsbibliotek. Minnesdagen är en fortsättning på de fyra dialogseminarier med berörda grupper som anordnades av CEMFOR under våren 2021. Dialogseminerierna uppmärksammade rasbiologin, det smärtande arvet och dess konsekvenser samt rasismen, som lever kvar än idag. Under 2022 planeras uppföljande seminarier. Vi utgår från metoder och etiska förhållningssätt som finns inom urfolksstudier, rasismforskning samt etiska regler som finns i svensk lagstiftning och hos forskningsfinansiärer samt i internationella konventioner och deklarationer om mänskliga rättigheter. Minnesdagen arrangeras av CEMFOR i samarbete med Forum för judiska studier (UU) och Centrum för forsknings- och bioetik (UU). Initiativtagare och projektledare: May-Britt Öhman. Finansiellt stöd har erhållits från forskningsprojekten: "Sijddaj máhttsat betyder "kommer hem", Vetenskapsrådet, Dnr 2021-03080, 6,120 MSEK. " 'Leva utan olja?!' Omprövande av relationer med land och vatten utifrån urfolks expertis", FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975, 7,5 MSEK, inom Nationella forskningsprogrammet om klimat., CEMFOR is organizing a digital memorial day of 100 years in the shadow of the Institute for Racial Biology. It is a part of Sweden's History that must not be forgotten or hidden. Time: 17/2, 2022. 9.00-17.30 (In Swedish only) The State Institute of Racial Biology was opened in Uppsala in 1922. In 1956/57 the Institute itself was discontinued and parts of the Institute were absorbed by Uppsala University, Department of Medical Genetics. The archives of the Institute of Racial Biology are held by the Uppsala University Library. In the spring of 2021, CEMFOR organised four dialogue seminars with interested groups. We focused on racial biology, the painful legacy and its consequences, and racism, which is still alive today. It is with these conversations that the work now moves forward. The memorial day is organized in cooperation with the Forum for Jewish Studies (UU) and the Center for Research Ethics and Bioethics (UU). Initiator and project leader: May-Britt Öhman. Financial support has been provided by the following research projects: "Sijddaj máhttsat means "coming home" in Lule Sámi, Swedish Research Council Vetenskapsrådet, Dnr 2021-03080 "Living without oil?! - Rethinking relations with lands and waters with Indigenous Land Based Expertise for a transition towards a fossil free welfare Society, FORMAS Dnr 2019-01975, Within the National program on climate.

In 2010, five people made an unusual find: an old gievrie, a South Sami drum. They found it in the landscape near the village of Røyrvik, in the Norwegian part of Saepmie, close to the national border with Sweden. According to Norwegian law, such a find should be reported, and the item handed over to the authorities. But the group left it where it was found. A process then started that led to a three-way agreement between the authorities of Norway, the Sami parliament, and the local Sami association, before the gievrie was handed over to a museum, the Vitenskabsmuseet, in Trondheim. It is still kept there today, in a storeroom, more than eleven years after the discovery. In this dissertation I use Indigenous Research Methodology, an approach that I find corresponds to the methods developed in local Sami centers during recent decades. It is a method where the local Sami people are involved in all parts of the research process from initiation to completion, and where the final outcome must also benefit them. Discussions with Sami people in the area and stories told by them reveal that the landscape lives and that the drum, the rock it was found in, and the ancestors connected to them have their own agency – a relational worlsview – meaning that as much as possible about their will must be investigated before any decision can be taken about whether the drum should be moved from its place of discovery. Because of a history of oppression, marginalization, and mistrust, and due to differences in culture, the Sami are hesitant to discuss these matters in public. But, silence is also significant for other reasons, apart from being situated in a subordinated position in relations of power. Not having a language for the issues in concern, not having any answers, culturally significant non-verbal communication instead of spoken language, a will to exclude unwanted participants: these are also reasons and methods. Western education is based on text while Sami training to a grea, Thesis defence also available via Zoom, link: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/66293524988

This special issue of Pacific Arts centers on the theme “Pacific Island Worlds: Transpacific Dis/Positions,” which was the topic of a two-day series of events held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in May 2018. This generative meeting explored Oceanic rootedness and mobility, grounded and expansive kinships, worlding, place-making, and colonial histories and their legacies. In important ways, it grew out of the “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge” symposium, also hosted by UCSC, nearly two decades earlier. “Pacific Island Worlds” was dedicated to the memory of Teresia Teaiwa, a graduate of UCSC’s History of Consciousness doctoral program (2001) who had passed away in 2017 and whose academic, activist, and creative work profoundly inspired Pacific studies scholars and artists around the world. Our introduction is a story of two conferences—moments, pauses, in an ongoing flow of historical, political, and intellectual activity.

This essay addresses contemporary migrations of Chamorus tied to the history of US military presence in Micronesia and the ways Indigenous culture and identity are negotiated through the Chamorro Cultural Festival (CCF) that has been held annually in San Diego, California since 2009. The analysis explores how diasporic Chamorus maintain close transpacific connections to the Mariana Islands while also establishing Chamoru communities abroad through the CCF. The festival simultaneously enacts Chamoru identities based in both mobility and rootedness and is a large-scale expression of how Chamorus create and express collective identities.

This thesis analyzes the development of oral history scholarship and transcription production through an interdisciplinary context. A common practice within institutional oral history projects involves the transference of recorded oral histories to written records, most commonly referred to as transcriptions. Institutional methods of transcription often resemble transactional and extractive forms of narrative documentation that neglect Indigenous forms of knowledge. In this research, I argue for a reimagined transcription process that prioritizes an Indigenous transcription framework that is collaborative, community-engaged, and culturally responsive. Additionally, this research examines variables and strategies for indigenizing transcription with care and consideration for speakers, Native communities, and Indigenous ways of knowing.