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Extensive site surveys and excavations on the Island of Barbuda led by Dr. Sophia Perdikaris have identified over 62 sites spanning from the Archaic time period to Historic times. Over the last 18 years, these multidisciplinary teams have focused on mapping all sites and performing rescue excavations on sites threatened by sea level rise, erosion or development. Two such sites are the Saladoid site of Seaview (BA016) and the Troumassoid site of Indian Town Trail (BA01). The dunes surrounding the site of Seaview receive the brunt of storms and hurricanes. In 1998 hurricane Georges exposed skeletal material now part of the Barbuda Museum. More recently hurricane Irma caused massive erosion on the same dune system and more skeletal remains were exposed that were rescued by Dr. Reg Murphy. The site of Indian Town Trail has been significantly destroyed by commercial limestone extraction, house, road and rail construction. While excavations were taking place at a different part of the site, donkey activity exposed human remains that were initially deposited as back dirt on the crossroads for a failed rail project. The skeletal remains from Indian Town Trail were collected by the archaeological team and are also part of this presentation today. The research presented is an osteobiographical analyses that includes an inventory of the skeletal remains, determination of the minimum number of individuals (MNI), estimates of the biological profile, and observations of skeletal trauma and paleopathologies. Available radiocarbon dating will be utilized to determine the age of the skeletal remains and better understand site occupation in Barbuda. Advisor: William R. Belcher

*Language usage is fluid and evolving, representing past and present people groups. During my discussions with my Indigenous composer colleagues, I've found that they hold varying preferences regarding how they wish to be addressed and the terminology they prefer. Because of this, I use the terms Native, Native American, First Nations, Indigenous, American Indian, and First Peoples interchangeably.* This document will discuss the historical exclusion of Native American music in the Western art forms, specifically the choral tradition, and provide solutions to incorporate it in modern choral performances. Considering first the wars, disease, displacement, colonization, and missionization, it is no surprise that Native music is underrepresented and scarcely preserved. Additionally, missteps in initial attempts to record the music of American Indians further widened the gap between musicologists and culture-bearers. With laws now in place meant to protect Native culture and spirituality, the twenty-first century is an opportune time to help instigate the reclaiming of Native art. Reclamation is accomplished by finding composers affiliated with Native communities who are qualified to write about those communities, commissioning them, and performing their works. The four composers chosen for this document claim Native heritage, participate in their tribal culture, and compose choral music influenced by those connections. There will be a brief biographical sketch of each composer followed by a discussion of how each composer is tied to their community and how that connection informs their music. Finally, I will give recommendations for the commissioning process and suggestions for further research. Commissioning works of ethnic composers is a unique procedure that requires sensitivity to secular vs. sacred music, verifiable source materials, and programmability. I will also suggest further investigation into language study, dictionaries, orthographies, and anthologies.

As a first generation Mexican-American, it is crucial that I advocate and promote music of the culture I grew up in. This project aims to unearth Mexican compositional techniques that derive from the fusion of European and Indigenous roots in an effort to promote diversity within the realm of Western Classical music. Music in Mexico is characterized by a unique blend of indigenous rhythms, European classical structures, and regional folk influences. This project will discuss how the bold timbre of the French horn intertwines with traditional Mexican and indigenous melodies, rhythms, and forms that create a unique style. The horn’s ability to evoke a wide range of emotions contributes to its popularity in both celebratory and solemn musical contexts. French horn music in Mexico stands as a testament to the country's musical diversity. Rooted in historical influences, the French horn has become an integral part of both classical and folk music traditions. Its continued presence in contemporary musical expressions showcases the instrument's adaptability and enduring appeal, making French horn music an essential component of Mexico's vibrant musical culture.

Welsh Indian Theory, originating in Elizabethan England, stated that a group of Welsh explorers settled in the Americas in the late 12th century and intermarried with the Indigenous tribes, thereby explaining “advanced cultures” ranging from the Mississippians to the Aztec Empire. This act of erasure became rooted in Kentucky and the surrounding area in the 18th and 19th centuries; a series of prominent individuals from Kentucky in turn contributed to a growing body of false historical narratives that denied Indigenous Americans their cultural identities and connection their ancestral lands in the United States. With a 460-year trail of scholarly debate and conjecture, the Welsh Indian Theory provides a case study of inherent cultural bias in historical research and US-Indigenous relations.

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 ten years, which show that psychedelic experiences can catalyze significant ideological shifts. In my research, pilgrims regularly reported encountering non-human entities during dietas and ayahuasca ceremonies. As a result of these experiences, pilgrims often became personally invested in the wellbeing of Amazonian peoples and the forest ecology.

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 Mexico and Latin America, think beyond the Zapotec for Indigenous solidarity, explicitly tie their language to politics, and highlights the culmination of a Zapotec history that resulted in a heroic vision of Juchitán and Zapotecs within the nation. Analyzing these magazines gives us insight into Zapotec thought, epistemologies and ontologies, histories, language revitalization movements, and autonomy, all pathways to Zapotec futures.

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.

Who found the raw materials of the industrial revolution and how did they find them? The expansion of industrial capitalism depended on the increasingly intense exploitation of mineral lands. But key industrial resources—coal, copper, iron, and lead—were hidden away within the earth and wasted mining ventures were a hazardous expense. How, then, did capitalists and imperial powers determine which lands could be profitably extracted? In this dissertation, I argue that the United States transformed from a mineral importer to a mineral empire by becoming a patron of the earth sciences and exploiting Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of their territories. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, many US political leaders and men of science saw Indigenous power as the most significant contingency to the realization of industrial political economy and state geologists would guide the twin trajectories of dispossession and US industrial development by providing political leaders with key information about the natural resources embedded within Indigenous lands. Focusing on the copper and iron rich lands of Anishinaabe nations in the Great Lakes region and the lead rich lands of the Sauk, Mesquakie, and Ho-Chunk nations of the Upper Mississippi Valley, I show how geological mapping and dispossession proved critical to the growth of mineral-intensive US industrial manufacturing. By focusing on the practices and conflicts involved in locating and acquiring resource-rich territories prior to their extraction, this project reveals how the United States became a global industrial power not by discovering abundance within its own territory, but by studying and seizing the mineral wealth of Indigenous nations. The results of this study are salient to the contemporary efforts of Indigenous nations to take back, steward, and receive just compensation for the United States’ historical and ongoing expropriation of their land and wealth.

Abstract: Indigenous women’s deaths are routinely underreported by mainstream media. “Discourse Analysis of Indigenous Women’s Sexuality in News Media” finds that The Globe and Mail, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, Winnipeg Free Press, and Toronto Star rely on stereotypes steeped in settler colonialism to report on the deaths of Helen Betty Osborne, Pamela George, Cindy Gladue, and Tina Fontaine. “Discourse Analysis of Indigenous Women’s Sexuality in News Media” also finds that mainstream media does not contextualise violence against Indigenous women within colonialism in Canada, ignores the voices of the victims’ families, and engages settler moves to innocence when reporting on the perpetrators who have been accused or convicted of murdering Helen Betty Osborne, Pamela George, Cindy Gladue, and Tina Fontaine. Finally, “Discourse Analysis of Indigenous Women’s Sexuality in News Media” proposes that Indigenous journalists are best equipped to report on Indigenous sexuality because of their more nuanced understanding of Indigenous women and sexuality. Furthermore, Indigenous people authoring stories about Indigenous sexuality is to reclaim a suppressed way of being. It also counters the singular narrative of Indigenous women as hypersexual people who are victims of sex-murder and redefines Indigenous women as fulsome people who experience the world’s pleasures including gender expression, the pleasures of sex, and sexual expression. This thesis uses Indigenous feminism and intersectionality as theoretical concepts and critical discourse analysis as a methodology, following the ethic of suspending damage.

The purpose of this thesis was to study the lawsuit case of the of Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation V. John J. Hoffman and to showcase how modern-day racism ultimately led to their federal lawsuit in 2015. Racism and racist biases over Indian gaming has affected not just the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe, but tribes all over the country and has severely hindered tribes in the state and federal acknowledgment process. There are also other tribes that have had lawsuits over racial biases of Indian gaming, which will be discussed within the thesis. By using oral histories from tribal members and allies involved in the lawsuit, this thesis uncovers how these racial biases caused an almost forty-year battle with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribe and the State of New Jersey. This thesis also addresses the discussion of Native American sovereignty and the debate that has surrounded that term for centuries. As many Indigenous people view the word and definition of sovereignty very differently than non-Indigenous people, this discussion is important in this lawsuit because it brings up the issue if a body of government can give rights to a nation that were already inherently there. The modern-day racism on tribal nations, as this thesis will discussed, showed that the battle for equality and inclusion is far from over.

The Roman Empire is among the best-known empires in the world, renowned for unifying vastly different peoples and lands. The process of these unifications was, at times, something resembling peaceful, but was at other times much more violent. Regardless of the method of acquisition, peoples brought into the Roman Empire always experienced some degree of cultural change. The modern study of this cultural change has most often been examined through the lens of Romanization, a mostly one-way transfer of Roman cultural practices onto the conquered territory and culture. Romanization, however, presents too narrow and too historically imperialist an approach to the cultural changes brought about by Roman influence. Accordingly, using a research framework heavily influenced by Indigenous Studies theory, this study examines the peoples of Late Iron Age Britain prior to the beginning of Roman occupation and after. Using such a framework and a definition of culture that includes both elites and non-elites, the cultural changes catalyzed in Late Iron Age Britain by the introduction of Roman influence can be shown to go beyond the limited focus of Romanization on mere cultural transfer. These cultural changes are explored within different aspects of culture in terms of the cultural loss, resistance, adaptation, and survivance experienced by the Britons at the Roman towns of Venta Icenorum and Aquae Sulis.

Modern-day slavery is an international crime against humanity which affects millions of lives each year. Human trafficking, a form of Modern Slavery, has negative long-lasting implications on trafficked victims and society, particularly vulnerable members such as indigenous women and children. This study examines human trafficking and forced labor in Mexico with a focus on indigenous women and children. It uses a mixed methodology composed of both qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data is used to analyze historical materials related to Spanish colonialism in Mexico, while quantitative data is used to measure poverty, numbers of trafficked victims, and to establish the overall scope of the problem. This research also examines the role of organized crime groups in human trafficking throughout Mexico. It dissects the involvement of corrupt government officials in organized crime and human trafficking and explains the intersectionality of criminal groups and corrupted authorities and government officials. Keywords: Modern slavery, Human trafficking, Sex trafficking, Child sex trafficking, Forced labor, Child labor, Indigenous groups, Mexico, Rebel groups, Organized crime, Cartel.

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land as an empty, God-given place for white settlers. However, not only was this land not empty but it has been occupied by Native Americans for millennia. Communities lived within the land and did not separate themselves from it. As opposed to this way of living, settler colonialism seeks to take over land and extract its resources, while trying to eliminate all Indigenous peoples. This approach has never ended and in many ways is the root of the climate and environmental crisis we live in. The exhibition offers both moments and images that appear to be more dire; others are intimate and hopeful. This contrast and tension are a reminder that while we grieve the victims and losses of colonial violence, there are many survivors. Regardless of what the future will look like, we can be inspired by the resiliency and nevertheless imagine a new world.

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.

Inspired by the ancestral cave painting, Drawing 18, located in Naj Tunich, El Petén, this interdisciplinary study focuses on aesthetics as a tool of resistance for Maya peoples from diverse genders and sexualities in Guatemala. Stemming from Maya gender & sexuality and diaspora scholarship, I analyze art and utilize a creative approach to the archive by relying on YouTube videos to understand contemporary Maya gender and sexual resistance. I develop Critical Maya Aesthetics (CMA)—a critical lens and framework to explore how Maya peoples in Guatemala have spoken, written, visualized, and imagined genders and sexualities—to help us understand aesthetic resistance to the cisgender heteronormative binary. Moreover, taking inspiration from Drawing 18, I utilize digital art as a method for knowledge production by incorporating two artworks derived from the research presented in this thesis. Through this combination of archival material, Critical Maya Aesthetics, and digital art, I argue that Maya LGBTQ+ peoples—especially those who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming—are actively resisting the cisgender heteronormative binary through their critical aesthetics. Maya LGBTQ+ peoples, via cultural and gender markers such as clothing, hair, language, and material objects, demonstrate more fluidity in aesthetics compared to their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. Therefore, this fluidness in aesthetics has continued to transform Maya cultures in Guatemala and has the potential to influence cultural practices in the diaspora.

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 often positioned as a novel crisis and “rupture” in history, climate change is equally a manifestation of long economic and ideological histories. Arctic ecosystems and performance practices based in and upon those ecosystems are central to the past, present, and future of climate change communication. By orienting audiences materially and conceptually, icescapes can naturalize, problematize, and innovate ways of relating to the more-than-human world. These mediated encounters produce environmentally consequential dynamics between humans and nonhumans and shape widespread ethical imaginaries. This research deepens and diversifies how contemporary climate change might be understood and confronted.

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 complex with immense depth and secret go-ons beneath the surface, I use the theoretical concept of wā to understand and critically unpack the theories, art, and ideas within this dissertation.

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 of woodlands. My research, thus, provides a roadmap for increasing equity within the discipline and integrating Native Hawaiian ways of knowing into archaeology. Furthermore, it highlights the potential and limitations of doing research on Hawaiʻi while forced to be off-island as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Objects belonging to past Indigenous cultures often lack provenance information and contextual details, like the La Tolita-Tumaco culture’s “architectural model” I analyze, making it difficult to deduce what they represent, how they were used, or the purpose of their creation. These objects are frequently overlooked, dismissed, and/or continue to be hastily classified as ritualistic, ceremonial, religious, or funerary by default, solely based on their Indigenous origin, echoing colonial biases. In this thesis, I employ Indigenous theory and methods in art history to engage and learn from the object as an extension of the La Tolita-Tumaco culture. I demonstrate how objects from past Indigenous cultures can provide crucial insights through a visual and material analysis. This research not only emphasizes the critical role of these “architectural models” in furthering our understanding of Ecuadorian art histories but also the importance of Indigenous objects and topics research in the field of art history and also challenges conventional notions of “models” and “architecture.”

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.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, ali‘i wahine (ruling-class Native Hawaiian women) were mostly excluded from serving in the governments of the Hawaiian Kingdom and Territory of Hawai‘i despite their inherent power and responsibilities of governance. I argue that ali‘i wahine developed alternative paths of political leadership outside of the “formal” government structure. Facing settler colonial encroachment and U.S. imperialism, these women addressed pressing issues affecting the lāhui (Native Hawaiian community) such as maternal health, women’s political participation, and cultural preservation, amongst other needs. They did this by forming women’s clubs and mixed-gender societies that drew opon authoritative genealogical, marital, and social networks. Their organizing labor resulted in community-based sovereignties in the form of healthcare facilities, schools, social welfare programs, women’s suffrage, and asserting control over cultural practices and historical knowledge production. Transgressing multiple regimes in less than a century’s time, I follow the continuities of ali‘i wahine governance while historicizing Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) sovereignties as ongoing and grounded in community, family, and non-biological kinship rather than anchored to particular nation-state formations. Under the pressures of colonialism and in the urgency of the context, ali‘i wahine organized with and against the settler state and its agents (including their own haole husbands) in expected and unexpected ways.My research interrogates this history through major themes such as Indigeneity, kinship, race, gender, and class, and across the fields of Hawaiian and Pacific History, Native Feminist Studies, U.S Women’s History, and Decolonial Studies. To investigate how ali‘i wahine built sovereignties beyond the nation-state, I map the uncharted networks of their biological, non-biological, and marital kinship ties. Ali‘i wahine relied on these networks to form their organizations, to solicit donations, and to access particular social or political spaces. Left out and overshadowed in Native Hawaiian political histories, I foreground their life stories and organizational labor by reading, interpreting, and analyzing a diversity of primary sources in both ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language) and English; this includes mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogies), newspapers, letters, memoirs, unpublished manuscripts, oral histories, mele (songs), and oli (chants), as well as analyses of visual and material culture.

This project evaluates the existing literature on Tribal co-management regimes for their success in enabling Indigenous sovereignty and homelands management in the United States and Canada. Developed to inform policy makers and Tribal leaders on co-management frameworks, this systematized thematic literature review analyzes both the practical components of co-management regimes, as well as the intrinsic components which impact their effectiveness. Informed by the anti-colonial praxis of Indigenous Political Ecology, 27 case studies were analyzed according to six metrics of Tribal co-management success: 1) recognition of Tribes as sovereign governments, 2) incorporation of US Trust responsibilities, 3) the existence of structures to enable Tribal involvement, 4) early integration of Tribal management, 5) extensive recognition and incorporation of Tribal expertise, and 6) the effectiveness of conflict resolution processes. Analysis of the case studies showed mixed-results in which co-management regimes produced some benefits but not without caveats and nuance. When executed thoughtfully, co-management can increase Tribal involvement in land management regimes; however it does not result in decolonization. Instead, co-management should be viewed as a possible pathway towards increasing the capacity and political power of Tribes to engage in true decoloniality.

This thesis situates three examples of transatlantic diplomacy practiced by Cherokee and Yamacraw diplomats in the eighteenth century within their Indigenous contexts. Utilizing treaty negotiations, transcripts from diplomatic summits, official correspondence, published journals, and newspapers, this study aims to situate these delegations within an Indigenous and transatlantic sociopolitical context. The aim of this work is to address questions regarding the objectives of the people involved, and to trace the outcomes of their policies. The answers to these questions explain one of many southeastern Indigenous political strategies of the eighteenth century, one that highlights the imperial center as a crucial setting in which Indigenous diplomatic policy was directed. The primary focus of this study, however, remains the North American interior, for the transatlantic diplomats prioritized their homes above all else. This thesis finds that the Cherokee and Yamacraw diplomats both effectuated several of their desired outcomes in the short term, as well as influenced the course taken by successive generations of Indigenous leaders who learned from their triumphs and their failures.

I examine the narratives of the South that have been historically overlooked, ignored, or hidden in order to establish a dominant narrative of the region. The narratives examined here are by southern Black and Indigenous authors who restore lost knowledge and offer histories that help complete the South culturally and ecologically. The conceptual methodology develops from LeAnne Howe’s tribalography which explains that Indigenous people create stories and histories that transform the space around them and offer an understanding of the world around us. Another methodology used is Anthony Wilson’s ecocritical swamp studies; each chapter analyzes a narrative centered around a swamp, a low-lying area, or a hurricane. I also use the concept of ecotones or spaces of transition, necessary spaces of invisible work as each author supplies a space created by knowledge, history, and story to do the necessary work of leading their readers through the middle of a dominant narrative to the unburied truth. The selected texts offer perspectives of a violent past and how this violence affected the ecology of their home as well as how the natural world was seen and cared for. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is an example used in one chapter that illuminates what has been lost due to colonization and white supremacy. I examine Black and Indigenous authors as these two people groups have suffered the most under colonization in the South and have witnessed the most violence. Their voices offer the South a way to confront its past and renew both land and human relations with access to hidden stories and forgotten knowledge.

In this project I rethink a key analytical category borrowed from religious studies—ritual—through the joint intervention of postsecular critique and Indigenous literature. My work unfolds in two parts: first in a critique of Eurocentric historicism and then in a move towards an anti-historicist interpretive horizon that nevertheless relates back to history. Chapter 2 then analyzes the Cherokee-Canadian author Thomas King’s 1993 novel, Green Grass, Running Water. I demonstrate that postsecular interpretation readily builds connections across time and space, prompting the reformation of categories such as ritual so that they may exceed their Eurocentric roots. What emerges from Green Grass, Running Water as a result is a clarified Indigenous radicalism that simultaneously reaffirms and displaces human agency.

Museums and Indigenous communities have shared tensions resulting from the way Native Americans have been discussed and depicted by museums, institutions which in the past have displayed indigenous cultures and artifacts alongside extinct animals and outdated dioramas. Despite this, Indigenous cultures and museums share an emphasis on storytelling practices, both as a means of education as well as preservation. This study sought to examine the use of storytelling and narrative exhibition development in museum exhibitions focused on Native American art, history, and culture. Through the course of a qualitative comparative cross case study, three key themes were identified, being Indigenous-led development, multimedia storytelling, and an emphasis on people rather than things, which when implemented more holistically represented Indigenous subjects.

This dissertation examines the role that performances of the history and mythology of the Oregon Trail have had in securing the power and futurity of a settler colonial Pacific Northwest at the expense of other social, political, and spatial possibilities. It primarily focuses on how these practices naturalize particular modes of inhabiting and territorial belonging, as well as positions settler colonists as the rightful people of Oregon. To do so, I focus on a range of practices throughout the 20th and 21st centuries which celebrated, represented, and interpreted the Oregon Trail, the primary vehicle for settling the Pacific Northwest by the United States in the mid-19th century. These practices include trail marking, museums and interpretive centers, historical pageantry and parades, and nostalgic reenactments of a popular educational video game. My investigation teases out the role of both representation and performance within my objects of study, grounding both elements within the fundamental reality of settler colonialism: the expropriation and occupation of Indigenous lands by non-Indigenous settlers.

Humans have been using hallucinogenic plants and fungi for thousands of years. Historically, people around the world have made use of these substances to aid in their spiritual development. Studies of the usage of hallucinogens in indigenous societies often use the term “shamanism” to characterize the associated system of belief and ritual practices. In popular understanding, shamanism is a religious system that features highly ritualized performances in which a practitioner (shaman) utilizes an altered state of consciousness to gain access to realms inhabited by spirits with the intent of recruiting their help to resolve a problem, cure a patient, correct a misfortune, or predict the future among other things. As it was historically used as a catch-all term for a variety of indigenous religious systems, it has been criticized as an overgeneralization at its best and racism at its worst. However, this has not stopped its growing popularity as a spiritual technique among Western spiritual seekers, a phenomenon referred to as neo-shamanism. While not all and perhaps only a minority of neo-shamanic practitioners utilize hallucinogens in their rituals, many Western users of hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms utilize ritual techniques and belief systems that are borrowed from indigenous spirituality. Western seekers are also attracted to places such as South America to participate in what they consider to be authentic shamanism. The growing interest in hallucinogens has also affected the medical establishment with a growing number of studies suggesting a psycho-pharmacological potential for these compounds. In this study, I examine the existing points of tension between indigenous hallucinogen use, neo-shamanic practices that borrow from the former, and the increased medicalization of these compounds through a critical review of the relevant literature.

Native American leaders of the Wabanaki community can provide great insight on how to build positive close-knit relationships within a community. This study explores authentic leadership within the Wabanaki Nation and how it contributes to the cultivation of positive relationships within the community. While research exists regarding other tribal nations such as the Cherokee and the servant leadership model, few studies have explored authentic leadership in the Wabanaki community. Authentic leadership occurs naturally in the Wabanaki Nation through their cultural upbringing and the leaders' authenticity projects back into the community. Ten leaders and advocates of the Wabanaki community participated. Each participant was interviewed with ten open-ended questions about how they function in certain leadership situations. The specific questions focused on (A) core values, (B) group pressure (C) conflict, and (D) open mindedness. The results: The researcher found the emergence of four major themes: 1) importance of community-based values, 2) cultural values impacting individual career trajectories, 3) consultation with community members who have diverse viewpoints, and 4) responsibility to elders and future generations. This study indicates that more research may be needed to further explore how authentic leadership is practiced by Native Americans from the Wabanaki Confederation and how it helps to deepen relationships within their community.

Across Latin America ‘development with identity’ schemes are currently widely promoted by multilateral and aid organizations; schemes based on the commercialization of heritage, which increasingly focus on impoverished ethnic minorities. As part of this trend, the Honduran state’s discourse on cultural diversity reinforces the ‘heritage-making’ (patrimonialización) of cultural minorities, their identities, and livelihoods—particularly indígena women, under the auspices of multiculturalism. However, the on-the-ground reality for indigenous Lenca communities, specifically Lenca craftswomen, participating in such initiatives, remains with some of the highest indices of poverty and vulnerability in the country. Hence, the conditions under which ‘development with identity’ benefits local communities, and indigenous women’s response to such state-sponsored engagement, are unclear. This research ethnographically examines the semantic spaces simultaneously created by Honduran public policy, heritage commercialization, and the development industry, through which intercultural engagements take place with the indigenous feminine ‘other,’ and the consequent welfare outcomes and effects on the identity discourses and political subjectivities put forth by Lenca craftswomen. The communities studied illustrate multifaceted, dynamic, and contradictory outcomes when it comes to the material welfare and social empowerment of Lenca women. CIALSAJOL and CIALCOYL are positioned as exemplary cooperatives that are actively engaged in community initiatives, whereas CALC is no longer as successful or recognized as it once was. The differences observed between each community have to do with Lenca craftswomen’s degree of engagement in collective work and the disposition of a workshop for crafts production. Additionally, the ready access to credit or rotating funds through the coops, the regular coop meetings, alternation of the board of directors, and the coops’ participation in local public forums also contributed to the success of each cooperative, which resulted in affiliated craftswomen’s social empowerment. The research suggests the crafts cooperatives, as social enterprises --specifically as indigenous entrepreneurship, do not directly enhance material welfare among indigenous women. Contrary to this, the crafts cooperatives, as part and parcel of the cultural industries framework, enable structural factors that underly the conditions of time poverty, material poverty and stakeholder dependency that characterize Lenca craftswomen’s lives. The involvement of intermediaries like Foletti, and initiatives such as PROPAITH sponsored by IHAH and foreign aid, which fomented the recognition and marketing of Lenca cultural heritage and motivated craftswomen to organize, strengthened the bases for a positive self-identification among women, as well as the reappropriation of collective Lenca identities and heritage among craftswomen and their communities. But these initiatives also contributed to organizing craftswomen’s labor and heritage for the ready commoditization and cooptation of their cultural capital and value-added differentiated cultural products, leading to the externalization of the wealth and profits generated by this cultural industry; continued dependent, subordinate, and exploitative relations with intermediaries; and threats to collective intellectual property rights through heritage governance. Development with identity in these three communities is fraught with gendered logics that result in replicating historic colonial forms of racialized work and exploitation of labor and creating new forms of power matrices within current global economies of culture. The case studies suggest that Lenca craftswomen’s indigeneity is articulated and expressed socially and intersectionally. Gender stereotypes, roles and prescriptions are significant cross-cutting elements that inform Lenca craftswomen’s economic and social exclusions and endowments. Each craftswoman engages in recurring intercultural spaces, most as inconsistent or attenuated instances of recognition and discrimination.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart was unanimously endorsed by 250 First Nations delegates in May 2017, culminating a year’s consultation with First Nations people around Australia (Referendum Council 2017a). The Statement calls for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making between governments and First Nations people and truth-telling about First Nations history. These calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth were not only made to the Australian government; the statement also seeks a response from the Australian people (Referendum Council 2017b). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content was mandated in Australia’s inaugural national curriculum, announced in 2008. The national curriculum resulted from increasing global economic pressures and growing federal education influence. This thesis assesses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curriculum content in the context of more recent developments in Indigenous-settler relations through the Uluru Statement: how can school curriculum contribute to self-determination, sovereignty and truth-telling? The research involved two complementary parts: analysis of selected Australian curriculum policies and conversations with First Nations educators. Poststructural analysis of the Australian goals of schooling and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cross-curriculum framework considered how curriculum policies reflect and construct Indigenous-settler relations. The second component privileged the voices of six senior First Nations educators at the forefront of integrating Indigenous knowledge and culture in school and/or tertiary curriculum and research in Indigenous Studies and other disciplines. Thematic analysis synthesises the experience and advice of these First Nations educators to provide guidance for truth-telling, self-determination and sovereignty within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curriculum. The research clearly points to a need for change in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curriculum development. Recommendations to support truth-telling and contribute to First Nations self-determination and sovereignty through curriculum are provided for curriculum writers and policy makers. Curriculum that tells truths about Australia’s colonised history and supports First Nations self-determination and sovereignty assists all Australian students to understand the complexities of history as well as understand and appreciate the diversity, resilience and knowledges of First Nations Peoples.

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.

Mitakuye Oyasin, an Oceti Sakowin (Lakota/Nakota/Dakota) phrase that translates as “All My Relations,” is a philosophy that means all things created on earth and in the universe are related and inhabit a shared space. Because all things are related and share space, they all have a purpose and a responsibility to discover and serve that purpose to ensure all of our relatives thrive in our shared space. This relational thinking influences the way the Oceti Sakowin interact with the world, including the way they teach. In this thesis, I analyze the way composition theories shape the curriculum and pedagogy of the Composition I, Composition I course at South Dakota State University, and suggest that the course incorporate pedagogical and rhetorical methods influenced by Mitakuye Oyasin. While instructors make a conscientious effort to invite students into the academic discourse community, several aspects of the course’s design perpetuate binary thinking. I ask readers to consider how binary thinking, which I suggest is at the root of the culture of contention in the United States, impedes the instructors’ success at most effectively inviting students to learn to critically read, write, and think in the academic commonplace. Finally, I ask readers to consider that when they overtly incorporate Mitakuye Oyasin in the course, such as introducing the concept of zuya and utilizing more explicitly narrative as a rhetorical and pedagogical device, the academy normalizes Native intellectual engagement and wisdom, and creates a more welcoming place for Native students, professors, and professionals, thus honoring the university’s commitment to rectifying past wrongs against the original people of the Dakotas.

In the two papers presented in this thesis, I examine mealing facility architecture both within and beyond Chaco Canyon. Both ethnographic and archaeological evidence tie the secular and sacred action of grinding corn to the gendered labor of women in modern and Ancestral Pueblo societies. In both chapters I utilize the defining elements of context, scale, association, and access to measure the ways in which corn grinding facilities in various Chacoan sites are similar and dissimilar to one another. In chapter 2, I examine the dichotomy between great and small houses located within Chaco Canyon regarding mealing facilities. Utilizing legacy data available via the Chaco Research Archive, I look at the ways in which female power, prestige, and authority is reflected in mealing facility architecture at these sites. I also present data regarding groundstone tools, I include a discussion of funerary contexts, and I review previous studies that present data regarding corn pollen frequencies. Based on this data I argue I conclude that mealing rooms at neither great nor small houses represent one consistent type. The second paper in this thesis examines changes to mealing facility architecture in the Chacoan and post-Chacoan landscape. Utilizing legacy data and introducing new 360 degree photography I examine mealing rooms at Pueblo Bonito, Salmon Pueblo, and Aztec West to identify differences in the prehistoric contexts between each site and modern alterations to the individual spaces. In the cases presented I conclude that changes to mealing facility architecture are significant and the rate of change at these sites necessitates a more robust process by which they are monitored. In addition to my analysis of modern changes I compare mealing facility architecture as it was documented at the point of excavations. Differences in context, scale, association, and access at these sites lead me to conclude that a certain degree of fracturing occurred between mealing practices at Pueblo Bonito and those at Salmon Pueblo and Aztec West. Advisor: Carrie C. Heitman

Digital language archives are used for the preservation of documented language data, such as video and voice recordings, transcriptions, survey data, and ethnographic fieldnotes. This data is most often used for research and linguists and anthropologists are generally heavily involved in the creation of language archives. Ideally, Indigenous communities that are represented in the archives are also able to access their data, but this is not always the case, especially if poor internet access and lack of technological know-how prevent archive use. In addition, western epistemologies are embedded in archival logics, exacerbating the issues surrounding Indigenous access and pointing to the need for a decolonizing archival design that centers the needs of its users. Using ethnographic research methods and a decolonizing framework, I conducted a usability study on the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) to uncover the cultural-based meanings that inform AILLA use. Using linguistics and anthropology listservs, I recruited research participants for a Qualtrics survey and conducted semi-structured interviews that explore the user perspective on AILLA. I analyzed AILLA's Google Analytics data and used qualitative and quantitative research methods to build upon the previous literature in user-centered design approaches to language archives. As one of the largest online language archives in the world, AILLA serves an important role in the language documentation and cultural revitalization movement. Continued research in the field of user-centered design and non-Western epistemologies is necessary to ensure the accessibility of language archives and for AILLA to fulfill its mission of support for the survival of the Indigenous languages of Latin America.

Opioid addiction is a serious and persistent global health issue. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that between 1999 and 2016, more than 630,000 people in the United States died of an overdose of a prescription opioid or illicit drug (CDC 2018). Extant research has suggested that for nearly a century, New Mexico has experienced some of the highest rates of prescription and illicit opioid death in the nation (Goldstein and Herrera, 1995; Landon, 2003; Shah et al., 2008). I examined intergenerational opioid dependence through the lived experience of women caregivers of opioid-addicted family members. Data for this project were qualitative and consisted of 34 in-depth interviews and participant observation. This study contextualized the racialized, gendered, and classed social geography of the opioid crisis experienced by Native American, Latina, and white women in rural New Mexico. Findings provide insight into the impact of overlapping structural inequalities—settler colonialism, racial capitalism, patriarchy, centuries of poverty—that have fueled intergenerational opioid addiction.

This dissertation examines fictional and visual texts by Native American and Black American women writers created from 1891 to 2008 that imagine the intersections of Native and Black experience in America. It considers these primary questions: how do Native-authored texts imagine Black experience/identity and intersectional experience? How do Black-authored texts imagine Native experience/identity and intersectional experience? How do these narratives consequently reimagine the settler colonial record and “speak back” to national American mythologies that triangulate Black, Native, and White identities for the purposes of state-building? To what extent do these fictional texts by women challenge, reimagine, and deconstruct this mythic triangulation as intersectional? I argue that texts created by Sophia Alice Callahan (Muscogee Creek), Pauline Hopkins, Carrie Mae Weems, LeAnne Howe (Oklahoma Choctaw), Wendy RedStar (Crow), and Julie Dash serve to importantly make visible crucial intersectional omissions in the settler map that challenge the historico-racial schema of heteropatriarchal white European settler colonial discourse, creating possibilities for new epistemologies. The visual and written narratives considered here directly confront a state-serving triangulation of Red, Black, and White through an interrogation of multiple grounds: a nineteenth century discourse of racial purity that persists unrelentingly into the present, the methodologies of archival encounter and documentary practices that aim to cast Black and Native creators as ethnographic specimen, the limitations of the Euro-American novel form, and settler-colonial mappings of Black and Native geographies that seek to both enforce a narrative of racial purity and confine Black and Native communities to a space of liminality. The artists and writers considered here imagine these grounds as defined by Black and Native agency and convergence, but not without a complexity that gestures towards the legacies of U.S-driven narratives of racial purity. To identify this complexity, I argue for a radical and intersectional reading practice centered on examining multiple texts (novels, art installations, archival documents, maps, and photographs) simultaneously and in conversation. This is a practice that aims to posit reading itself as an exercise in symbiosis: a tool capable of sensing, delineating, and recovering moments where languages, geographies, and histories converge. I argue that intersectional reading as methodology highlights the possibilities of decolonial exchange between literary studies, visual analysis, Black studies, and Indigenous studies. At the same time, it points towards the convergence of imaginary spaces and material social justice movements focused on Indigenous sovereignty and land rights, Black/Indigenous retention and celebration of cultural ways, and the collective assertion of dignity and autonomy.

This multimodal ethnography engages feminist filmmaking, autoethnography, montage, poetry, historicity, and activist ethnography, as methods and epistemics, to understand Christian Indigenous resistance on the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands. It examines how Mizos, a community of one million people living at the edges of the British and Indian Empires, create and maintain their Indigenous and Christian identities, through fraught interactions with actors they see as nationally, ethnically, religiously, culturally, and morally different. Drawing on three years of anthropological research conducted between 2014-2021 in India (Mizoram, Manipur, Assam, Delhi, and Goa) and in Burma, I examine the articulation of Mizo identity against three boundaries: an external, political boundary, vis-a-vis the Indian state; a linguistic, cultural and religious internal boundary vis-a-vis the Hmar, Mara, Chin, Bru, and Chakma ethnic minorities living in Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura and Assam; and a self-reproducing moral boundary vis-à-vis Mizoram’s sexual and moral minorities (drug and alcohol addicts and the LGBT). Bringing the above articulations of Mizoness in conversation with their invisiblized counter-voices, I interrogate the hyphen that links the nation with the state and frame Mizo nationalism as an everyday, felt historicity, inter-generationally transmitted and transmuted into longue durée resistance, as the unrelenting dream of a nation without form. At epistemic level, this research embraces multimodality as a transgressive form of critical socio-cultural analysis, as a response to recent calls to expand Indigenous Studies beyond the Western-centric, White, Settler-Colonial frameworks that shape it. It pushes thus against, and sometimes fully exists, the binaries of colonizer and colonized; nation and the state; ethnicity and its others; homonationalist and LGBT socialities; history and myth-making; ethnography and fiction; and pathos and logos. Ultimately, this project is an archive of absences, of their excesses, and how they remap the dominant geographies, temporalities, socio-political formations, and the mutually constitutive yet competing Utopian orientations of the Mizo and Indian nations.

In 2016, An estimated 15,000 people representing 400 Indigenous Nations and non-indigenous allies gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in solidarity against the Dakota Access Pipeline to protect Mni Sose, the Missouri River. They became known as the Water Protectors. This dissertation analyzes the response in environmental philosophy journals to the #noDAPL protest at Standing Rock. Even though the Stand at Standing Rock became one of the most important and monumental environmental protests of the last decade, neither Standing Rock nor the Water Protectors appear in environmental philosophy journals at all--not once. Why? I suggest a possible answer by exploring the Stand of the Water Protectors as a moment in a much longer continuous history of resistance to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism attempts to facilitate the erasure of Indigenous populations by colonial ones, in order to gain access to territory—to land. The omission of Standing Rock from environmental philosophy journals represents the ease with which environmental philosophy can become complicit in the project of settler colonial erasure and replacement through absence. Drawing on Indigenous land-based philosophies of kinship, Latin American decolonial philosophy, settler colonial theory, and frameworks of Indigenous environmental justice, I show how the geo-politics of colonialism have come to produce environmental injustice and planetary ruin. I work to break the silence on Standing Rock in environmental philosophy and allow the Water Protectors example to guide the project toward an environmental philosophy which centers colonialism and Indigenous resurgence as core concerns.

Abstract: Bringing together the fields of Critical Indigenous Studies, settler-colonial studies, and governmentality studies, this dissertation seeks to methodologically trace the dispossession of Metis from lands in Manitoba throughout the mid-twentieth century by placing these dispossessions into the multijurisdictional and socio-historical context. In the first half I engage dominant Canadian historiography in order to trace out a broader governing apparatus that possessed technologies of education, employment, immigration, and health aided in normalizing the dispossession of predominantly racialized populations by settler-colonial populations and their municipal apparatuses. The second half of the dissertation focusses on original archival research. I engage nineteenth century Metis historians to genealogize the formation of Manitoba’s provincial apparatus which formed the basis for the establishment and proliferation of municipal apparatuses in Manitoba throughout the former half of the twentieth century. I trace the maneuvering between federal, provincial, and municipal apparatuses in governing Metis in Manitoba through various agricultural programs meant to increase the overall health and security of the settler-colonial population, as well as through social welfare reports that sought to identify and recommend how to ‘improve’ Manitoba Metis. In the final chapter, using my own historic Metis community of Minnewaken as a case study I demonstrate how the Rural Municipality of Coldwell dispossessed Metis residents who went from owning 4000 acres of land in 1915, to 10 acres of land in 1970. I trace this land dispossession through an engagement with local histories and municipal tax-rolls, by-laws, and council minutes. Taxes and by-laws, I argue, were key technologies of municipal apparatuses that rationalized and realized the dispossession of Metis from Minnewaken. A key emphasis of this dissertation focusses on illustrating the ways in which municipal governments, in particular, came to represent significant vectors of Metis land dispossession during this era.

Abstract: Engaging with the fields of critical Indigenous theory, Indigenous STS (Science, Technology, and Society), and governmentality, An Apparatus of (In)Difference interrogates how Indigenous food insecurity policy reiterates food insecurity as a matter of poor health choices. I delineate how a power/knowledge nexus of health and nutrition informs how the food insecurity of Indigenous people living in Winnipeg is differentially governed through healthism, a governing rationality that disciplines bodies through strategies of self-regulation at the level of the individual. In following Foucauldian governmentality methodologies, this research charts an apparatus of healthism that is constituted by federal, provincial, municipal, not-for-profit intermediaries, and researchers’ rationalities, programs, and technologies that includes but is not limited to: population statistics, anti-obesity frameworks, nutrition and dietary programming, food councils, community food assessments, geographic mappings of food deserts, mirages, and swaps, and after school nutrition education. I situate these empirical facets within three conceptual relationalities – the individual and the body politic (settler agents of governmentality), the expert and the expertise (federal policy makers), and the biocitizen (the disciplined Indigenous subject). By connecting these conceptual relationalities to the empirical context of Winnipeg, I demonstrate how governmentality and healthism operate through white possessive securitization and racialized logics, which ultimately leads to the differential governing of Indigenous health and food security. This research identifies liberal, seemingly altruistic, calls for health promotion and regulation that have disciplinary outcomes for Indigenous populations. As such, this analysis disrupts the racialized logics that limit Indigenous health policy approaches to the reiteration of biocolonial ideals.

This dissertation considers the ethical and political stakes of delving into the past. Literary critics have long contended that fiction about the past encourages an ethical relationship to violent legacies through a variety of narrative and affective techniques. According to such scholars, historical fiction works by evoking specific feelings in readers (sentimentality), bringing marginalized stories to the forefront (visibility), and filling gaps in archives (recovery). Departing from these approaches, my dissertation charts how non-realist elements transform historical fiction into a toolbox of political tactics such as direct action, covert movement, tangible care, community building, and the calculated use of the law. In other words, speculative tropes make history concrete in order to kindle decolonial and abolitionist politics. Each chapter highlights the world-making quality of Black and Indigenous political imaginaries. My first chapter, on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, explores how the sentimental conventions deployed in many neo-slave narratives can unintentionally undermine the genre’s revolutionary goals by facilitating domestication that bolsters the antiblack nation-state. Whitehead’s unsentimental novel of slavery instead turns towards affiliation mediated by palpable care. Chapter two argues that Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears demonstrates how making Indigenous history visible can collude with the assimilative function of settler colonial capitalism. In chapter three, I explore the limits of recovery through Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling as well as Butler’s unpublished papers. I assert that Fledgling’s Black amnesiac protagonist models how to grapple strategically with an unrecoverable history. Reconceiving both speculative fiction and historical fiction, my project intervenes in broader conversations across the humanities about what constitutes an ethical relationship to the past. I demonstrate that though speculative fiction appears concerned with the fantastical, imaginative, or contemplative realms, it offers concrete tools for dealing with tangible injustices that persist in our current moment.

In Native American literature, there is a discourse that solely focuses on the relationship between Indigenous people and the land. This relationship is vital to understanding the traditions, rituals, storytelling, and practices of Native Americans. The presence of settler colonialism changes the relationship, effectively changing the nature of cultural and spiritual relationships as well. Indigenous literature provides examples of the modern relationship Native people have with their land; an example of this is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Tommy Orange’s There There Despite modernity, assimilation, and ways of life introduced by settler colonialism, Native people maintain a relationship to the land, whether on a reservation or in an urban space. The relationship, as well as their traditions and rituals, changes between Ceremony and There There. This research aims to illuminate the relationship in conjunction with the concepts of cultural hybridity, sovereignty, and a third space.

in search of ourselves, we find each other is a fully collaborative, multi-platform exhibit centered on developing and locating relationships to both self and community. Challenging societal individualism, the exhibit focuses on collective, relational creativity using Indigenous methodologies for community. It is about me. It is about you. It is about us.

This dissertation proposes rez theory, a model for the study of everyday aspects of life on the rez in Native American and Indigenous literature and cultural production. I argue that three thematics form rez theory—language, politics and humor—and that consideration of these areas in critical analysis of cultural productions by Native people and about the rez reveals how rez folks use tactics, aesthetics and sensibilities to intervene in structures of power. What I study in this dissertation is not the reservation or reserve—that is, the history of the physically bounded places demarcated by settler colonial governments—but the rez as it is imagined, depicted and represented in text by the people who call the place home and bring it to life. This project examines and applies rez theory to Native American and Indigenous fiction, memoir and television. Beginning with the Native American Renaissance, I argue that Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine uses an array of mundane objects and characters’ attitudes to illustrate her rez aesthetic. I show how Terese Marie Mailhot redeems markers of Indian-ness typically deemed unsavory in the memoir, Heart Berries, by revealing their ambiguity and complicating fixed definitions of rez life. I propose related concepts within the wider framework of rez theory, such as rez vernacular and rez gothic, and illustrate their usage on two Canadian television series, Mohawk Girls and Trickster. The conclusion issues an invitation to rez theory and points to contemporary Native American and Indigenous cultural productions worthy of consideration. This project intervenes in narratives that position the reservation as a place defined by poverty, tragedy and socioeconomic difficulties by providing a model that promotes Native agency and self-determination. The radical intervention of rez theory is to suggest that such a thing exists at all; that it is possible to understand rez life as critical, tactical and theoretically significant. As a “theory from below,” it looks to everyday Native language, politics and humor to inform understandings of how everyday rez people intervene in strategic processes that seek to determine Native life. Cultural theories, such as Michel de Certeau’s practice of everyday life and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage, elucidate rez theory. De Certeau’s theories about users versus producers and tactics versus strategies offer a framework for interpreting how rez people operate within systems imposed upon them using tactical interventions. Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage explains how an assembly of objects and attitudes form a rez aesthetic and identifies everyday Native people as the architects of it. Rez theory foregrounds overlooked pieces of ephemera and off-the-cuff attitudes as the material that forms a rez aesthetic. It asks critics to turn their lenses toward the rez as an important site of meaning-making in studies of Native American and Indigenous literature and cultural production.