Search

Contested Icescapes is an ethnographic and historical study of climate and agrarian change in the Northwest Territories, Canada. This dissertation examines how and in what ways marginal Arctic land has become an imaginary and material frontier for agriculture and considers the implications of the new frontier for rural and Indigenous lands and livelihoods. Through archival and ethnographic research, I contribute a deeply situated analysis of agricultural development and broader food systems change in this cold-climate region. I trace the entangled histories of settler colonialism, agricultural development, and climate change, and I demonstrate how these forces (re)shape the subjectivities and class relations of rural peoples, as well as their relationships with the state, Indigenous governments, society, and the environment.Throughout this dissertation, I develop the concept of “contested icescape,” which I use to analyze how various material, social, and political-economic forces assemble and reassemble to enable a Northwest Territories’ agricultural frontier at various historical moments. The contested icescape also refers to a discordance between frontier imaginary and frontier reality, and it is in this liminal space – shaped by local political contestations, increasingly uncertain ecological futures, and historical transformations in the regional political economy – that Northwest Territories’ agriculture continues to be characterized by smallholder family farmers and subsistence agriculture. Despite deep historical and political tensions between commercial smallholder famers and Indigenous subsistence growers, I demonstrate that both groups have been dispossessed of land and livelihoods as a result of new climate enclosures. I argue that rural and Indigenous peoples are adapting to new conditions of production and social reproduction, yet these adaptive practices are mediated by long standing colonial inequalities and transformations in the regional political economy. This dissertation underscores the importance of Indigenous and local environmental governance in climate justice.

This dissertation is a history of 500 years of resistance to violence amongst indigenous peoples in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta -SNSM, in Colombia, as practices of healing and reciprocity. It is focused on the legacy of the Kaggaba People to maintain themselves as an indigenous people, confronted by violence and domination since the Spanish invasion of their territory, until to today. The work is written from a perspective of my lasting and ongoing collaboration with those peoples. It combines Kaggaba historical memory, with written historical sources and present-day situations. The work focuses on how Kaggaba practices of reciprocity form part of processes of resistance and healing. It addresses how the Kaggaba deploy precise forms of reciprocity that link territory, people and things, all connected with “the spirit”, as what the Kaggaba call the Law of Origin, involving “paying debts” at a spiritual level. We analyze how these forms of reciprocity can have effects on the other elements along those linkages, to produce results through transformations of context centered around ancestral territory. The Kaggaba consider territory as living entity which produces responses through practices of reciprocity. To approach Kaggaba practices of resistance as reciprocity, we propose the concept of articulated assemblages in which reciprocity, articulates processes of transformation between things, people, territory and the “spirit”. Reciprocity as an assemblage engages with elements from linguistic anthropology, theories on violence, articulation and relationally produced identity, and expanded concepts of context. We address implications of Kaggaba practices of reciprocity as process of rearticulation of the self with context and power in ways that transcend subject-object divides, at the heart of healing and violence.It weaves together grounded scenarios based on the deployment of debt relations. As a history, the work starts with the colonial imposition of “encomiendas” in Kaggaba territory, as forms of domination through debt and violence, and how the indigenous people redeploy those same links of reciprocity as resistance. Then it moves into Kaggaba deployments of reciprocity as linked to the “spiritual” origin of ancestral territory as hybrid strategies of coexistence with the colonial catholic church. During most of the 20th century, colonial forms of domination and debt combined with public policies for the dissolution indigenous identity and land. These elements morphed into a “State of Exclusion”, with deplorable levels of violence against the indigenous people of the SNSM, invisibly subsisting within modern nation. The dissertation addresses how the indigenous peoples of the SNSM transform violence at personal and political levels. Especially the Kaggaba and Arhuaco, directly deploy their “Law of Origin”, embedded in the ancestral territory of the “Black Line” as processes of reciprocity based on principles of care. These practices of embodied reciprocity generate profound transformative responses from territory, enabling the indigenous people to cast off those chains of debt and violence. The Kaggaba present various forms reciprocity as practices of healing. These are ancestral” practices upon which the indigenous people have based their existence since before the arrival of the Spanish. They offer new ways of conceptualizing healing and forms reciprocity between people, things, nature and territory and expanded concepts of context.

This thesis is a methodological reflection on a years’ work on hereafter.land, a collaborative webmapping project exploring a speculative ecology of the Malartic Mine. In these reflections, I address the ethical obligations of co-creative research, methods and sources used in developing hereafter.land, and how the physical infrastructure of extraction and the digital infrastructure of mapmaking disturb relationalities. I argue that the separation of plant, water, and animal kin so often found in Western spatial science is incompatible with Indigenous epistemologies rooted in relationality. In making hereafter. land, my collaborator Vanny and I developed a webmapping method based on our understandings of good relation as Anishinaabe and Chickasaw people, respectively, that aims to push back against the abstraction necessitated by Western cartographic tools and conventions.

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 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 Indigenous forms of governance within coastal waterscapes. While pathogens come to reflect and reinforce colonial structures of dispossession, I argue that Indigenous-led efforts to track pathogens throughout salmon bodies and ecosystems are shifting power dynamics in ways that offer new possibilities for the “blue revolution.” This research brings scholarship on pathogens and industrial landscapes into conversation with enduring concerns about the material consequences of environmental injustice and colonialism. In situating aquaculture as part of an under-explored extension of settler colonial logics, structures, and governance into marine space, I suggest that the dominant framing of settler colonialism as land-based leaves large openings for understanding how colonialism and sovereignty are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. Illuminating how industrial aquaculture and efforts to track pathogens take place within a broader politics of asserting sovereignty “at sea” reveals how historical inequalities and ongoing power dynamics become inscribed within oceans, with important implications for understanding contemporary ocean politics in the 21st century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Nahua-Pipil have existed for centuries in Kuskatan, particularly, in the west and center of El Salvador, such as in the municipality of Santo Domingo de Guzman or Witzapan and Izalco or Itzalku, Sonsonate. Yet, the Salvadoran State only recognized the existence of indigenous peoples in its territory in 2014, after decades of repression. The Nahua-Pipil community maintains their identity and cultural such as through the Nawat language and other forms of cultural production, despite their historical marginalization and attempts of state-sponsored ethnocide. While western conceptions of human rights can be useful mechanisms to amplify continued Indigenous mobilizations in Kuskatan, they remain insufficient in supporting the persistence of Nahua-Pipil culture in Witzapan, Itzalku, and in the diaspora. The objective of this dissertation is to understand the different local and national actors immersed in the process of the revitalization of the Nawat language as a linguistic and ancestral heritage, and in the works of Nahua-Pipil cultural production. In this sense, I argue that Nahua-Pipil understandings of humanity, dignity, justice, and respect manifest through material and symbolic relationships to land, to (Nawat) language, and to safeguarding (Nahua-Pipil) worldviews.

This dissertation considers the rise-to-prominence of Siberian writers during the late-Soviet period as a form of literary regionalism arising in response to postwar state interventions in the region. Reading works by Russian-Siberian village prose writers Valentin Rasputin, Vasilii Shukshin, and Viktor Astaf’ev and Indigenous writers Yuri Rytkheu, Anna Nerkagi, Vladimir Sangi, and Yuvan Shestalov, I argue that the poetic innovations for which Siberian writers of the period became known can be characterized as literary articulations of Siberian spatial practice. Through mimetic simulation of local relationships to place, perspectival concerns are transcribed onto the formal and stylistic fabric of the text and features such as genre and plot take on contours of natively experienced Siberian space-time. These figurations cultivate distinct modes of expression, which in alignment with Soviet literary values served a didactic purpose: in theory, the text would generate a locally-formulated Siberian imaginary into which outsiders could be oriented through the phenomenology of reading.Spatial practice is informed by the specificity of its environment. Likewise, colonial policies and patterns of human settlement in Siberia were shaped in part by the region’s watersheds. My literary analyses are thus each organized according to a state of water representative of both an aspect of state intervention in Siberia and a regional literary response. “Water” considers Valentin Rasputin’s conservationist depictions of the Angara River in dialogue with popular depictions of Siberian hydroelectricity. “Ice” traces the development of Yuri Rytkheu’s Bering Strait fiction as a response to modernizing discourse about Indigenous Siberians under Soviet nationalities policy. “Air” reads the significance of aerial motifs in Siberian narratives of displacement as a regional instantiation of Soviet jet-setting culture as it emerged during the period. Within these literary ecologies, I argue, authors evoke Siberian spatial practice to manifest a sense of environmental and civic responsibility in a readership increasingly deprived of place-based community knowledge transmission due to urbanization. Siberian regionalism illustrates the generative potential of the “region” as a discursive category in ongoing discussions about diversifying the Russophone literary canon. In addition to understanding writers in terms of their individual ethnic/national literary traditions, this dissertation demonstrates the influence of the unique properties of Siberian place—including its physical geography and settler colonial history—on Russophone literary aesthetics.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 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.

The birth of modernist art in South America is largely attributed to the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres-García. Born in Montevideo, Torres-García spent forty years living abroad in Europe and the United States, before returning home. Because his life was divided between Europe and the Americas, his artwork and legacy are discussed as exemplars of art as mestizaje, but to label him thusly performs an erasure of both the Indigenous influence on his aesthetic and his commitment to establish a truly Latin American art. His homecoming was not heralded by a desire to impose an imperialist aesthetic on Uruguay but inspired him to establish an autochthonous art, first through the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935-39) and then through the Taller Torres-García (1942-62), which outlived him by over a decade. In this dissertation, I interpret both his artwork and his literature as philosophical texts, as such, I examine the Indoamerican roots in his thinking and art practice and seek to reorient the assumed direction of influence on South American modernism away from Europe and back to American soil. I then place Torres-García and his body of work within the Chickasaw academic, Jodi Byrd’s, theory of cacophony. If one of the failures of postcolonial theory is that it flattens relations into a binary, cacophony, a concept Byrd builds from the Chickasaw-Choctaw notion of haksuba, seeks to nuance this. Reading Torres-García within this framework, I argue, allows me to simultaneously critique him and his indigenismo ideology, while also analyzing his Indigenous modernism and its attempt to create community within and across the Americas.

Reggae is ubiquitous and normalized in Hawai‘i and consists of a major portion of the live music and recordings produced there. Despite this, very few scholars have written about the scene. Such a gap in scholarship can partially be attributed to the fact that reggae in Hawai‘i is not overtly traditional or political; those are the two lenses through which Indigenous culture is typically viewed in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and even Indigenous studies. However, reggae in Hawai‘i is both traditional and political below the surface, frustrating colonial binaries and representing Indigenous people in the complexity of their lived realities. Through in-person and virtual ethnographic research, archival research, and analysis of musical recordings, I consider the ways in which identity operates in reggae in Hawai‘i. I argue that although Native Hawaiian music and worldviews are implicit—that is, often obscured or not acknowledged—they are the basis of engagement with identity in reggae in Hawai‘i. At the same time, the categories of Local and global build on top of and yet are interrelated with the Native Hawaiian. This study joins a growing body of work on Hawaiian music and Indigenous popular music that centers the messiness of everyday Indigenous life while privileging Indigenous agency and worldviews.

European honeybees, Apis mellifera, are largely promoted and studied as necessary pollinators for their economic importance and agricultural viability. Apis mellifera receives widespread attention due to two key factors: national and global agricultural dependence on them and the high volume of bee deaths across the country and worldwide. My work cares about the relationships and (im)material realities that are (re)created when and where settler colonial scientific research practices center Apis mellifera honeybees and Euro-Amercian agriculture systems and the ways that Indigenous Land and Native bee pollinators are taken up in these systems of research. I attend to such attachments as they flow through research institutions where they have palpable material, immaterial, social, and political consequences, and I do so in ways that are adapted to my relationships with science and Indigenous Land and Peoples.This methodological work contributes to Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (I-STS), an emerging subfield of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and is an effort in creating Indigenous theories of the technosciences. In it I show how agents of pollination, be they human or not, are altering Indigenous Land, lives, and bodies and ways that institutional research can be done differently through decolonial research practices and by following Indigenous Land protocols and ethics. In this vein, this work discusses how researchers can learn from Indigenous research practitioners who in their life/work, reclaim and remake research practices that honors Indigenous Land, and who co-create and co-think with their Land-bodied relatives through mutually (corporeal) caring and Indigenous centered more-than-research practices. Attending to bee pollinators and research institutions within US agricultural systems provides better understandings of (im)possibilities for good research relations by which they may disrupt colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial realities toward Indigenous sovereignty.

Removal and displacement of indigenous people cause spiritual dislocation and something that most healers would consider - a spiritual un-wellness. But migration is often described as a positive step that migrants take to “find a better life”. Most Filipinx families have displacement stories, and we often tell them as migration or immigration stories - something our families are proud of, because it shows our resilience. From the life histories of Filipinx migrant and immigrants, this project looked for any indications of rootedness to any ancestral places, and for the impacts that displacement had on our relationships and connection with both people and places. The life histories showed the deep hurt that migrants sustained because of their separation from their people and their places. They showed that the hurts are not contained in just their generation but rather were passed on to the generations that followed them, especially that profound feeling of loneliness, feeling of not belonging, and the longing for home (kamingaw). Their life histories also showed that despite being away from their places and traditional medicinal plants, they still held on as best they could to their healing practices and the epistemologies under the practices.

European honeybees, Apis mellifera, are largely promoted and studied as necessary pollinators for their economic importance and agricultural viability. Apis mellifera receives widespread attention due to two key factors: national and global agricultural dependence on them and the high volume of bee deaths across the country and worldwide. My work cares about the relationships and (im)material realities that are (re)created when and where settler colonial scientific research practices center Apis mellifera honeybees and Euro-Amercian agriculture systems and the ways that Indigenous Land and Native bee pollinators are taken up in these systems of research. I attend to such attachments as they flow through research institutions where they have palpable material, immaterial, social, and political consequences, and I do so in ways that are adapted to my relationships with science and Indigenous Land and Peoples.This methodological work contributes to Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (I-STS), an emerging subfield of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and is an effort in creating Indigenous theories of the technosciences. In it I show how agents of pollination, be they human or not, are altering Indigenous Land, lives, and bodies and ways that institutional research can be done differently through decolonial research practices and by following Indigenous Land protocols and ethics. In this vein, this work discusses how researchers can learn from Indigenous research practitioners who in their life/work, reclaim and remake research practices that honors Indigenous Land, and who co-create and co-think with their Land-bodied relatives through mutually (corporeal) caring and Indigenous centered more-than-research practices. Attending to bee pollinators and research institutions within US agricultural systems provides better understandings of (im)possibilities for good research relations by which they may disrupt colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial realities toward Indigenous sovereignty.

Reggae is ubiquitous and normalized in Hawai‘i and consists of a major portion of the live music and recordings produced there. Despite this, very few scholars have written about the scene. Such a gap in scholarship can partially be attributed to the fact that reggae in Hawai‘i is not overtly traditional or political; those are the two lenses through which Indigenous culture is typically viewed in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and even Indigenous studies. However, reggae in Hawai‘i is both traditional and political below the surface, frustrating colonial binaries and representing Indigenous people in the complexity of their lived realities. Through in-person and virtual ethnographic research, archival research, and analysis of musical recordings, I consider the ways in which identity operates in reggae in Hawai‘i. I argue that although Native Hawaiian music and worldviews are implicit—that is, often obscured or not acknowledged—they are the basis of engagement with identity in reggae in Hawai‘i. At the same time, the categories of Local and global build on top of and yet are interrelated with the Native Hawaiian. This study joins a growing body of work on Hawaiian music and Indigenous popular music that centers the messiness of everyday Indigenous life while privileging Indigenous agency and worldviews.

My thesis explores how interpersonal relationships between women healers and non-human persons (such as leluhur, or ancestral souls, and nitung, or nature/guardian beings) in the Lamaholot region of East Indonesia demonstrate sophisticated understandings of health beyond Western biomedical definitions. Building on a previous five-month study which expanded my connections with healers on the island of Lembata, I conducted a month-long oral history collaboration with a family of local healers and their diverse acquaintances on how local healing practices inform historic identity and psycho-social well-being. As Indonesia’s Ministry of Health imposes increasingly stringent laws on “wild” or unregulated medicine, local populations increasingly embrace Western, technoscientific models of health and safety. This, alongside the increased influx of affordable technologies (especially smartphones and laptops), causes kinship and identity to also transform. In 2006, the government of Lembata passed a law which prohibited all unlicensed traditional healers from providing ingestible or prescriptive treatment in any capacity. The legal discernment of 2009 between institutionalized health systems and traditional healers shifted public views on epistemologies previously upheld for centuries. My collaborators and I work to collect, and later visually depict through creative nonfiction, an archive of personal histories. This collection of microhistories will serve as a reference for Lamaholot communities who regularly discuss the value of passing down local knowledges to their youth. Throughout this thesis, I explore how local knowledge systems partially “travel” across temporal and generational boundaries within Lembata, and also how these knowledge systems endure transformation across geographic distances. I conclude that the longevity of local healing knowledge depends on how locals a) maintain practices for remembering past identities, b) adapt to adjacent knowledge systems without being overpowered by contending epistemologies, and c) contribute new or pertinent notions of the possible.

AbstractThe Mana of the Tongan Everyday: Tongan Grief and Mourning, Patriarchal Violence, and Remembering VabyFuifuilupe NiumeitoluDoctor of Philosophy in Comparative Ethnic StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Patricia Penn Hilden, ChairIn this dissertation, I contend that the Tongan economies and systems of va trace their roots to the Sacred, the Feminine, the heartbeat of Tonganness that consists of the natural world, the fonua (land) to the Moana (ocean) and encompasses all the worlds in between. In addition, I contend that the desecration of the Sacred was the quintessential goal of the colonial project in Tonga. The losses are systemically supplanted with the colonial institution, heteropatriarchy that is symbolized by the new white and male Christian God at the forefront of the new Tongan nation. I show that the systemic desecration of the Sacred was the aim of several historical “racialized projects” that relentlessly deployed a phenomenon that scholars term as “white terror,” which Frantz Fanon explains in his statement about European colonizers being “the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native” (38). The European “racialized projects” began in the seventeenth century with the arrival of the first Europeans; they were Dutch explorers traveling on Tongan waters in an expedition searching for capitalistic and opportunistic gain. At the moment of contact with Tonganness, the Dutch explorers deployed “white terror” through the heinous use of firearms on the bodies of unarmed Tongan families riding on a tongiaki on their way to Samoa. This historical moment serves as a harbinger outlining the unrelenting violence of European and U.S. “racialized projects” on Tonganness. The colonial trajectories tracking the maneuvers of “racialized projects” deploying “white terror” on Tonganness continues to the historical voyages of the renowned British Captain James Cook and his paradigmatic naming of Tonga as the “friendly islanders.” Yet this seemingly playful moniker masked a political strategy meant to erase the maneuvers and desires of British patriarchal domination and violence in the eighteenth century, to the arrival of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the proliferation of the prodigious and unrelenting Christian missionizing project through the deployment of unyielding and layered forms of patriarchal violence or “white terror.” As a result, colonial invaders influenced a new Tongan nation that centered the colonial institution of heteropatriarchy, which became symbolized by both the new white and male deity at the forefront of the Tongan nation and the contemporaneous maneuvers of the U.S. Empire’s military occupation of Tonga during WWII. The production of topographies of unrelenting “white terror” on Tonganness were indelibly marked by militarized violence that had been deployed, unrelentingly, on the bodies of Tongan women and girls. Consequently, this colonial legacy opened the door for U.S. institutions such as the Mormon Church to enter and take center stage in Tonga in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition, the heavy hand of the Mormon Church continues to perpetuate and proliferate the objectives of U.S. Empire on Tonganness in Tonga and in the production of Tongan communities here in the U.S. The systemic desecration of the Sacred, a “dichotomy” that Gloria Anzaldua describes as “the root of all violence” (59), was and continues to be a deliberate colonial strategy to subjugate Tonganness not just in the past, but to replicate it in the present moment through the normalization of violence against women within every ay Tongan lives and within the boundaries of Tongan families and intimate relationalities. Thus, I examine the colonial productions of Tongan intimate spatialities such as the colonial family production of the nineteenth-century Tongan Nationalist Family and the contemporaneous production of the Tongan Mormon Family that traces its genealogy to the maneuvers of U.S. Empire during WWII in Tonga. Furthermore, the goals of the colonial project are unyielding and without end. Its desires for domination extend to the future generation of Tongans, for as Frantz Fanon argues in his theory of “ perverted logic,” the desecration of the Sacred and the simultaneous severing of Tongan va to the Sacred are colonial strategies that stifle Tongan mana and self-determination. In fact, the aim of the desecration of the Sacred— according to Fanon—is the “total” colonization of Tonganness.

The locus of linguistic landscapes scholarship has fallen upon the investigation of macro-level patterns and broad sociopolitical themes (e.g. diversity, ecology, economy, hegemony, identity, multilingualism, social solidarity, vitality, etc.) as they are mediated through textual verbal modalities (e.g. displayed signage or other publicly accessible digital and print media), approaching analysis through predominantly quantitative, observational, and empirical methods. I present my discussion on the broader topic of linguistic landscapes scholarship, as well as observations from my own research examining the linguistic landscape at Acoma Pueblo in the Southwestern United States. With this, I aim to connect my work to current debates in linguistic anthropology and social theory. I draw on contemporary and classic literature from within the linguistic anthropological canon, engaging a discourse that covers a dynamic range of relevant theoretical concepts and methodology. I endeavor to reconcile the epistemological divide that exists between a linguistic anthropological approach to linguistic landscapes research and the largely decontextualized quantitative and empirical approaches that pervasively influence the domain of inquiry to date. Therefore, I advocate for adapting an analytic and methodological framework that is oriented toward more ontologically predicated forms of analysis within the field. I also argue to expand the criteria that are used to conceptualized and define the linguistic landscape. I seek to provide a more ethnographically substantiated, contextualized account of the linguistic landscape as it articulates with local language policy and sociocultural practices within an indigenous Puebloan context. Through my examination of policy and practice on the linguistic landscape at the Acoma Pueblo, I attempt to provide basis for a multimodal language ecological understanding of the linguistic landscape. Particular to this undertaking, I investigate a variety of ways that members of the local community engage the linguistic landscape-not only through contemporary textual verbal modalities endemic to the conventional purview of linguistic landscapes research, but also through traditional verbal modalities (e.g. oral literature and narrative). The linguistic landscape proves to be more than an assemblage of verbal signage displayed in public or community spheres within urban contexts. Rather, the linguistic landscape is a conceptual frame inherent to both literate and preliterate language traditions as a socio-structural phenomenon.

The musical genre of Hawaiian reggae is typically considered a combination of reggae and Hawaiian music, and has been popular in Hawai‘i since the 1980s. Also known as Jawaiian or island music, this genre involves the ever-shifting identity and cultural categories of localness and Hawaiianness. Localness in Hawaiian reggae involves rootedness in and affective connection to place, multicultural inclusion and equalization, and opposition to an “outside” or the global. Musicians and listeners of Hawaiian reggae will reference these characteristics in the music directly or when speaking about it. Localness in Hawaiian reggae also involves the cooption of Hawaiianness. Localness as a general category becomes legitimately connected to Hawaiian land through coopting Hawaiian indigeneity. In Hawaiian reggae, cooption occurs when musicians incorporate elements that sound Hawaiian in order to make the music sound more local. Listeners of the music also recognize sounding Hawaiian as serving this function. Although cooption and other settler colonial processes that legitimize localness make it highly problematic, it is the reality of many people. For this reason, I suggest that localness expresses a different connection to the land than that of indigenous Hawaiians. It is at once legitimate and highly problematic.

My dissertation introduced a Native feminist reading methodology as a transhistorical methodology that resists disappearance and affirms presence. It is a methodology that sees ghosts and answers them. I read historical texts, paintings and quilts, family photographs and films. It is a methodology that involves reading against disappearance; it involves reading futures yet in store for Native lives. I draw upon the work of many Native feminist scholars including, Lee Maracle (1988), Ines Hernández-Avila (2005), Jennifer Denetdale (2007), Eve Tuck (2009), Michelle Raheja (2010), Chris Finley (2011), Dian Million (2013), Michelle Jacob (2013), Mishuana Goeman (2013), Leanne Simpson (2013), Audra Simpson (2014), Maile Arvin (2015), and so many others, because I understand their writing as practices of reading survivance. I also draw on my ancestors, their lives, their stories and their refusals. Extending arguments of recognition, this methodology is an act of recognition. That these readings are practiced by Indigenous feminists is not meant to make reading a kind of essential magical ability of Indian women, but rather I take the standpoint that the reading practice is something done to bear futures into existence, just as similar practices were done by our predecessors. It is this shared ontological project of bearing the future out of a genocidal present that connects Native feminists now and Native women then; in this respect it is a survivance practice that recognizes itself within a tradition of survivance. In short, a Native feminist reading methodology is reading as self-recognition.Throughout the chapters I used examples of Native feminist methodologies, including Audra Simpson’s ethnographic refusal and Eve Tuck’s desire-based research, Michelle Raheja’s visual sovereignty and Leanne Simpson and Maile Arvin’s regeneration as a response to being possessed by whiteness. Throughout I use haunting as a methodology adapted from sociologist Avery Gordon’s work and drawing upon Tuck and C. Ree’s theorizing. What is gained from Native feminist methodologies is the work of trusting our knowledge, and bringing that knowledge through primarily Western institutions to one another as a form of recognition. My dissertation is an intervention and participation in that ongoing decolonizing project.

Transindigenous Modernism indigenizes the study of literary modernism. It applies the term indigenismo, generally defined as a discourse of assimilating Indigenous peoples in the Americas, to begin with the premise that settler nation-state consolidation and modernization were dependent on assimilating Indigenous peoples culturally and politically. Transindigenous Modernism questions the extent to which Indigenous peoples normalized indigenismo. Using a North-South methodology that brings together English-language and Spanish-language primary sources, theory, and literary criticism, Transindigenous Modernism interprets artistic and literary productions such as literary criticism, oral traditions, novels, and histories published by American Indian and Indigenous Mexican artists between 1929 and 1945. Through this approach, this dissertation seeks to recover and interpret Indigenous-to-Indigenous connections made through literature, connections which are often obscured or under-examined due to the dominance of nation-state paradigms to pursue literary studies. Transindigenous Modernism argues that these transindigenous connections attest to Indigenous peoples’ creative adaptations and contestations to settler nation-state consolidation (indigenismo) and their insistence on modern Indigenous, and tribal-specific, identities and futurities. Traveling intellectuals and writers such as Todd Downing (Choctaw), Andrés Henestrosa (Zapotec), and John Joseph Mathews (Osage), helped shape a North-South circuit of knowledge and cultural production that scholars are beginning to explore and appreciate. In order to capture the historical moment, chapter one examines the discourses of indigenismo and mestizaje in the Mexican, modern artist José Clemente Orozco’s writing and mural, The Epic of American Civilization, at Dartmouth College. Chapter two re-examines the themes explicated in chapter one through the lens of an American Indian narrator traveling south in Todd Downing’s The Mexican Earth. Chapters three and four examine Indigenous-to-Indigenous connections across time and space in the tribal-centric writings of Andrés Henestrosa and John Joseph Mathews. The epilogue explores further questions about mestizo/a-Indigenous connections.

AbstractScales of Sovereignty: the Search for Watershed Democracy in the Klamath BasinbyDaniel Reid Sarna-WojcickiDoctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and ManagementUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor David Winickoff, ChairThis dissertation examines the politics of knowledge in collaborative watershed governance institutions of the Klamath River Basin of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The waters of the Klamath are shared between farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous communities, hydro-electric facilities and one of the most biologically diverse eco-regions in the United States. Since 1986, the watershed has provided the primary spatial unit for resolving resource conflict by coordinating agency and citizen science, guiding integrated resource management and cultivating a shared sense of place and belonging among Klamath watershed inhabitants. For nearly three decades, the Klamath Basin has served as a laboratory for experiments in “watershed democracy”- a form of hydrologically-grounded political association that attempts to facilitate the direct participation of all watershed inhabitants in knowledge production, deliberation and collective action at the watershed scale. Through the idiom of watershed democracy, I connect empirical research on the outcomes of nearly three decades of community-based natural resource management in the Klamath with theoretical debates waged over the last century and a half regarding the question of scale in environmental science, democratic governance and natural resource management.In this dissertation, I analyze the watershed as a scale of knowledge production, a site of democratic deliberation and a unit of environmental governance. I investigate whether the watershed is the most appropriate socio- spatial unit for representing people and place in the Klamath, paying particular attention to the impact of collaborative watershed governance arenas on the ability of Karuk Tribal members to participate in knowledge-production and decision- making for natural resource management in their ancestral territory in northern California.Through participatory research with the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, participant observation, document analysis and interviews withFederal, State, Tribal and local agency scientists and representatives, I follow knowledge and policy-making processes across a diverse range of institutions engaged in Klamath watershed governance. Combining participatory research and participant observation with theoretical insights from political ecology, science and technology studies (STS) and indigenous studies scholarship, I evaluate the processes and outcomes of collaborative watershed-based governance according to its impacts on local watershed ecosystems and communities. Drawing on the theoretical framework of “co-production”, I analyze the mutually constitutive relations between watershed science, watershed governance institutions, the materialities of Klamath watershed-ecosystems and the distributions of resource benefits and burdens in Klamath communities. I follow Klamath experiments in watershed democracy negotiate the basic terms of political life such as property, territory, sovereignty and the public good, as well as the material conditions and flows of watershed resources and the patterns of access to, ownership in and distribution of these resources.While the Klamath experiements in collaborative environmental governance at the watershed scale have opened up oppportunities for Karuk representatives to participate in knowledge production and decision-making, the watershed scale has itself constrained the focus of integrated resource management, limiting the kinds of knowledge that can pattern as reliable and the types of restoration and management projects that can issue from Klamath collaborative governance forums. I demonstrate how Karuk representatives have both leveraged and critiqued the watershed as a way of conceptualizing Klamath watershed-ecological processes and as a socio-spatial unit for approaching ecological restoration and cultural revitalization in their ancestral territory. Watershed science and watershed governance forums were sometimes leveraged by Karuk representatives to substantiate Karuk sovereignty and resource rights and at times rejected for not being able to convey distinct Karuk epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies. I demonstrate how collaborative watershed management forums have struggled to render different types of indigenous, local and scientific knowledge commensurable and have instead provoked debates about how to produce knowledge about nature in ways that are appropriate for the local community and its ecosystems.I draw attention to the cultural politics of scale to critique watershed-centric management and search for alternative ways of representing the multiple scales through which Klamath inhabitants understand and value nature. I compare watershed-based governance with two other emerging scales of democratic resource governance- firesheds and foodsheds- in their abilities to bring together diverse forms of environmental knowledge around multiple nested scales of social and ecological processes. Firesheds are emerging areas of community-based fire management patterned according to the way fire burns across the western Klamath landscape. Foodsheds are another emerging form of community-based resource governance taking shape in the Klamath around the spatial and temporal characteristics of food resources and their associated management practices in forest ecosystems. Comparing watersheds, firesheds and foodsheds opens up the question of scale in collaborative environmental governance by highlighting tensions among different ways of producing knowledge, managing resources and acting collectively at different bioregional scales in the Klamath.Against watershed-centric approaches to ecological democracy, I argue for deliberative multi-scalar approaches to implementing collaborative environmental governance, cultural revitalization and watershed-ecosystem restoration in the Klamath. Multi-scalar perspectives can accommodate multiple ways of making knowledge while avoiding homogenizing diverse situated perspectives into a single way of seeing Klamath eco-cultural landscapes. I argue for “democratizing scale” in order to define an appropriate scalar framework for producing knowledge, representing human values and making decisions about the management of natural resources. Collaborative environmental governance requires an accompanying democratization of scale to accommodate the myriad ways of knowing nature and making a living in Klamath watershed-ecosystems. Scalar formations that are produced through deliberative democratic processes can provide more inclusive grounds than watersheds for democratic environmental governance and multispecies world-making.

This dissertation presents an intersubjective ethnography of repatriation in Rapa Nui. The central problem addressed in this study arises by recognizing that the debates around repatriation and the “reburial issue” are grounded in an epistemological friction. Throughout this dissertation I contend that Rapanui understandings of ivi tupuna or ancestral remains conflict dramatically with the widespread understanding held by non-indigenous, both scientists and beyond. As this study demonstrates, the Rapanui people have their own ontology, according to which they perceive being and beings in the world very differently than those of us influenced by Western worldviews. They understand the ancestors and other beings they co-exist with as persons. For the Rapanui, ivi tupuna have thus an ontological status: they are the ancestors, with whom they relate by haka ara, genealogy. As persons, they are capable of sharing their distinctive knowledges and mana with other beings, humans included. This genealogical and epistemological relation connects the living and the dead with their history, land, and knowledges. Scholars have very often ignored this distinctive ontology promoting a scholarly tradition that objectifies Rapanui systems of knowing and relating. In doing so, they dehumanize relations between a people and their heritage. The repatriation debate eloquently demonstrates the dramatic consequences of this epistemological conflict. First, repatriation activists have been particularly eloquent in asserting the destructive consequences of Western misinterpretation and appropriation of indigenous ancestors and knowledges. Second, the repatriation of the ancestors and ceremonial materials have helped indigenous communities around the globe maintain and revitalize their traditional systems of knowing and relating, re-connecting peoples with their histories and self-knowledges. Third, the repatriation movement has urged a new paradigm for the careful dealing of indigenous ancestors and living materials, rethinking the scientific endeavor and opening a space for a new generation of collaboration based on greater understanding and respect. This conflict between ontological and objectifying views expands to the broader field of indigenous studies, the repatriation lens working here as a microcosm revealing its grave consequences to indigenous peoples and their cultures.

Romanticized as a lone Caucasoid race surrounded by Mongoloids, the Ainu―an indigenous people from the Hokkaido region of northern Japan―fascinated turn-of-the-century tourists, anthropologists and intellectuals. Suffering from the insatiable Wanderlust produced by rapid modernization, explorers traveled to Hokkaido in search of an “authentic” native experience outside of the Westernized Japanese treaty ports. British, American, and even Japanese travelers likened the unruly geography of the northern frontier to the Ainu body and personality. For some, these “hairy” indigenous people epitomized the exotic; for others, the ethnic ambiguity of the Ainu embodied a fantasy of aboriginal whiteness. Surveying the images represented in explorers’ reports, travel memoires, world’s fair press releases, and indigenous publications, this dissertation examines networks of visual imagery that formed a consistent stereotype of Ainu culture from the height of Euro-American and Japanese “Ainu fever” in the late nineteenth century to the indigenous collectivization of the Ainu circa 1930. This dissertation is organized around transnational personalities such as traveler Isabella Bird, novelist Edward Greey, artist Arnold Henry Savage Landor, anthropologist Frederick Starr, photographer Arnold Genthe, artist Kondō Kōichiro, illustrator Katahira Tomijirō, and writer Takekuma Tokusaburō. While explorers and tourists traveled to Hokkaido to find themselves in the north, the Ainu had to contend with becoming an absent center in their own visual discourse. In addition to addressing images produced by British, American, and Japanese travelers, this research also investigates indigenous voices, such as Katahira and Takekuma, in order to restore attention to the self-fashioning of the Ainu image in print culture. These case studies span diverse visual media and synthesize text and image to investigate the role of circulation in producing knowledge about the Ainu. This project argues that while the origin of Ainu stereotypes can be found in Japanese Ainu-e paintings or early Euro-American travelogues of Hokkaido, they became a mainstay of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century visual culture through the incessant reproduction of a small body of images across space and time.

"Vāsā (Ocean)--The Space that is Sacred: Pacific Islanders in Higher Education" investigates how Pacific Islander students across three college campuses--City College of San Francisco, University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of California, Berkeley--change their schools though the use of their indigenous cultures (ocean). Creating a voice for an often invisible community in higher education, students "talk-story" about the challenges and triumphs of their journey in higher education while questioning the politics of knowledge production, identity constructions, indigenous cultural practices, community formations, and inclusion in their schools. The project illustrates how these Pacific Islander movements are critiques of diversity in post-secondary educational institutions but also explores students' engagement with contemporary colonization as a way of understanding their personal lives, their families and communities, and their worlds.

Allison K. Athens"Arctic Ecologies: The Politics and Poetics of Northern Literary Environments"This dissertation examines the lives of humans and animals in the North American Arctic and the types of narrative modes used to describe them. My project seeks to elucidate the poetics of place, or how language creates and shapes the specificity of social and ecological environments in the north. This poetics is not neutral, however, as language, chiefly the language of writing but also that of film, is political in its enactments of or prohibitions on ways of engaging with the world. Thus, my project begins with administrative discourses such as legal statutes that govern hunting, fishing and subsistence activities; congressional documents such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act; and state and federal mandates that create (and sometimes destroy) wilderness parks and recreation areas in Alaska. Furthermore, given that these governing directives often obscure the prolific contemporary written and visual art of Alaska's native peoples that represent a very different view of place, inhabitation, and northern identity, my project engages the concurrent critical and creative work of northern indigenous peoples. I divide my dissertation into four chapters, each featuring an iconic creature of the north: polar bear, seal, caribou, and salmon. I choose these animals for their prominence in stories about the environment, economy, and culture in the Arctic. They are also important for being at the center of disputes involving laws enacted either to protect them from human exploitation or to aid in their harvesting for personal or profit-motivated use. Finally, I explore the stakes of undoing and redoing these contested spaces and discourses and ask how they might coexist, if one idiom (the language of linear economic development) were not to colonize another (the language of a multidimensional ecology). Reading an alternative epistemology through the lenses of ecocriticism, feminism, and postcolonial theory allows me to confront an archive that first figures, then legalizes, wilderness as empty, species as vanishing, and history as linear and progressive.