Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Contesting Historical Enchantment: Militarized Settler Colonialism And Refugee Resettlement In New Mexico, Christina Juhasz-Wood

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary critical study of refugee resettlement to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I argue that refugee resettlement to the United States cannot be understood separately from the ongoing structure of settler colonialism. I analyze Albuquerque’s post-WWII militarized settlement as a settler colonial process of extraction and suburbanization that depended on Native labor and resources to fuel the growing nuclear weapons program. Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base played a role not only in displacing and thus producing refugees during the Vietnam War but also in marking Albuquerque as a distinctly militarized geography to which they were resettled. Thousands of …

Unsettling Indian Health Services: Secularism, Modern Medicine, & The Reproduction Of The U.S. Settler State Through The 1954 Transfer Act, Jillian Elizabeth Grisel

American Studies ETDs

This thesis takes up the role of secularism in modern medicine as a political doctrine that works in service of settler colonialism. I argue the Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization (WHO) globally institutionalized secular ideologies in the post-World War II environment. This thesis links how this global reordering came to inform U.S. health policy by examining how government officials and medical experts drew from the WHO and framed infectious diseases as a security issue to impose a biomedical order in Indian country. By contextualizing modern medicine within a settler political economy and secular political doctrine, I …

Immigration/Migration And Settler Colonialism: Doing Critical Ethnic Studies On The U.S. - Mexico Border, Raquel A. Madrigal

American Studies ETDs

My dissertation argues that the U.S.-Mexico border, and the militarized operations of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the border, including state and federal anti-immigration law, are historically ongoing settler colonial structures of U.S. imperialism, and empire, which are asserted upon, and over Indigenous people and their land. I claim that these anti-immigrant, and anti-migrant structures and operations perpetuate Native dispossession, and removal, as well as deny Native presence and sovereignty. I also contend that undocumented immigrant and migrant justice must be accountable and responsible to Indigenous peoples, their land, and …

The Heart Of K'E: Transforming Dine Special Education And Unsettling The Colonial Logics Of Disability, Sandra Yellowhorse

American Studies ETDs

This paper takes up the roles of ideology and spatiality as they impact Diné students and learners in understanding conceptions of normativity, neuro-diversity and bodily variance. I am concerned with how the movement and creation of Indigenous schools and their praxis still maintain and often times produce settler colonial ideologies of being, personhood, difference and ability. I illustrate the challenges that Diné planners and educators face in entrenching cultural knowledge and language into their educational initiatives, while some of the problematic manifestations and expressions of normativity present themselves through state polices, federal law and mainstream curriculum.

I focus on the …