Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Barriers To Outdoor Recreation For Marginalized Groups At The University Of Montana, Sabine R. Englert, Beatrix Frissell, Adrienne Liebert, Sophia Rodriquez, Margaret Jensen, Rachana Harris, Abby Doss

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Exclusion from outdoor recreation reflects legacies of oppression of marginalized communities and makes access to the outdoors not equally available. In the United States, approximately 38% of Black Americans and 48% of Hispanic Americans participated in outdoor recreation in 2020. This is compared to 55% participation among Caucasian Americans. Many other intersecting identities are actively excluded, including people with disabilities, fat populations, and members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community; furthermore, class-based hierarchies are shown through the restricted outdoor access of low-income populations.

While numerous studies show a lack of diversity in outdoor recreation, little to no research has been conducted on …

Traversing Paradigms: An Environmental Journey To Body And Mind, Martin Ceja Mejia

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Traumatic life experiences altered the way I perceive the world. As a result, I embark on a journey to reshape my relationship to self, the built and natural world; to environment. In this thesis I ask: How do I want to relate to the environment? Considering I am a doubly colonized agent, I also aim to decolonize my relationship to environment along the process. Therefore, this work aims to formulate a new, personal, relationship to environment through academic literature, history, psychology, Indigenous knowledge and science, and literary studies, among other fields of knowledge. This work is interdisciplinary in nature; life …

Re-Storying Grant Creek: A Case Study Of Relational Dynamics On A Degraded Montana Stream, Seamus Rucci Land

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration began in 2021, and after a history of contentious ethical debates, ecological restoration is increasingly portrayed as a viable framework for combating environmental degradation and supporting more healthy and stable social-ecological systems. The proposed ecological restoration of Grant Creek, a degraded stream near Missoula, Montana, offers an opportunity to connect a restoration site to the broader, rapidly growing field of restoration practice. It also allows the opportunity to forward the ‘relational turn’ proposed by many in the sustainability sciences as an ontological and methodological means to move beyond positivist portrayals of social-ecological systems, which …

Tales From A Placeholder: A Relational Journey With Land, Place, People And Self, Kalle O. Fox

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The proposed thesis is a collection of place-based, long- and-short-form creative nonfiction essays. The places of interest are where the author spent different amounts of time in during her twenties, including Iceland, Miami and Seaside, Florida, Butte and Missoula, Montana, and a series of National Parks on the western side of the Continental Divide. This thesis is informed what cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan coined as topophilia: the affective bond between people and place. “Place” and “sense of place,” while each having their own array of definitions in environmental scholarship, are considered interchangeable in the context of my work. A …

Disrupting Settler Stories: Learning To Live With Respect, Intimacy, And Reciprocity On Colonized Land, Anna S. Favour

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

These essays and illustrations are informed by the question of how to form meaningful connection to place and care for a place when that land is colonized; when the creation of this place is rooted in harm. The purpose is to explore questions that have arisen during four years of Environmental Studies education. I want to learn what it means to be an environmentalist – to have a deep respect for the land and its inhabitants in a manner that extends beyond conservation – a relationship centered around respect, intimacy, and reciprocity. I want to understand if it’s possible to …

Mountains To The Sea: How Climate Change Influences People, Cultures And Communities, Stephanie L. Maltarich

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

"A Pressure Not To Be Resisted Or Evaded": Military Occupation, Reform, And The Incorporation Of Northern Montana, 1879-1916, Hayden Nelson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores Fort Assinniboine’s role as an extension of the federal government’s military arm in the Northern Plains. It argues that the military occupation of northern Montana served to incorporate the northern borderland region and peoples into the American mainstream as a part of the national reconstruction processes following the Civil War into the twentieth century. In a period of half a century, north-central Montana transformed from a Native American common hunting ground lacking any major white settlement to a rapidly developing agricultural region. Fort Assinniboine played a central role in this transformation, hastening the economic collapse of the …

Hear Me Roar, Abigail R. Seethoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.

Ethical Eating: Overcoming Alienation In The Industrial Food System By Aligning Our Practices With Our Principles, André Kushnir

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis arose out of a moment of discord, while an environmental philosopher was eating blackberries in the middle of a blizzard in Missoula, Montana. What follows is an attempt to bridge the gap between our principles and our practices, by asking the questions: What does ethical eating look like? Is it possible within our current industrial food system? and If not, what needs to change? Responding to the publication of the 2019 EAT-Lancet report, this essay moves beyond thinking of ethical eating as “healthy” and “sustainable” and challenges the networks of suffering and labour that we take for …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

Recovering Our Roots: The Importance Of Salish Ethnobotanical Knowledge And Traditional Food Systems To Community Wellbeing On The Flathead Indian Reservation In Montana., Mitchell Rose Bear Don't Walk

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis provides a culturally-comprehensive review of the plants utilized for food in the Bitterroot Salish tribe of northwestern Montana. As part of the larger Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CS&KT) of the Flathead Indian Reservation, the Bitterroot Salish historically utilized hundreds of plants for food, medicine and hygiene. This thesis aims to highlight food plants and their important cultural components. The information herein is a combination of history, ethnography, linguistics, ethnobotany, and first-hand experience with the current Salish community to provide a holistic framework of understanding traditional food plants today. A comprehensive plant list is provided with Latin, Salish …

Resilience Through Connection To Place: How Native Peoples Rely On The Land And How The Land Relies On Us, Tabitha N. Espinoza

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Wilderness Solitude In The 21st Century, Thomas C. Lang

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Recent advances in mobile communication technology have led to a decrease in opportunities for individuals to experience alone-time within daily life. As a result, the solitude offered by wilderness landscapes has become all the more valuable. Past research on wilderness solitude has been divided into two distinct frameworks: the Social-Spatial Perspective and the Humanistic Perspective. This distinction has severely limited the development of a comprehensive research model that incorporates all the possible conditions relating to wilderness solitude. This study synthesized past research and theory to create a quantitative model of wilderness solitude which includes elements from both research perspectives, while …

Social Justice In Social-Ecological Systems: Resilience Through Stakeholder Engagement, Frederick I. Lauer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Successful management of social-ecological systems (SES) is predicated on quality collaborative exchanges between project stakeholders and management. The Southwest Crown of the Continent Collaborative (SWCC) Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) provided an opportunity to explore landscape scale collaborative management and SES outcomes. Global change and future uncertainty of landscapes prompted the SWCC to employ restoration treatment alternatives throughout 1.4 million acres of forests, most of which are publicly held. The SWCC currently monitors environmental and economic variables, with plans to monitor social variables. This thesis formalizes a proposed framework to investigate SES resilience, and explores public engagement as an …

Poison In Pink, Sydney V. Cook

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Humans slather, spray, mist, and cleanse their bodies with personal care products like lotion, hairspray, cologne, and shampoo every day. Our cupboards are stocked full of them, but few of us understand what is in those jars and bottles. We trust that if it’s on the shelf at the store, it’s safe. However, this is not always the case, and many personal care products contain chemicals that are harmful to human and environmental health.

My multi-disciplinary Environmental Studies thesis project combines evidenced-based research, interviews, nonfiction narrative, and science communication to create part of a book manuscript intended to educate general …

Little Rebecca, Rebecca Collins

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Santiago de Compostela, a city in Galicia, Spain, has been said since the 8th century to hold the remains of St. James, an apostle and the patron saint of Spain. Old walking routes, still in use, fork all throughout the European continent toward this singular destination, with the collective label of the “Way of St. James,” (the Camino de Santiago in Spanish, Le Chemin du St. Jacques in French). For nine months of this past year, the Camino de Santiago and the study of pilgrimage was my singular destination as well. I studied the history of pilgrimage, European pilgrimage literature, …

Wilderness And Epistemic Wildness, John T. Stanfield

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The traditional concept of wilderness was a product of the time out of which it came. Times have changed. The social context of conservation, how humans affect nature, and scientific understanding of how ecosystems function have all shifted in ways that make the wilderness idea problematic. The values that people found in wilderness are still relevant, however. It is the way that they are tied together in the concept of wilderness that has become a problem.

I propose a revised concept of wilderness that meets the concerns of critics of wilderness, and accounts for the tension between the wild and …

The Bioscience-Industrial Complex, Radical Materialist Aesthetics, And Interspecies Political Ecologies: The Unforeseen Posthuman Future In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, Sarah Sydney Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This project traces how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, science fiction novels from the Romantic and contemporary literary periods respectively, contest the problematic relationships between subjecthood, science, ecological health, and patriarchal, capitalist societies by crafting radical materialist alternatives to such a system and its dualistic and destructive interpersonal/interspecies relations. Through the theoretical framework of ecofeminism that recognizes the conceptual linkages between women and nature in Western systems of thought, as well as psychoanalytical feminist critiques of the masculinization of scientific epistemology, this project examines the developmental and ontological overlaps between literary “masculine” and “scientific” subjects socialized under …

Raising Grain In Next Year Country: Dryland Farming, Drought, And Adaptation In The Golden Triangle, Montana, Caroline M. Stephens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Climate change has already and will likely continue to impact agriculture in the Western United States, threatening water supplies for both irrigated and rainfed agriculture (Calzadilla et al. 2010; Chambers and Pellant 2008; MacDonald et al. 2010; Pedersen et al. 2009). In the Golden Triangle, a region in north central Montana, known for its dryland grain production, the same is true. There is a need for in-depth, fine-grained, place-based, and qualitative research about the process of climate change adaptation in agriculture (Miller et al. 2013). Drought challenges farmers in the Triangle, which is semiarid and receives 10-15 inches of annual …

May You Walk In Beauty: The Decline Of Navajo Land And Culture, Jocelyn Catterson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The Navajo homeland, Dinetah, is bordered by four mountains that are sacred to the Navajo people: two in Colorado, one in New Mexico, and one in Arizona. Historically, Navajo medicine men have traveled to these mountains to renew prayers and collect medicinal herbs. Today, the mountains, which exist outside of the reservation boundaries, are used for resource extraction and various recreational pursuits. While many Navajo are fighting for the protection of these sacred lands and their traditional culture, others are disinterested. Traditional practices and beliefs are slowly disappearing within the Navajo Nation. The land-use issues associated with these sacred mountains …