Indigenous Studies Commons^™

Mauna Kea: Where The Cosmos Meet Settler Colonialism, Maria Encinosa

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

International Research Symposium Exhibitor and Honorable Mention Abstract:

The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea has sparked protests given the sacredness of the mountain to the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians). The narratives that have arisen reignite familiar tropes, framing the conflict as one between indigenous religion and scientific progress. I deconstruct these narratives through an analysis of TMT International Observatory (TIO) affiliated websites paired with insights from secondary sources. Ultimately, I argue the TIO’s response and presentation of Ho’Omana Hawai’i religious views and ‘modern’ astronomy as antagonists extend settler-colonialist interests.

Prototype Online Archive Of Documents Related To Indigenous Peoples In Colonial Spanish Florida., Emilia Thom

Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS)

Digital Projects Showcase Exhibitor During the summer of 2020, I worked on a project titled “A Prototype Online Archive of Documents Related to Indigenous Peoples in Colonial Spanish Florida.” This project focuses on creating a prototype online archive containing digital editions of primary source documents relating to interactions between Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists during the eighteenth century in Florida. With the help of Dr. Clayton McCarl and Dr. Denise Bossy, I worked to edit five documents from eighteenth-century St. Augustine. The documents are letters sent from Florida to Spain, to inform the crown of colonial matters. They contain information …

2slgbtqqia+ Sub-Working Group Mmiwg2slgbtqqia+ National Action Plan Final Report, Percy Lezard Dr, Noe Prefontaine, Dawn-Marie Cederwall, Corrina Sparrow, Sylvia Maracle, Albert Beck, Albert Mccleod

Indigenous Studies Faculty Publications

Categories of gender, sex and sexuality have been introduced through colonial processes and institutions. The term Two-Spirit encompasses a broad range of sexual and gender identities of Indigenous peoples across North America and complicates distinctions between gender, sex and sexualities7 . While the term is used by some people to refer to the cultural roles of individuals embodying both female and male spirits, the term has also been used as an umbrella term to describe Indigenous people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex and part of the continuum of non-heterosexual identities. It is important to distinguish …

The New Beginnings Newsletter, April 2021, Wokini Initiative

Wokini Initiative: The New Beginnings Newsletter

Wokini Challenge Grant Recipient: Wizipan Leadership and Sustainability Program
Lakota Word of the Month
American Indian Student Center Grand Opening Celebration
Book of the Month: Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logicsof Decolonization
Open Positions

Treaty Stories: Reclaiming The Unbroken History Of Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Sovereignty, Margaret Huettl

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Ojibwe leaders negotiated treaties with the United States amid nineteenth-century encroachments on their territory. These treaties, which were more than tools of dispossession, enfolded and extended aadizookanag (sacred stories) in agreements that embodied Ojibwe relationships with land, language, sacred history, ceremony, and kin. Federal and state policy makers, fueled by the desire for Indian land and resources, attempted to unravel these relationships in the decades that followed. By continuing to live out through labor and stories their relationships with the woods, waters, and manoomin (wild rice) beds of Anishinaabewaki, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibweg kept their treaties and their sovereignty …

This Land Is Their Land, Char Miller

Eastern Sierra History Journal

An 1891 petition to the United States government from the Indigenous people of the Yosemite Valley in the central Sierras offers a blistering indictment of the settler-colonial expropriation of their homeland and a counter narrative to conservationists who have debated for more than a century the impact of flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide water to San Francisco.

Looking Beyond Binaries: How Native Activists Create Decolonized Futures, Sam Guido

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Native people in the United States and Canada have been resisting settler colonialism for as long as settlers have tried to impose it upon them. That activism has been continuous across centuries; however, sometimes that overall narrative has been lost due to the imposition of settler perspectives that constrain Native activism. Recent Native activist movements in the United States and Canada such as the anti-Keystone Pipeline protests and Idle No More received a lot of attention from both the public and the media, but there was an impulse to define these movements within binary categories like “male or female” or …

3rd Place Contest Entry: Sovereignty, Statehood, And Subjugation: Native Hawaiian And Japanese American Discourse Over Hawaiian Statehood, Nicole Saito

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Nicole Saito's submission for the 2021 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won first place. It contains her essay on using library resources, a three-page sample of her research project on the consequences that Japanese American advocacy for Hawaiian statehood had on Native Hawaiians, and her works cited list.

Nicole is a junior at Chapman University, majoring in Political Science, History, and Economics. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Robert Slayton.

The Stolen Children: Their Stories: Aboriginal Child Removal Policy And Consequences, Peter U. Wildgruber

Student Publications

From 1910 to 1970, the Australian government embarked on a policy of Aboriginal child removal which sought to acculturate Aborigine children of mixed descent into white Australian society. The 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, records the individual testimonies of hundreds of victims of child removal and argues that prolonged familial separation caused irreparable damage to native Australian communities. Carmel Bird’s edited version of the report, The Stolen Children: Their Stories, was published in 1998 to disseminate the report's findings and advocate for legislative action. Her book includes the stories of seventeen individuals and responses to the original report …

A Brief And True Report Of The Newfoundland Of Virginia, Thomas Hariot

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

End Of The Line: The Women Of Standing Rock, Gary Saul

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (2021), directed by Shannon Kring.

An Application Of Lakota Ethics To The Contemporary American Waste Crisis, Erika Marchant

Student Research

In this paper, I discuss the unethical nature of modern American waste systems and individual practices, focusing on the benefits of adopting elements of indigenous land care ethics. Specifically, I discuss the opportunities for sustainable improvement found in the Lakota perspective of humans’ relationship with the land, such as the frugality epitomized in their hunting, harvesting, and material culture. Lakotan environmental consciousness is ultimately owing to the centrality of their spiritual convictions and traditions, which are, of course, not replicable in the non-indigenous Western context; although we will certainly never be able to understand nor internalize the heart of Lakota …

Sheep Replace Pronghorn: An Environmental History Of The Mono Basin, Robert B. Marks

Eastern Sierra History Journal

This article examines the ways in which the hunting-gathering people of the Mono Basin lived before their way of life and environment was overturned by the nineteenth-century arrival of Euro-American settlers with vastly different ways of interacting with the environment. And it tracks some of these alterations by tracking when and how sheep replaced pronghorns.

Utilizing Art & Culture To Support The Success Sequence, Kelvin M. Walston, Tarita Johnson

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

This presentation will demonstrate how Hip Hop and African American History are used as educational teaching tools in our evidenced based program to promote social, emotional, and violence prevention skills. Explorations from the African diaspora, historical trauma, slavery, post traumatic slave syndrome to decoding and deconstructing hip hop elements all intersect to provide the basis of violence prevention, and more profoundly social and emotional balance.

A Reimagining Of The Chacoan World, Larry Benson, Richard W. Loose

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

A new paradigm of the Chacoan world is presented, wherein Chaco Canyon is considered to be a mostly unoccupied architectural complex that functioned primarily as a pilgrimage destination. Chaco was the political, religious, and social focal point of people living in outlying regions. The resident population of the Canyon consisted of a small number of caretakers, charged with maintaining great house structures, food supplies, and their ceremonial contents. Chacoan chiefdoms were mostly located in large, well-watered, agriculturally-based communities situated at the base of mountains that ring the San Juan Basin, e.g., the Chuskas. Chiefly elites lived year-round in those areas, …

Pinturas Del Artista Plástico Maya, Marcelo Jiménez Santos

Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

Originario de la comunidad maya de Noh Cah, en el municipio de Felipe Carrillo Puerto, en el estado de Quintana Roo, México. Desde 1976 hasta la fecha, han sido incontables las exposiciones pictóricas en las que ha participado, ya en forma individual, ya en forma colectiva y su labor pictórica, didáctica, de promoción, gestión y difusión cultural ha sido ininterrumpida. Sus acciones en el contexto de la creación, promoción y difusión han contribuido para que las propuestas del arte y cultura maya actual tengan presencia en nuevos escenarios y destinatarios, tanto en el ámbito cultural local, regional, nacional e internacional.

Variations On Hunting And Care: Ownership, Kinship And Other Interspecific Relationships In The Eastern Amazon, Uirá Garcia

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article is based on fieldwork among the Guajá people, a small indigenous group of Tupí-Guaraní speakers inhabiting the eastern portion of Brazil’s Amazon region. Aiming for an ethnographic definition of kinship, this article engages in issues related to the figure of the “owner/masterin the Amazon, proposing a dialogue with a seldom discussed aspect of this subject—namely, its relation to conjugality. I argue that relationships included in the universe of “familiarity” and “mastery” are not only coextensive with the field of kinship; they also reveal a very particular conception of humanity. The process of Awá-Guajá kinship, where the spouse is …

Introductory Note, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Ana Bella Pérez Castro

Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

English Introductory Note

“Aquí La Haces, Aquí La Pagas”: La Ética De La Palabra En Algunos Exempla Del Yucatán Contemporáneo, Abrahan Jesús Collí Tun

Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

El presente artículo explora la tradición oral yucateca contemporánea y se enfoca en algunos géneros didácticos relacionados con la performatividad enunciativa y con las retóricas corporales en contextos premorten, para dilucidar algunas pautas axiológicas de los narradores y la forma en que aquellos inciden en la confección de marcos éticos y morales sobre la comunicación en sus contextos sociales.

Nota Introductoria, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Ana Bella Pérez Castro

Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

Spanish Introductory Note