Digital Commons Network^™

Return To Wolf Country: Exploring Rancher Knowledge Of Gray Wolves In Wallowa County, Oregon, Theodore Masters

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

With the extirpation of gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the American West in the early 20^th Century, generations of ranchers have grazed livestock free from any threats by wolves. The absence of wolves from the western landscape has created an inter-generational gap in the experiential knowledge held by ranchers regarding how to manage livestock in wolf country. Using Wallowa County, Oregon, as a case study site, 18 cow-calf ranchers were interviewed to gain insights into the ways they generate and share knowledge of running livestock in landscapes shared with wolves. This study revealed the arrival of wolves …

Counter Archives: Unfolding Hidden Stories, Berlin Loa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

We select what we value as history creating collective memory that can obfuscate or devalue other threads in the story intentionally or unintentionally. Through collections of material culture, curated and described by archivists, we receive information that constructs our collective memory of self. These cultural artifacts reflect and reconstruct the past. Material artifacts in the archives depend largely on the story that is told about their provenance to provide meaning. This paper takes photographic collections in archives as examples of material culture to demonstrate how archival presentation affects the stories of collections items, and examines modalities and subverted stories in …

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 …

Investigating The Archaeological Record Using A High-Resolution Gis Land Use Model In The East Saddle Mountains, Grant County, Washington., Mars Galloway

All Master's Theses

For decades, the annual subsistence round in the Mid-Columbia Plateau has been examined archaeologically through surface lithic scatters using bivariate approaches. We know from the ethnographic record that the annual round is a complicated process where multiple resources may be extracted simultaneously, yet there are no studies examining the archaeological record on a scale that allows investigation of this complexity. This research used GIS to model landforms and the locations of plant, animal, and mineral resources to assign a resource potential score across the landscape. The relationship between resource potential score and the archaeological record in the East Saddle Mountains …

The Syndemic Landscape: A New Paradigm For Montana Suicide Prevention Grounded In Agricultural Renewal, Emory Chandler Padgett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana has had one of the highest suicide rates in the nation for half a century, and since 2000, it has risen almost 50%. Despite suicide’s alarming persistence in the state, there has been minimal academic study of suicide or mental health specifically in Montana, so this thesis attempts to answer a few questions: Why does Montana have such a high suicide rate? Is there something culturally, historically, or socially unique about Montana that contributes to suicide? Are current prevention efforts helpful, harmful, or lacking? Could a consideration of culture and land benefit an understanding of suicide in Montana? What …

Traditional Healing In Psychology On The Caribbean Island Of Montserrat, West Indies, Yvette Adelcia Cabey

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

In Montserrat, traditional healing medicines consist of herbal treatments and customary therapeutic methods such as ritual practices and herbal teas also known as “Bush and Weed” (Duberry, 1973, p.1). The purpose of this study is to discuss herbs known as “Bush,” in Montserrat, and how they benefit psychological wellbeing among the communities in Montserrat. A subsequent intention of this study is to address how an understanding of Montserratian Traditional Healing remedies can be beneficial to Western Psychological practice and enhance the efficacy for psychological healing. The gap in the literature indicates that few studies are examining mental health methods in …

Fine Roman Dining At Affordable Pompeian Prices: Reevaluating The Commercial Gardens Of Pompeii, Claire Campbell, Rhodora G. Vennarucci

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Previous scholarship has designated Roman gardens into binary otium or negotium designations; however, this research on Roman gardens suggests that these concepts often exist in spaces simultaneously. The reevaluation of commercial gardens in Pompeii presented in this article allows for an integrative analysis of garden spaces, which reveals that commercial gardens have coinciding qualities and functions with private elite gardens and that various trades were actively integrating these features into commercial settings to promote and financially supplement their businesses. This research challenges the assumption that non-domestic, commercial gardens only have qualities indicative of negotium and that garden spaces were not …

Western Region Health & Wellness Programming Efforts: Qualitative Results From A Three-Part Listening Session, Cris L. Meier, Lily Ward, Anders Van Sandt, Sue Schneider, Riana Gayle

All Current Publications

The purpose of this project was to understand the programming efforts and experiences of Extension professionals in the Western Region of the United States. The Health and Wellness Working Group team held a series of listening sessions with a closed cohort of Extension professionals, hoping to learn from each other while also building the foundation for future collaborations and conversations about health and wellness programing in the western region.

The objectives were to understand: (1) the state of health and wellness work in the western region, including the gaps and challenges, (2) the programs that currently exist and ways that …

Hanford Nuclear Site Cultural Resource Gis Analysis: A Case Study Investigating Pre-Contact Travel Networks And Site And Artifact Locations, Luciana R. Chester

All Master's Theses

This thesis uses Global Information Systems (GIS) to investigate travel networks and site locations on the Hanford Nuclear Site. I construct a spatially referenced base map of historical travel routes, compare amounts of areas with and without archaeological survey, and analyze the location of archaeological sites. Government Land Office maps (GLO’s) mapped trails between1860’s and 1890’s. GIS analysis helps calculate relative frequencies and the densities of site and artifact types within 2 km buffers along the Columbia River corridor and trails. Collaboration between agencies and tribes facilitates consultation on all matters related to Hanford, and shared management of data covering …

Seeing Community Values And Resistance In The Grave: Burial Practices At Terre Haute African Cemetery, Annabelle Julia Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis examines a group of 114 burials found within the Terre Haute African Cemetery in Midlothian, Virginia, using gender and resistance as frameworks through which to understand the relationships that members of the historically Black Huguenot Spring community had with the American funeral industry as it developed parallel to the cemetery’s use history from roughly 1800 to 1934. The movement for the beautification of death and increasing emphasis on material goods for funerary commemoration beginning in the nineteenth century did not occur in a vacuum; this work explores the ways in which Huguenot Springs community members chose to participate …

Embodied Feminism: An Ethnographic Study Of Abortion Access And Hopeful Praxis, Nicolette Tuttle

WWU Graduate School Collection

Reproductive justice is of critical concern in the United States, especially since the onslaught of abortion bans in 2019, this ethnographic study explores abortion access and activism through a feminist participatory action research (FPAR) approach during my internship at the Feminist Majority Foundation in Los Angeles, California and clinic escort volunteer work with L.A. For Choice. Embodied feminism, here, takes the shape of a qualitative study of abortion access as well as the praxis of scholar-activism. Themes of opposing biopolitical values among feminist and anti-choice activism, narratives of feminist activism, and creative expression and reflection inform this thesis with further …

Empowerment As A Birthright: Exploring The Power Of Informed Choice, Delaney Elizabeth Reece

WWU Graduate School Collection

Discussion of medical practice as a cultural experience is essential in understanding the disparities between biomedicine medical practice and evidentiary reports without medical intervention during childbirth and delivery such as the use of a midwife. Research, such as interviews, done about birth and birth experience may be able to highlight an individual's experience with these disparities. The history of birth care in the United States and the greater capitalist culture at large have greatly influenced the culture of birth today. Capitalist cultures are not consistent in every hospital or birth experience but remain in every hospital. They therefore also impact …

Nazi Stolen Art: Uses And Misuses Of The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

U.S. courts in Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”) cases must interpret a comprehensive statute which has been said to stand or fall on its terms. At the same time, in Nazi-looted art cases, they do not ignore entirely the backdrop of the U.S.’ adoption of international principles and declarations promising to ensure the return of such art. To some extent, such an undertaking has been incorporated into a statutory amendment of the FSIA. The years 2021 and 2022 have seen major developments in the FSIA both at the U.S. Supreme Court and in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in …

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

Articles

In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

Calls For Change: Seeing Cancel Culture From A Multi-Level Perspective, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Articles

Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend. Faculty accused of or caught using racist, sexist, or homophobic speech are increasingly met with calls to lose their positions, titles, or other professional opportunities. Such calls for cancellation arise from discreet social networks organized around an identified lack of accountability for social transgressions carried out in the professional school environment. Much of the existing discourse …

Theory Matters—And Ten More Things I Learned From Martha Chamallas About Feminism, Law, And Gender, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This Festschrift article celebrates the scholarship of Martha Chamallas, Distinguished University Professor and Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law Emeritus of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, and one of the most impactful scholars of feminist legal theory and employment discrimination of her generation. Mining the insights of Chamallas’s body of work, the article identifies ten core “lessons” relating to feminism and law drawn from her scholarship and academic career. It then weaves in summaries and synthesis of her published works with discussion of subsequent legal and social developments since their publication. These lessons (e.g., feminism is plural; …

Changing Every Wrong Door Into The Right One: Reforming Legal Services Intake To Empower Clients, Jabeen Adawi

Articles

It’s recognized that people affected by poverty often have numerous overlapping legal needs and despite the proliferation of legal services, they are unable to receive full assistance. When a person is faced with a legal emergency, rarely is there an equivalent to a hospital’s emergency room wherein they receive an immediate diagnosis for their needs and subsequent assistance. In this paper, I focus on the process a person goes through to find assistance and argue that it is a burdensome, and demoralizing task of navigating varying protocols, procedures, and individuals. While these systems are well intentioned from the lawyer’s perspective, …

Re-Presenting People: Critically Reviewing Existing Imagery Of Traditional Coast Salish Lifeways And Creating New Images, Beatrice Franke

WWU Graduate School Collection

Images are powerful communicators of ideas because they shape how people perceive and understand the past (Moser 1996, Arnold 2005). It is important to critically look at them with a decolonizing lens to ensure that the artists who make these images and the authors that use them do not imply harmful or disrespectful ideas about the people depicted. For my thesis, I critically examine how archaeologists and other authors present ideas about indigenous Northwest Coast and Coast Salish people’s traditional lifeways through images. By looking at existing images from my perspective as an archaeologist and artist and including perspectives from …

Good Dog. An Osteometric And Morphometric Analysis Of Coast Salish Dog Breeds From Archaeological Sites 45wh1, 45wh9, 45wh17, 45wh34, Courtney Jo Paton

WWU Graduate School Collection

The first domesticates, dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), have a complex, 15,000-year long relationship with humans. Dogs are adaptable mammals, filling a variety of roles such as, but not limited to, companions, hunting aids, guardians, draft animals, and food. Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological data from the Pacific Northwest reveal a deep human-canine relationship for indigenous societies in this region, and one of best documented cases of indigenous dog breeds. Two breeds have been documented in the Coast Salish area, a Wool dog and Village dog in ethnographic accounts, and in the archaeological record (Crockford 1997). The presence of both breeds has …

Norwegian American Language Identity, Else Lindsey

WWU Graduate School Collection

Heritage language is a powerful register through which heritage as a political construct is created and an individual’s language and ethnic identity are thereby performed. Norwegian, the focus language of this thesis, has benefited from formal structural racism in the form of United States immigration laws as well as pervasive white privilege which places heritage languages of BIPOC groups at a significant disadvantage and marks speakers of those languages as deficient. Although Norwegian has, as a result of this privileged position, been less vulnerable to the language shift which affects many of the world’s languages, the language ideologies which Norwegian …

Wattpad As An Online Medium For Contemporary Folklore, Alisha Tess Helton

Online Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses its discussion within the discipline of folklore by identifying Wattpad.com as a contemporary medium of online folkloric content. Wattpad provides its users with a text-based—and sometimes multimodal—means of communication via its interface that mimics traditional communication as we know it—a means founded in orality, literacy, and the archive. Wattpad users are creating new folktales that are nuanced with elements from Wattpad’s archive, which characterizes contemporary online folklore in a way that has not been fully explored. This project serves to identify the past and present discourses that inform such a discussion while also explaining the intricacies of …

Black Feminist Citational Praxis And Disciplinary Belonging, Bianca C. Williams

Publications and Research

What does a Black feminist citational practice look and feel like? This contribution to the #CiteBlackWomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: First, that Black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions Black women scholars contribute to the academy; and second, that anthropology’s neglect and erasure of Black feminist anthropologists relates to disciplinary (un)belonging. I explore how citation and “disciplinary belonging” influence hiring practices, doctoral training, intellectual genealogies, and what is valued as anthropological knowledge.

Hinterlands To Cities: The Archaeology Of Northwest Mexico And Its Vecinos, Matthew C. Pailes, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Tis approachable book is a comprehensive synthesis of Northwest Mexico from the US border to the Mesoamerican frontier. Filling a vital gap in the regional literature, it serves as an essential reference not only for those interested in the specific history of this area of Mexico but western North America writ large. A period-by-period review of approximately14,000 years reveals the dynamic connections that knitted together societies inhabiting the Sea of Cortez coast, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, and the Sierra Madre Occidental. Networks of interaction spanned these diverse ecological, topographical, and cultural terrains in the millennia following the demise of …

Book Review Of Early Farming And Warfare In Northwest Mexico (Robert Jarratt Hard And John R. Roney), Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Like many archaeologists working in northern Mexico and the US Southwest, I have eagerly anticipated this volume and its reporting of the Early Agricultural (Middle-Late Archaic) occupation in northwestern Chihuahua. Primarily, it documents the research conducted by the coauthors over several years at sites known as cerros de trincheras, or terraced hills. These were massive construction projects resulting in habitational terraces built by early maize farmers who began to settle in the Casas Grandes River Valley and surrounding areas more than 3,000 years ago.

Redating Paquimé And The Convento Site Sixty Years After The Joint Casas Grandes Expedition In Northwestern Mexico, Samuel Jensen, Michael T. Searcy, Meradeth Snow

Faculty Publications

Debates continue regarding the rise of the Late Prehistoric (post-AD 1200) city of Paquimé in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico. Unfortunately, the established chronology of the site was flawed due to incorrect interpretations of dendrochronological samples that lacked cutting dates (i.e., outer rings). While Dean and Ravesloot (1993) were able to determine this mistake through a reanalysis of the original chronological sequence, no attempts have been made to revise the chronology using new dates. This poster reports the results of new radiocarbon dates analyzed from samples of human remains found at Paquimé during the Joint Casas Grandes Expedition from 1958 to 1961. …

A Reanalysis Of Population Dynamics In The Casas Grandes Region Of Northern Mexico Using Mitochondrial Dna, Meradeth Snow, Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

The Casas Grades region in northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, is ideally situated to explore the notion of contact between the Southwest/Northwest and Mesoamerica, as it lies geographically in the borderlands where traditions of both culture areas were practiced. In order to explain these ties, past researchers have suggested the flourishing Casas Grandes population in the thirteenth century AD was caused by migrants from Mesoamerica, as first suggested by Di Peso in his pochteca hypothesis. Others, such as Lekson and his Chaco Meridian hypothesis, suggest migration from the north. Mitochondrial genetic data from earlier and later time periods provides the ability to …