Digital Commons Network^™

Black Deathways: An African Methodist History, 1829-1916, Christina M. Varney

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study will focus on the transformations of death practices and the shifting roles of death workers from 1829-1916. The Postbellum portion of this study will focus on African Methodist communities in the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee as practices and people moved West to the states of Montana, Colorado, and California. These practices experienced changes as a result of rising literacy rates, the establishment of Black churches, and from the movement of Black people within the South. More changes occurred with the creation of mutual aid societies and Black-owned funeral homes. Black funeral directors …

How Aquatic Insects Mitigate Temperature-Oxygen Challenges Via Behavioral, Morphological, And Physiological Plasticity, Jackson H. Birrell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

How do organisms respond to environmental challenges and to environmental change? These questions occupy a central place in ecology and answering them will help us to understand why species live where they do, how organisms are affected by human activities, and, ultimately, how to choose among alternative conservation strategies. These questions are difficult, however, for two reasons. First, environmental challenges often involve multiple, interacting stressors. Second, individual responses can be modified by behavioral, morphological, and physiological plasticity. My dissertation investigates how interactions between temperature and oxygen influence the performance and survival of aquatic insects and how plasticity allows individuals to …

Impacts Of Eating Disorder Recovery On Communication Of Identity Through Food, Rosemary Willett Jeter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Using the Communication Theory of Identity as a framework, the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how the experience of eating disorder recovery (EDR) impacts one’s communication of identity through and about food, and perceptions of others’ communication about and through food. Purposive sampling yielded 20 adult participants who self-identified as having been in EDR for at least one year. Results from a phronetic iterative data analysis of semi-structured interviews yielded several themes. When considering how EDR influences personal communication through food, main themes include: (a) the inability to share meals creates a gap between the enacted and relational …

Building Bridges: Supervisors’ Management Of Competency Questioning, Arianna Camille Vokos

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Clinical supervision is an opportunity for supervisors to influence and shape the education of counselors-in-training. Exchanging feedback between supervisees and supervisors can be a challenging aspect of supervision and can have profound impact on the efficacy of supervision, the safety of clients, and the supervision relationship. Understanding the experience and process that supervisors go through when their competence is questioned could be critical to understanding the supervision relationship. Successful management of competency questioning contributes to the efficacy of the supervision relationship, better protection of clients, and positive development of supervisees. Using grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014), this qualitative study addresses …

The Effect Of Place Attachment And Leisure Identity On Stewardship Participation In The Rattlesnake National Recreation Area And Wilderness, Elena Rene Thomas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As outdoor recreation participation increases in the U.S., and many communities in the American West are experiencing rising amenity migration, park and protected area managers face significant challenges to balance both providing for visitors’ desired experiences and protecting the natural resources on which these experiences depend. Confronted with declining management capacity, agencies are increasingly looking to engage both newer and established recreationists in stewardship behaviors to help maintain these areas and improve human-environment relationships. One barrier to community involvement in stewardship efforts is the need to better understand the connection between recreationists’ antecedent conditions and their motivations to steward. Past …

Theory Of Care, Gabriella Ann Graceffo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

With a backdrop of the body and its inner forms, Theory of Care is a collection of poems and lyric excerpts that explores themes of queer sexuality, physical and mental health, etymology, desire, and physicality. It coheres moments of internal reckoning with an exploration of how trauma lives in the body, particularly the queer femme body. By accessing various landscapes including the medical sphere, family dynamics, and the social environments of the South, the collection grapples with different vernaculars to question how the language used to discuss (or dismiss) trauma dramatically alters the perception of those experiences.

Equitable Pharmacogenetic Testing Implementation For Rural And Underserved Populations, Shayna Killam

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Pharmacogenetic testing has potential to transform healthcare, yet implementation strategies have been limited to major academic medical centers serving metropolitan communities and large health systems. In contrast, rural, community-based health systems are slow to implement these advances, threatening to exacerbate existing healthcare disparities for rural populations. A majority of Montanans live in rural areas, with unique challenges in providing access to pharmacogenetics.

We have established partnerships with three clinical sites who serve rural, underserved populations including American Indian, pediatric, and low socioeconomic status patients. We conducted a needs assessment for pharmacogenetic testing implementation by interviewing 48 key stakeholders. Interview questions …

Training And Utility Of Mindfulness Among School Psyschologists, Emily Ann Hattouni

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The role of school psychologists (SPs) includes consulting with parents, teachers, and working directly with students. Researchers have demonstrated a high rate of burnout among professionals in this field (e.g., Huebner, 1992; Schilling et al., 2018). Mindfulness-based interventions have been found to be useful to address symptoms of burnout among other professionals (e.g., physicians: Luken & Sammons, 2016). Mindfulness has also been theorized as particularly useful for the myriad roles that school psychologists work within (Alahari, 2017). Although research into the utility of mindfulness have found positive effects for students within the schools (e.g., Felver et al., 2016), no research …

In The Shadow Of The Megadrought: Opportunities And Challenges For Addressing Loss And Damage From Climate Change In Chile And Eastern Montana, Usa, Elizabeth Grace Tobey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As the impacts of anthropogenic climate change mount, climate- related harms, both economic and non-economic, occur across every inhabited continent and disproportionately affect the world’s most vulnerable people. In response, the Loss and Damage agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has emerged to address those climate-related harms that exceed human capacities for mitigation and adaptation. Significant questions remain regarding how losses and damages emerge across the globe and how Loss and Damage policy will be implemented to address those impacts. This thesis explores two specific questions: (1) national-level Loss and Damage policy mechanisms; and (2) perceptions …

A Reynolds Number Based Sampling Technique For 3-D Vector Fields In Computational Fluid Dynamic Environments, Trent James Schweitzer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Effective visualization of unsteady, time-dependent vector fields in a virtual environment is not a trivial task. This is due to the fact that most visualization techniques require the user to have a prior understanding of how the vector field will behave to set the parameters used to create the visualization. In this thesis we will take air flow data from a computational fluid dynamic simulations to calculate the amount of turbulence (represented as Reynolds numbers) to identify regions of interest. We then calculate wind pathlines that will intersect with these points sampled from these regions. We address the issue of …

Investigating Teacher Perceptions Of Montana Kindergarten To Second-Grade Play-Based Learning Practices During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Erin N. Ellis

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The purpose of this mixed-method study was to examine early elementary education teachers' perceptions of the presence, feasibility, and desirability to implement play-based learning, including free play, guided play, and games in Montana public school K-2 classrooms, and the impact COVID-19 health and safety protocols had on the implementation of play-based learning compared to the previous year (before COVID-19). Using a sequential explanatory research design, teachers self-reported their ability to implement play-based learning, including playbased learning forms, activities, and materials before the COVID-19 pandemic (retrospectively) compared to during COVID-19 and the impact the COVID-19 health and safety protocols had on …

24-Hour Total Energy Expenditure During Ultra-Endurance Cross-Country Cycling, Patrick S. Dodds

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have used the doubly labelled water (DLW) method to evaluate the total energy expenditure (TEE) during Ironman, ultra-marathon trail runs and competitive road cycling. However, the technique has not been applied to a 24-hour cross-country mountain bike event. This case study examined the TEE, cycling metrics and ad libitum nutrient/fluid intake in a trained male cyclist during a 24-hour cross-country mountain bike race. A trained male cyclist (41 y, 74.1 kg, 172.4 cm) received an oral dose of DLW prior to the 24-hour event for the calculations of TEE and water turnover (rH₂O). Nude body …

Predicting Groundwater Flow And Transport With Numerical Models And Environmental Tracers, Nicholas E. Thiros

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Groundwater flow and transport processes strongly influence and are inextricably linked to the integrated hydrologic and biogeochemical dynamics within catchments. Yet, groundwater system understanding and model predictions remain uncertain owing to the unknown subsurface property distributions, errors in atmospheric forcing conditions, and limited observations to constrain groundwater fluxes. In this dissertation we investigate the use of environmental tracer observations that inform hydrological processes over broad timescales to reduce uncertainties in groundwater transport prediction uncertainties. We further develop environmental tracer data assimilation and uncertainty quantification techniques to enhance integrated hydrological and groundwater process understanding at two distinct field sites: a semi-arid …

Seeding Resilience: An Examination Of The Impacts Of A Seed Saving Network In Western Montana, Christina Leas

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Seed saving, a worldwide practice as old as agriculture, continues even in the context of an increasingly industrialized and globalized agricultural system. While some scholarship has focused on informal seed saving practices that continue to thrive in the global South, few studies have examined the dynamics of these practices in the global North, particularly in the American West. Informal seed saving systems have implications for the resilience of agroecosystems. The concept of resilience has become an important framework for conceptualizing agroecosystems as social-ecological systems, both in scholarship and in policy. However, operationalizing the concept of resilience, particularly in agroecology research, …

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 …

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 …

Wilderness As An Aesthetic Concept, Nathan A. Pagel

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this paper I argue that many of the philosophical problems with the concept of wilderness can be mitigated by thinking of wilderness as an aesthetic concept rather than as a real feature of the world or a special metaphysical category. In Section 1, I respond to arguments for wilderness no longer being extant in the world as well as being conceptually contradictory by examining the ways in which people continue to experience wilderness in spite of these challenges. To resolve this tension, I offer an account of wilderness as an aesthetic concept, that is, as something that cannot be …

American Indian Traditional Ceremonial Practices: Addressing Problem Substance Use In A Multi-Tribal Urban Community, D'Shane Barnett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Background: Traditionally, American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities and individuals held ecological knowledge that supported holistic wellness for their tribal members through a variety of medicines and ceremonies. Contemporary Western healthcare systems have largely alienated AIAN people from access to traditional ceremonial practices (TCPs). Despite decades of cultural adaptation of evidence-based practices (EBPs), the deleterious effects of historical and intergenerational trauma are widely documented. This includes disproportionately high rates of problem substance use in both reservation and urban AIAN community settings.

Purpose: In contrast to deficit-based paradigms, Reziliency posits that protective factors, approaches, and methods used within AIAN communities …

Examining The Interpersonal Psychological Theory Of Suicide In A Sample Of Individuals With Psychosis, Jennifer Villa

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Psychotic disorders confer high risk for suicidality. Previous research has found the symptom clusters of psychosis to have differential relationships with risk for suicidal ideation and behavior. Despite evidence for unique determinants of suicide among people with disorders on the psychosis spectrum, little research has examined theoretical models of suicide that aim to explore the transition from suicidal thoughts to behavior in this population. The Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide (IPTS) may be particularly useful in delineating this transition, as the constructs underlying the IPTS overlap with symptoms and experiences salient in people with psychosis. We examined baseline data from an …

Trailing Fire: Working In The Woods And The Future Of Forests In A Chaotic Climate, Claire Kilchrenan Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Our national conversation about wildfire is shifting. As wildland fires become larger, more frequent, more severe, and more expensive—and as climate change and land-use patterns drive the trend toward more fire—we’re scrambling to find a different paradigm for engaging with fire. Scientists now call this age of increasingly extreme burning the Pyrocene, and we’re just beginning to grapple with its impacts on the way we work, play, and live on the land.

As a longtime trail worker for the U.S. Forest Service, I’ve spent hundreds of days clearing trails in burned forests. In Trailing Fire, I draw on these …

Hunger On The Richest Hill: A Case Study Of Linked Historical And Contemporary Food Insecurity In Butte, Montana, Elizabeth Anne Bett Osborn

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

On the “Richest Hill on Earth” or Butte, Montana, a dilemma of food insecurity persists. This dilemma broadly consists of limited access to affordable, healthy, and appropriate nutrition for the city’s urban population. This thesis constructs a historically and contextually-informed understanding of food insecurity in Butte since the city’s establishment in 1864. Food insecurity research largely lacks place-specific consideration of historical events and processes which contribute to and reinforce the root factors contributing to food insecurity. Butte was once a thriving copper-mining boom town yet saw the decline of its primary industry in the late 20^th century. In 2020, …

Moccasin Economics: Entangled Museum Stories Of Niitsitapi Women, Labor, And Footwear, Michaela Ann Shifley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation emphasizes how anthropologists can use museum collections as anthropological data banks (Sturtevant 1973) to uncover the unwritten histories of objects, people, and cultures. I show how museum collections are repositories for the untold stories of Native women’s economic histories and how objects embody women’s critical contributions to the economic, spiritual, and cultural survival of their communities throughout time. To reveal the complex, hidden labor processes involved in historical and contemporary moccasin-making, I draw on interviews with contemporary Niitsitapi moccasin-makers, as well as object-based analyses of 109 pairs of moccasins from five museum collections and numerous archival documents and …

Bacteriophage Infection Induces Intracellular Polyamine Accumulation As A Defense Mechanism In Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, Camilia Dornelles De Mattos

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cells are constantly monitoring their extracellular environment for danger signals that warn of imminent threats. When cells are killed by physical or other non-infectious injuries, they release concentrated intracellular molecules into the surrounding area. These danger-associated molecules alert other cells that danger is nearby. When cells are killed by pathogens, they release both damage-associated and pathogen-associated signals. Both eukaryotic and bacterial cells sense these molecules and make threat assessments of cellular injury. Here, I show that lysis of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and other bacterial species releases high concentrations of polyamines that are in turn taken up by surviving cells in a …

A Comparative Analysis Of Repatriation Of Native American Artifacts And Human Remains Laws In Montana, Usa And Alberta Canada, Helen Cryer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

ABSTRACT: Native American and Indigenous communities across the United States and Canada have lost an extensive amount of human remains and sacred artifacts to non-Native people exhuming Native American and Indigenous burial sites that may have been dug up for personal gain, stolen, placed in museums, or left in the hands of non-Native collectors. The repatriation of human remains and sacred artifacts to Native nations can be a lengthy, political, and challenging process yet it is worth the effort for Native people. Native American advocacy and evolving public sentiment toward Native people have led to legislative advancements in the United …

Structural Mechanism Of Nuclear Receptor Biased Agonism, Michelle Deanna Nemetchek

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Nuclear receptors are a class of ligand-activated transcription factors that affect gene expression. Pharmaceutical drugs that target nuclear receptors make up (13%) of all therapeutics prescribed in the United States. Unlike signaling pathways, nuclear receptors have a wide variety of binding partners that can bind upon activation of a nuclear receptor to upregulate gene transcription. These binding partner proteins, called “coregulators”, are diverse in function. However, the determinants of their binding to nuclear receptors, and how binding to certain coregulators over others occurs, is not known.

In this work, we examine how ligands create a preference for nuclear receptors to …

Invasive Earthworms In The Crown Of The Continent System And Implications For Land Management, Meghan Elizabeth Scott

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The United States contains invasive earthworms originating from Europe and Asia; the majority are European lumbricids. Direct introduction occurs primarily through human activity and, once established, earthworm populations are difficult to address. When exotic earthworms engage in bioturbation, they negatively alter subterranean food webs and nutrient cycling by disrupting soil layering systems. The most prominent form of physical alteration is the change and removal of the topmost organic layer. This disruption is associated with altered nitrogen and carbon cycling, as well as altered forest floor plant communities.

The Crown of the Continent ecosystem is located in southwestern Alberta, southeastern British …

Current(S), Austin Raye Navrkal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Current(s) addresses my perspective of the subtle changes that happen as the seasons slowly transition to act as a metaphor for the subtle changes that have happened to me over the course of my time in graduate school.

The Introduction Of Veteran Service Organizations To The State Of Montana’S Department Of Corrections, Zachary C. Rehm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Veteran Service Organizations (VSO) exist throughout the United States and serve veterans, service members, dependents, and survivors. Some VSOs provide programming for veterans in their communities, such as job fairs, organizing fundraising events, raising awareness around the issues affecting veterans, assisting in the application process, and assisting in rehabilitation efforts. The American Legion specifically was chartered by Congress in 1919 as a 'patriotic veterans organization'. Since its conception, the Legion stands at nearly 2 million in membership, scattered throughout 13,000 posts worldwide. Most recent studies from the Justice of Bureau Statistics indicate that 8% of all incarcerated inmates are United …

Functional And Pharmacological Characterization Of Glun3-Containing Nmda Receptors, Nirvan Rouzbeh

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors are a member of ionotropic glutamate receptors that mediate excitatory neurotransmission across the mammalian central nervous system. NMDA receptors are organized into heterotetrameric assemblies containing two obligatory GluN1 subunits and two GluN2A-D, or GluN3A-B subunits. GluN1 and GluN3A-B bind glycine or D-serine, whereas GluN2A-D bind glutamate. The structural, functional, and pharmacological investigation of GluN1/3 NMDA receptors has been greatly hindered by their unconventional properties such as impermeability to Ca2+, insensitivity to the voltage-dependent block by Mg2+, and robust desensitization upon binding their endogenous agonist glycine. Another major barrier in GluN3 research has been the lack of selective …

Lidar-Landsat Covariance For Predicting Canopy Fuels, Margaret D. Epstein

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Managing wildfires in the western United States is becoming increasingly complex. Visualizing and quantifying canopy structures allows fire managers to both plan for fire and track recovery. Light detecting and ranging, or LiDAR can measure forests in three dimensions, but has limited spatial and temporal coverage. LiDAR-Landsat covariance uses machine learning to fill in the spatial and temporal gaps of LiDAR coverage with supplemental Landsat imagery. However, in order to capture real forest dynamics, a model needs to be stable enough to detect long term trends, sensitive to episodic disturbance, and general enough to work on multiple landcovers. The purpose …