Browsing by Subject "Indigenous"
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Item An Approach To Nutrition Education For Urban American Indians In The Twin Cities(2017-05) Pine, Yeoun-JeeAmerican Indians in the Twin Cities make up a diverse and geographically dispersed urban community. Historical experiences of colonization, through treaties, allotments, reservations, relocation, and dependency on commodity foods, have had a lasting impact and adverse consequences to health. Too often nutrition education makes little mention of this, if at all. With Indigenous knowledge as a framework, Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), and Action Research (AR) hold potential benefit to the community. This thesis presents the building of relationships through engagement with community members and American Indian organizations that, over time, led to three distinct projects: a vision for a Native food hub, guidelines for culturally appropriate nutrition education for SNAP-Ed Community Nutrition Educators (CNEs), and development of culturally appropriate recipes for heirloom Dakota flour and hominy corn. Grounded on American Indian epistemology and axiology, these projects unveiled knowledge of the collective already held within the community.Item Beast Of Many Names: Cattle, Conflict, And The Transformation Of Indigenous Florida, 1519-1858(2022-04) Herbert, JasonBeast of Many Names argues that cattle sat at the epicenter of environmental and societal transformations as well as conflict between Indigenous people and Euroamerican empires in Florida between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This dissertation argues that cattle were a motivating factor in nation building in what became the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and played a critical role in both American aims to take the peninsula as well as Seminole resistance efforts. Further, the dissertation argues that cattle filled a niche left by the departure of other large megafauna, and that feral cattle populations helped to transform landscapes throughout the peninsula.Item Economies of Plunder: The Case of Rosewood Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Southern Belize(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2014-04-28) Zempel, ChristopherNew middle income countries in the Global South are leveraging established neocolonial structures of dependence to extract raw resources from other countries in the Global South. In Belize, China’s demand for tropical hardwoods has come face-to-face with an indigenous land rights movement. Using the extraction of rosewood from Belize as a case, this paper explores the following questions: (1) What do new patterns of neocolonial extraction look like? (2) Who are the actors at both ends of the relationship? (3) What tools have indigenous communities used to protect their economic and self-governing rights? and (4) Have they been successful?Item Educational Expectations in an Urban American Indian Community: A Phenomenological Investigation(2017-05) Vertigan Swerdfiger, JacquelineEducational Expectations in an Urban American Indian Community: A Phenomenological Investigation. This investigation uses narrative to explore the educational experiences and expectations of 10 urban, Midwestern United States American Indians. Results include insights into community-based evaluation, suggest an emerging field of Indigenous Educational Evaluation, and offers a model and suggestions that may help guide future evaluations of educational programs serving American Indian students.Item The Emergence Of Human Rights In The Mayan World: Rural Church And Indigenous Activism In Guatemala, 1943-1983(2021-09) Tun Tun, HeiderThis dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach of History and Human Rights to discuss the organization and activism of Indigenous Catholic communities that preceded and shaped the human rights movement of the 1980s in Guatemala. By focusing on the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche from 1943 to 1983, I argue that the human rights movement in Guatemala that called attention to the country’s deep historical roots of racism and discrimination was the result of the activism carried out by Indigenous communities in connection to the Catholic Church. I use the term “Rural Church” to refer to these communities of Catholics from the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche that focused on enhancing the living conditions of the poor and marginalized; since the 1950s members of the Rural Church worked on organizing cooperatives, colonizing new lands, studying the structures of inequality, as well as advancing the teaching of the gospel. By tracing the concept of the Rural Church, this dissertation highlights the importance of rural society and the influence that marginalized and Indigenous communities had on the Catholic Church in Guatemala. This dissertation engages extensively with unpublished archival documentation including the local efforts of De Sol a Sol (“From Sunrise to Sunset”) and Ixim (“Corn” in Maya K’iche) which feature the efforts of Indigenous and local intellectuals to discuss the connections between race, ethnicity, class, and inequality. My archival approach is influenced by the Mayan cyclical view of time which highlights the survival of Mayan people despite numerous attempts of eradication and genocide against their communities.Item The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial Practice Among Mapuche Activists and Student Protesters in Santiago, Chile(2015-09) McKay, KellyThis project is a choreographic and historiographic analysis of practices by which contemporary activists in Santiago, Chile create new embodied frameworks for the production of space. I study the relationship between the ongoing Chilean student rebellion and the Mapuche rights movement by examining divergences between the respective spatial practices of protest undertaken by student protestors and Mapuche activists. By spatial practices, I mean the embodied activities through which people produce and alter space. While student protestors frequently make performative and discursive connections to Mapuche, I question whether these connections constitute political alignments or appropriations of indigeneity. In order to investigate whether student protest practices align with Mapuche activist political projects, I analyze the ways that both student protestors and Mapuche activists enact radical reconfigurations of space in the city of Santiago through their embodied practices. I identify various performative mechanisms by which student protestors and Mapuche activists produce and change space, including (but not limited to) choreographic restructurings, sonic interventions, and embodied reimaginings. My ethnographic work focuses on case studies in order to show the distinct embodied frameworks for the production of space posed by students, often in contrast to those posed by Mapuche. My historiographic work historicizes the spatial practices I identify through an analysis of protest focused on spatiality. While most scholarly treatments of student and indigenous social movements conceive of protest as deliberative political enunciations addressed to a state apparatus, my project proposes an understanding of protest as spatial practice. This focus on space allows for a careful analysis of the differences between the everyday embodied practices of activists in the respective movements.Item Exploring a Cultural Intervention's Influence on Sense of Belonging: Bringing Dakota Story into 6th and 10th Grade Social Studies Classrooms(2015-06) Peterson, TeresaResearch has determined the importance of sense of belonging on one's health and well-being. Furthermore, sense of belonging has been correlated to academic success. The persistent academic achievement gap in the American Indian student population afflicts both educational policy makers and classroom teachers. This community-based participatory action research project drew upon the recommendations of the American Indian community to establish partnerships with American Indian communities and the inclusion of American Indian representation in curricula. This project utilized a mixed methodology to investigate the pilot of a cultural intervention (i.e., a culturally-based curriculum built upon storytelling) in sixth and tenth grade social studies classrooms and explored its influence on American Indian student's sense of belonging. The results also assisted in improving the curriculum and effectively meeting the state's new mandate that calls for the inclusion of American Indian contributions in curricula.Item Illuminating Common Ground: Success Factors for Tribal Solar Energy Development(2023) LaValle, SarahTribal energy development is a complex multi-faceted topic. The objective of this work is to identify common themes across tribal solar energy deployment projects, focusing specifically on lessons learned and recommendations. Identifying these commonalities and learning from the experiences of tribes that have embarked in energy development efforts can help to inform the development of future tribal solar energy projects. A thematic qualitative analysis approach was used to analyze project reports and presentations for 41 tribal solar deployment projects funded by the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, applying a framework of success factors developed from the literature. The results of the qualitative analysis are described in four discrete parts: comprehensive and inclusive planning, fostering partnerships and collaboration, building capacity, and exercising and advancing tribal sovereignty. Each of the overarching themes inform recommendations for tribes to promote the success of solar projects.Item Indigenous Doulas: Empowering Their Communities(2021) Ness, Norensa M.Item Indigenous experience in Mexico: readings in the Nahua intellectual tradition.(2010-06) McDonough, Kelly ShannonSometimes unwittingly academic trends, disciplinary isolation, and narratives of nation-building have contributed to the exclusion of native voices from the literary and cultural history of Mexico. Literary anthologies mention the "great pre-Colombian civilizations," discussing the Popul Vuh and Aztec codexes, and ethnohistorians over the last thirty-some years have shed new light on indigenous intellectual work in the first centuries of the Colonial Period. But less is heard from indigenous people after this. Did they progressively cease to think, speak, and write poetically, abstractly, or philosophically after conquest? My dissertation discusses how Nahuas, heirs to one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous language in Mexico (Nahuatl), have indeed continued to work as intellectuals. However, as needs of specific communities changed, so did the role of the intellectual along with the genres, forums, tools, and discursive codes he/she used. To demonstrate these shifts, I trace four Nahua intellectuals over a period of nearly five hundred years, dipping into distinct historical time periods that markedly affected indigenous intellectual work. I begin with Nahua and Jesuit priest Antonio del Rincón, the first indigenous person in the Americas to write a grammar of his own native language, Arte mexicana (1595). Next, I discuss the rhetoric of nation-building during the nineteenth century, including the disappearance of indigenous people in the discourses of citizenship through the work of Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, Nahua politician, attorney, scholar of colonial Nahuatl texts, and Nahuatl teacher to Emperor Maximilian I. Moving to the early twentieth century, I highlight discourses of Social Darwinism manifested in the nation's resolve to deal with the "Indian problem" as read in the testimony of Doña Luz Jimenez, specifically her experience with assimilative schooling. Finally, I explore bilingual education in Mexico and the co-optation of indigenous peoples to promote assimilation in the latter half of the twentieth century. I focus on Ildefonso Maya Hernández's play Ixtlamatinij and a series of interviews with the author. In a move to reconnect the theorization with the people being theorized, I also read the texts in focus groups with Nahuas, some encountering their own cultural patrimony for the first time.Item Instructional Strategies for Supporting Oral Language Development in a Navajo Immersion Classroom: A Case Study.(2020-10) McKenzie, JamesThis descriptive case study identifies instructional strategies for supporting oral language development in a Grade 1 Indigenous (Navajo) immersion classroom. While immersion education is seen as one way to help reverse language shift, immersion students sometimes exhibit lower-than-expected speaking abilities (Cummins, 2014, Tedick & Lyster, 2020). To contribute to understating what instructional strategies may affect language development in Indigenous immersion contexts, this study uses classroom observation, video and audio recordings, field notes, pictures and interviews to examine pedagogical strategies used by a teacher. Findings reveal that an Indigenous (Navajo) teacher uses strategies common to world language and immersion education, as well as strategies related to distinctly Indigenous ways of being, to support oral language development. The study addresses implications for Indigenous immersion education, teacher education, and future research, and calls for more attention to strategies that promote oral language development in ways that align with Indigenous concepts of language.Item Miracle Survivors (Pisatsikamotaan): an indigenous theory on educational persistence grounded in the stories of Tribal College Students.(2009-04) HeavyRunner, IrisFor the last two hundred years, higher education for American Indians has been an Anglo institution involving compulsory Western methods of learning, reoccurring attempts to eradicate tribal culture, and high departure rates for American Indian students at mainstream institutions. In direct response to this history, American Indian leaders drew upon the philosophical framework of the “self-determination” movement of the 1960s to rethink the role of higher education. These leaders recognized the importance of post-secondary education and fostered among themselves the awareness that American Indian colleges could strengthen reservation economies and tribal culture without forcing the students to accept acculturation. In 1968, the Navajo Nation created the first tribally controlled community college - now called Dine’ College in Tsaile, Arizona. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reported in 1997, “[w]ithout question, the most significant development in American Indian communities, since World War II, is the creation of tribally controlled colleges.” The purpose of this study was to develop an Indigenous theory on educational persistence for American Indian students. This indigenous theory emerged from the stories of tribal college students, faculty, and staff. This qualitative study is twopronged: (1) what constitutes educational persistence in a tribal college setting and (2) how students believe they came to “persist” in the tribal college.Item Native+ Students Involved in Sex Trading: Data from the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey(2023-05) Johnston-Goodstar, Katie; Martin, Lauren; Rider, G. Nic; McMorris, Barbara; Filoteo, Montana; Brown, Camille; Hayes, Lenny; LaFrinier-Ritchie, Anne; Matthews, Nicole; O'Keefe, Beth; Perrote, Nigel; Arnold, Rayan; Freemont, Khaloni; King, Elvis; Maiingan, R J; Matthews, Kiora; Ohr, Jasper; Zephier, IlianaItem Persistencia de la cosmovisión y la concepción espacial indígenas en imágenes andinas de la religiosidad cristiana: una descripción de tres objetos culturales de los siglos XVII y XVIII en Perú(2013-09) Pilares, NellyThis dissertation involves an analysis of three Colonial Peruvian texts to argue that the religious images as treated in Guaman Poma de Ayala's Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno ; Juan de Espinosa Medrano's drama El hijo pródigo; and a well-known painting La Virgen del Cerro, reveal the persistence or presence of an Indian worldview; that the Indigenous signs and Inca's distribution of the space have a continued presence within the Andean-Christian religious vision. This work is anchored in a semiotic analysis of theater and painting; in the perspective of cultural hibridity advanced in the work of García Canclini, Gruzinski and Moraña and in the postcolonial perspective of Mignolo and Quijano.Item The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe(2023-08) Annis, AmberAbstractMy dissertation project is an examination of the militarization of reservation land, the appropriation of water, and the exploitation of tribal sovereignty of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. I argue that acquisition of the tribe’s resources for a military gunnery range and for a national damming project was fundamental to U.S. nation-building between the end of WWII and through the Cold War. My dissertation is an inherently American Studies and American Indian Studies project in regards to the various methodologies and sources I am employing. However, I also draw heavily from the fields of ethnohistory, history, and autoethnography. I have framed my project around four chapters that will move chronological in order. Beginning with a historical overview of the tribe, I shift to examining the air-to-air gunnery range and from there I move to telling the story of the damming of the Missouri River and the effects this damming project had on the land and on the people. From there I turn my attention to the community and focus on an environmental tribal program that spent years and millions of dollars in pursuit of mitigation of the gunnery range and the damming project. I end with an examination of concepts of nationhood, expressions of sovereignty and memory among the Lakota people of Cheyenne River. By placing Indian people at the center of my conversation I am investigating the manner in which American Indian people and resources were fundamental to America’s national identity. By highlighting these moments of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe our understandings of American Indian sovereignty, World War II and Cold War engagement, militarization, identity, mobility and nation to nation race-relations are greatly enhanced. The continued use of Lakota peoples resources, specifically land, on Cheyenne River have greatly influenced the development of the United States as a major player in the larger world and the sustained erasure of these histories of exploitation and disregard for sovereignty in dominant scholarship regarding public and foreign diplomacy perpetuates the misconception that Indigenous Studies is not central to postwar studies.Item We Are All Related: Contemporary Native American Literature and the Nonhuman Turn(2019-07) Majhor, SamanthaExamining the period of Native writing after the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (1990) alongside the ‘nonhuman turn’ in current critical theory, I examine the centrality of nonhuman beings and indigenous object ontologies in fiction and poetry by Native writers. My research locates indigenous philosophies of materiality deployed in contemporary literary works published since 1990 by Native writers including Louise Erdrich, Susan Power, Frances Washburn, Orlando White, Tommy Orange, Tommy Pico, and Heid Erdrich. I argue that the period since passage of the legislation is defined by calls for repatriation and redress in answer to a long history of dispossession and demands a reading of the culturally specific responses and indigenous orientations toward the material realities presented in these texts. The indigenous ontologies envisioned in these works, while tribally specific, voice a broader orientation that disrupts the binaries between the human and nonhuman, the object and subject, and the discursive and material. While Native American and Indigenous Studies regularly articulates the centrality of broad cross-being kinship networks, I want to highlight a tribally-specific articulation of the expansive kinship networks and responsibilities that speak to notions of being. This interdisciplinary comes out of the sustained vibrancy in Native literary criticism and Native American and Indigenous Studies and, even as it builds on the most recent avenues of critical inquiry, it owes much to the calls for tribal specificity and a recognition of the centrality of self-determination and sovereignty in the past twenty years of NAIS scholarship.