Browsing by Subject "Indigenous Peoples"

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    First We Must Consider Manoomin/Psiŋ: Impacts of Climate and Land Cover Change on Wild Rice
    (2023) Nyblade, Madeline
    In the upper Laurentian Great Lakes region, Indigenous communities have experienced declines of wild rice (Ojibwemowin: Manoomin; Dakodiapi: Psiŋ; Latin: Zizania palustris), a sacred aquatic plant and food central to their culture. Through tribal-university collaboration, we analyzed Manoomin/Psiŋ density and harvest data along with case studies to show Manoomin/Psiŋ available for tribal harvest has declined regionally by 6±4% to 7±2% per year, complicated by local multi-year cycles and relationships. Our analysis of this data in relation to key environmental conditions reveals both climate and land cover change as drivers of this decline. Increasing precipitation during early summer, as well as decreasing winter temperatures, snowfall, and lake ice, with the changing climate all negatively impact Manoomin/Psiŋ density. Land cover change with U.S. colonization causes harm as well: the resulting increased croplands, pastures, and urban areas, as well as the shifting forest types, all negatively impact Manoomin/Psiŋ. This decline has infringed on Indigenous lifeways by reducing off-reservation harvest by Indigenous people, a right guaranteed by treaties with the US government. Since time immemorial, Indigenous nations have been taking care of Manoomin/Psiŋ, charting a course of Manoomin/Psiŋ stewardship that can be followed to protect this important being in the face of threats from climate and land cover change.
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    “Stories As Theories”: Illuminating Human Rights Education Through The Narratives Of Human Rights Educators
    (2023-08) Rudelius-Palmer, Kristi
    The purpose of this study is to examine the narratives of human rights education (HRE) activist educators to contribute to the formation of an important yet less recognized history of the evolution of human rights that foregrounds education and activism. As a human rights activist educator who has worked in the field for decades, my concern is that the United Nations (UN) legal-political, nation-state orientation to human rights and HRE has resulted in a myopic view of human rights history, centered on the evolution of UN human rights law and political monitoring systems as the primary ways of measuring the impact of human rights across the globe. The disclosed experiences and actions of activist educators—their stories—which I see as theories (Brayboy, 2005; Million, 2011) reveal the complexity of land, Indigenous, transformative storywork (Archibald, 2008) within holistic Human Rights Learning (HRL). This study examines the transformative and creative nature of HRL through the personal lived experiences of four HRE activists in the Philippines and the United States, Lisa Bellanger, Cheryl Daytec-Yañgot, Loretta Ross, and Feliece Yeban, who often at great risk have engaged in the field for 25 years or more. These activist educators, working as Co-Creators in this study, have used HRE as a vehicle to address injustices by learning for and through human rights while persisting in the field. I have used the term Co-Creators to indicate deep collaboration in fellowship with human rights educators and as one myself who works alongside them as a colleague and researcher. Through their stories, this dissertation shows concrete contributions of HRE and HRL by explicitly addressing the impacts of the tensions of sovereignty, nation-state identities, treaty rights, colonization, justice movements, climate change, and global pandemics. By understanding how HRE has been shaped in the past, how it is practiced in the present, and how it is envisioned in future initiatives, HRE fields can be better positioned to further research, construct formal and non-formal education programs, and uplift narratives to positively impact the promotion, protection, and fulfillment of hope, joy, and love for all our relations.