Browsing by Subject "activism"
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Item Gakaabikaang: White Earth Ojibwe Women and the Creation of Indian Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century(2020-05) Suarez, SashaThis dissertation is an historical examination of how White Earth Ojibwe women’s community organizing labor in twentieth-century Minneapolis, Minnesota created the necessary foundation on which later activism and Indigenous institutions were built. I use interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze how, between 1920 and 1975, urban White Earth Ojibwe women’s community organizing within informal, social networks was transformed and integrated into the predominantly white civic structures and systems of Minneapolis. By utilizing non-Indigenous community spaces and civic systems of funding, Ojibwe women were better able to further their own agendas in support of the urban American Indian community. My dissertation demonstrates how Ojibwe women were practicing a specific Ojibwe placemaking process that relied upon continuing cultural norms and practices of community responsibility. As such, I center Ojibwe women’s efforts concomitantly as labor and resistance to assimilation, arguing that methods of organizing community support extends conversations about activism beyond traditional on-the-ground political activism. This dissertation expands conversations on what it meant to be urban and Indigenous in the upper Midwest in the twentieth century and has implications for further studies of American cities as spaces of Indigenous presence, survival, and resistance. By approaching an urban American Indian history through a gendered, tribally-specific lens, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on settler colonialism in the twentieth century, and interrogates conversations on the gendered nature of urban Indigenous assimilation and activism and resistance.Item “I get it that you're worried about my school, but this is my education.” Connected literacies and critical pedagogies in anti-racist youth organizing(2019-08) Rombalski, AbigailIn the past half a decade, many youth in urban high schools have witnessed the raised racial and political consciousness of a nation on screens, in schools, and on the streets. Many students of color have already seen or felt school or state-sanctioned surveillance, violence, and segregation. Some white students in urban schools have begun to see their worlds differently and to ask how they, too, are implicated. In newly formed solidarities, urban youth have raised their voices to talk, to walk, to march, to meet, and to thrive in the streets, working collectively—and sometimes separately—towards a just future. Using an alternative format, this dissertation is structured as three separate but related papers. The first paper works to define youth activist pedagogies. The second paper explores the literacies of youth activists through the frames of connected literacies; freedom, struggle, and dialogism; and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993). The third paper examines youth-adult relationships and responsive participant observation within engaged research. As a whole, this dissertation examines the connected literacies and critical pedagogies of youth activists in urban schools, a unique group whose knowledges and activities are largely unknown or underutilized by teachers and schools. Through a two-year, youth-informed critical ethnographic study, informed by asset-based and participatory action research, I documented pedagogical and literacy activities of youth across interracial anti-racist youth groups in two urban high schools in the upper Midwest United States. The overall research questions of the study asked: How did interracial anti-racist youth groups frame literacies and learning; how did they learn; and how were literacies and learning connected to liberation? This study was youth-informed and connected across school, community, and digital space. I refused the dominant deficit discourses of urban education and youth, in order to see the strengths that were not only possible, but that already existed in youth knowledge, inquiry, and capacity. Interracial youth activists, led by BIPOC youth, mobilized throughout a major urban area, learning and leading in overlapping racial justice, arts, education, and Black liberation networks and activities. Critical race theories helped to illuminate the ways that activist youth pressed against racism while submerged within it. Across all three papers, and despite challenges, youth activists created ripple effects of consciousness raising and social change throughout themselves, their schools, and the city. Implications of this research suggest pedagogies, practices, and positioning to amplify youth-centered education in literacies for liberation.Item Mohican Archival Activism: Narrating Indigenous Nationalism(2018-06) Miron, RoseThis dissertation traces the creation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican tribal archive and related historical projects from 1968 to the present to show how the Mohican Nation has recovered and reclaimed authority over their historical materials and by extension, their history. I collectively refer to these multifaceted efforts over the last fifty years as “Mohican archival activism” and define this in the context of indigenous studies as the construction of an archival collection that assembles previously scattered sources, establishing indigenous nations as the premier resources on their own history and giving them authority over the assembly and retrieval of those historical materials. I argue that these actions are a strategic type of activism that resists settler-colonial policies that sought to separate Native peoples from their history, allows Mohican tribal members to create new historical narratives of their nation, and constitutes a form of Mohican nation-building by enabling the tribe to assert sovereignty over the collection and presentation of their own historical materials. By tracing the creation of a tribal archive and its mobilization in various projects, I demonstrate how tribal archives have the potential to challenge the control non-Native institutions often hold over indigenous histories and use newly assembled historical materials to counteract damaging representations of indigenous nations.Item Scholarly Balance: Engagement, Activism, and Rigor(2014-02-26) Brennan, Timothy; Hartmann, Douglass; Miller, Joanne; Pearson, Kathryn; Soss, Joss; Jacobs, LawrenceItem Symbol and Community as Activism: Techniques from the Tradition of the Indonesian Shadow Play and Their Potential Application with At-Risk Youth on St. Paul’s East Side(2017-12) Markell, Melinda S.Minnesota has been struggling to find a solution which places both students of color and white students at the same level of success in their schooling. Empowering students to communicate their concerns and therefore invest in the quality of their own schooling is key. This can be accomplished through a proposed curriculum which combines Wayang or Indonesian shadow plays, the power of symbol, and citizen professionalism. Students learn how Indonesians have used symbol in their plays to communicate social concerns and through citizen professionalism create a play of their own. The process gives students the opportunity to build community amongst themselves with the ultimate goal of addressing social concerns in a way that leads to solutions-based discussion.