Browsing by Subject "indigenous"
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Item Indigenous Language Revitalization using Virtual Reality(2021-05-12) Werner, ColtonWorking within the framework of the Indigenous Futures project, a collaborative research project between the University of Minnesota and three local Indigenous communities, this thesis explores the potential of using VR environments to facilitate Indigenous language revitalization and trans-Indigenous exchange, specifically on the topic of star knowledge and stories. I implemented a virtual night sky filled with Micronesian, Ojibwe and Dakota constellations. These constellations carry rich cultural histories, and their stories have been passed down through generations within each community, making them an ideal topic for trans-Indigenous exchange. 3D text can be incorporated into the environment to label the constellations directly in the virtual sky; however, this raises the question of how the constellations' written names should be represented. To understand this important design choice, I developed a series of visual prototypes, both in English and the respective Indigenous languages incorporating various scripts and symbols to depict each name. The prototypes also explore where and when to display these labels (i.e., side-by-side, overlapping, changing over time). In this way, the project serves as a case study of some of the many options available to Indigenous communities for representing written forms of language in VR. Early feedback from collaborating Indigenous scholars supports the potential of VR environments in this style to open the door to further conversations about the importance of language in Indigenous culture and suggests that using "morphable 3D labels" (those that change over time to depict multiple names for the same constellation) may provide a useful graphical tool for facilitating these conversations.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 Multiple Sovereigns and Transient Resources: Contested Ecosystems and Expanding Tribal Jurisdiction in the Great Lakes Region(2018-10) Matson, LauraIn the past sixty-odd years, Indigenous nations and tribal groups have increasingly expanded their authority and advanced their communities’ interests in the realm of environmental protection. Multiple Sovereigns and Transient Resources: Contested Ecosystems and Expanding Tribal Jurisdiction in the Great Lakes Region seeks to understand some of the ways in which tribes and inter-tribal groups in the Lake Superior region have extended their influence over, engagement with, and impacts on environmental management and resource regulation. In particular, this dissertation investigates how tribes have mobilized jurisdictional authority to demand a seat at the table in regulatory discussions that impact their reservations and the treaty-ceded territories in the region. In so doing, this dissertation builds an empirical record of some of the strategies and mechanisms that tribes have used to advance their environmental interests in practical terms. This empirical record forms the basis of a more sustained critical engagement with the concept of jurisdiction. Intervening in legal geography, political ecology, and Indigenous legal scholarship, this dissertation argues that contests over environmental jurisdiction are not just disputes about static administrative units within fixed governmental hierarchies, but also enroll the authority to interpret and define the law and its normative orders. Through interviews, participant observation, archival review, and doctrinal legal analysis, I demonstrate how jurisdiction is practiced and produced through the day to day acts of permitting, rule-making, enforcing regulatory standards, litigating conflicts, building infrastructures, degrading and restoring habitats, and negotiating between governmental entities. Tracing the jurisdictional expansions of the Indigenous “third sovereign” illuminates the particular ontologies that ground state and federal environmental regulatory practices, but also provides a set of alternatives for thinking about resource protection in an integrated, dynamic, and co-dependent ecosystem.Item Positive Mental Health: A Concept Mapping Exploration(2015-07) Kading, Margarette L.American Indian (AI) people experience higher rates of depressive symptoms, psychological distress, and poor mental health than non-Native Americans. Despite a 17.1% prevalence of Anishinabe (an indigenous people who live in the Midwest of the United States and Canada) adults living with type 2 diabetes and meeting the PHQ-9 cutoff for depression, half (51.3%) of those surveyed were flourishing according to Keyes' Mental Health Continuum--Short Form (MHC-SF). A unique paradox appears to exist for AI people more so than that documented for other groups: despite historical trauma, various social stressors, ongoing marginalization, and depression and chronic diseases, a disproportionately large number of AI people met criteria for flourishing mental health. In order to better understand Anishinabe concepts of mental wellness and the utility of the MHC in this population, the specific aim of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of indigenous interpretations of positive mental health (PMH) by engaging in a group concept mapping session with Anishinabe community members from two communities. The resulting concept map varied somewhat from the three aspects of PMH presented in Keyes' MHC-SF (emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing). According to the map, PMH included the following clusters: 1) Values Gained with Maturity, 2) Motivated, 3) Traditional Spirituality/Culture, 4) Culturally Competent/Accept Others, 5) Take Care of Self, 6) Financial Health/Organized, 7) Ethical/Moral Leadership, 8) Community, and 9) Family/Relationships. Many of the clusters were related at least in part to the MHC-SF, but some differences were evident. Additionally, themes of harmony and balance, resilience and coping, and connection and interconnectedness, while not found in the MHC-SF, were prominent aspects in this concept map, lending support to their importance in indigenous PMH. Overall, the theme of interconnection is key to understanding the results of the concept map. The focus of this study fulfilled calls for strengths-based (as opposed to deficit-based) research for indigenous people. This was significant not only for better understanding Anishinabe perspectives of PMH, but also for understanding the ways in which all groups of people can learn lessons about PMH through cross-cultural research.Item Time, Ecology And The Graphics Of The Borgia Group Of Codices(2024-07) Nair, SreekishenThis dissertation examines a selection of beautifully illustrated almanacs found in the Borgia Group of Codices: a set of sacred manuscripts drafted in Central Mexico by Indigenous scribes during the 14th-15th centuries ce (the Late Postclassic Period). A growing body of research demonstrates that these calendrical tools were used, in part, to record, organize, and tabulate data about seasonal ecology and the environment, here understood as vitally dynamic and intrinsically sacred. The information was archived through a sophisticated mode of visual communication, unique to Central Mexico, that combines glyphic, notational and pictographic signs with illustration. Contemporary studies have partially reconstructed this visual language using bilingual documents prepared by Indigenous scribes during 16th century, which incorporate both alphabetic Spanish and native glyphic entries. Drawing from these lines of research, I discuss Borgia Group almanacs whose graphical contents address agriculture, weather, and astronomy in terms of sacred calendrical cycles. I examine both the internal logic of their graphical language, and the external environment they describe, combing both inquiries with ethnohistoric data to construct a hypothesis for the social lives of the almanacs in their native contexts. I propose that priestly specialists compiled their ecological and astronomical observations into graphical archives that were referenced for managing vital civic concerns, such as agriculture or periodic environmental crises (e.g. drought or pestilence). Notable similarities among almanacs from different regions suggest that communities were sharing such data across wide geographies. The function of the ancient almanacs parallels governmental bulletins published in 18th century Guatemala that were compiled to manage potential locust outbreaks, researched by Martha Few (2013). This discussion contextualizes the sacred almanacs within Mexico’s Indigenous scientific scholarship as expressed through art, architecture, and landscape management. As sacred dossiers for ecological data, the almanacs in the Borgia Group comprise an archive that explains how their ancient authors experienced their environments. They thus enhance contemporary understandings of climate patterns, and present a sample of the rich, polyvocal scholarship that flourished in ancient Mesoamerica. This study is submitted in honor of the Indigenous authors of that archive, as well as their contemporary descendants.