Doctor of Education , University of Dayton, 2022, Educational Leadership

The Missing Murdered Indigenous Women Coalition of North Carolina (MMIW NC) has examined the relationships among local, state, county, tribal, and federal supportive and responsive systems, gaps in services, and barriers to care in North Carolina that contribute to violence against American Indian women, girls, and two-spirit. There are gaps in coverage due to databases not having racial categories for American Indian women to select what race they belong to, jurisdictional battles that occur when reservation residents are discovered or reported missing elsewhere, tribes' inability to exercise sovereignty and prosecute violent crimes such as rape. The MMIW NC Coalition is dedicated to creating a statewide initiative to convince the North Carolina General Assembly, North Carolina Department of Public Safety, North Carolina Attorney General's Office, governor of North Carolina, and Commission of Indian Affairs provides a database for the monitoring or public reporting of missing and murdered Indigenous women and create a task response responsible for gathering the data. Currently, no comprehensive, accessible, cross-jurisdictional database exists to record missing American Indian women in North Carolina.

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

This thesis is a selection of chapters from We Are Earth, a book-length work of creative nonfiction focused on regenerative agriculture—farming with nature and not against it. The narrative follows my travels to meet regenerative farmers across the United States and around the world. These farmers employ practices and philosophies acknowledging that humans are a part of an intertwined and complicated system that we cannot tame or manipulate. They see regenerative farming as a solution, which builds soil, promotes ecological diversity, provides people with meaningful lives and livelihoods, and sequesters carbon—maybe even enough to combat climate change. Agriculture is both political and environmental. It's a local and global act. To capture these dualities, the book is a mix of journalism, travel narrative, and memoir. By weaving the local with the global, I intend to show the reader how their daily lives, eating habits, and relationship with nature connect to issues of environmental and social justice.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2022, Educational Leadership

For the youth in many Indigenous and formerly colonized communities, Indigenous languages, epistemologies, and knowledge practices remain obsolete, ‘backward', and irrelevant to their contemporary identities, goals, and aspirations. Furthermore, educational systems and curricula in communities that were previously colonized fail to highlight and emphasize the value of Indigenous languages, epistemologies, and knowledge practices to contemporary issues, challenges, and future possibilities. This dissertation expands the scholarship on anti-colonial and African feminist approaches to recognizing Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as tools to challenge these assumptions across learning spaces. Using anti-colonial and African feminist theories as guiding frameworks, this dissertation undertakes a situated qualitative study that explores how six Ghanaian women conceptualize and use Indigenous epistemologies in their everyday practices and how these epistemologies offer possibilities and pathways to decolonize existing educational discourses and practices in Ghana. ‘Colonial' is used here to represent practices that over-generalize and represent Indigenous knowledge practices as negative, backward, and irrelevant to contemporary pedagogical and educational practices. The dissertation relies on information derived from individual conversations, focus groups, and the analysis of Indigenous artefacts that are mentioned in interviews and focus groups. Collectively, anti-colonial and African feminist frameworks help identify and critique oppressive, racist, and anti-Black discourses and practices within the educational system and curricula while highlighting the rich possibilities that epistemologies from Indigenous women offer to address contemporary challenges and inequities in the educational system. The study further draws on findings to develop the Adinkrahene and Apa Indigeneity frameworks to interpret and theorize about Indigenous knowledge and Indigeneity respectively. (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Educational Studies

This constructivist narrative inquiry thesis focuses on the stories Native American student-athletes share about their college choice, academic, and athletic experiences. I review existing literature on Native American student athletes' persistence and retention as well as college choice and environmental themes that support Native students and student-athletes. I then share my research design, including methodology, methods for story collection, and proposed methods for narrative analysis. The most common association by non-Native collegians between the phrases "Native American" and "college athletics" is any number of offensive college mascots. Rarely do non-Native people think of Native American student-athletes or consider what it means to be Native and a college student competing in intercollegiate athletics. Using narrative inquiry and Tribal Critical Race Theory as a theoretical framework, I elevate the throughlines within the Native American student-athlete collegiate experience and suggest best practices for both —Higher Education Administration and Athletics—by listening to and understanding Native American student-athletes' experiences in choosing a college/university and their athletic and academic experiences while attending an NCAA Division institution. The findings of this study indicate Native American student-athletes are unfamiliar with the athletic recruiting process and Native American campus resources have a positive influence on the Native American student-athlete experience. Recommendations are provided.

MA, Kent State University, 2022, College of the Arts / School of Art

Much of the art historical discourse surrounding the work of contemporary Native artists has used language that maintains an exoticizing or othering lens, and that critiques Native artists against a Euro-American idea of static cultural authenticity located in the past. In the context of the Western museum gallery, issues of representation emerge when Native artists are critiqued against a universalist or colonial narrative. Language thus plays an important role in the reception of contemporary Native artists' work and where it is situated in the larger conversation of contemporary art. This thesis examines language, specifically words, language structure, and modes of transmission, and the effect it has on the representation of contemporary Native artists. This premise is considered in relation to artists Emmi Whitehorse (Dine) and Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe), and the discourse surrounding their work.

MA, Kent State University, 2021, College of the Arts / School of Art

Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, or simply known as Skawennati, is a new media artist working in Montreal who has spent the past three decades establishing Indigenous territories in cyberspace. Since its commercial debut in the early 1990s, cyberspace has become a virtual destination ripe with undefined potential for anyone with access to the appropriate technological devices. Much like the Western frontier as the subject of art and fascination in the nineteenth-century United States, and the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States that garnered great attention in the twentieth century, cyberspace has emerged as a new frontier and borderland to be figuratively and literally negotiated well into the twenty-first century. While many parts of cyberspace are subsumed by capitalistic and neo-colonial structures, some Native artists and scholars imagine liberatory possibilities for Indigenous peoples on the Internet. In fact, after receiving her BFA in Graphic Design from Concordia University in the early 1990s, Skawennati quickly recognized cyber-network technology as the “right tool” to envision contemporary Indigenous peoples. The artist has since established cyber-spaces that are sovereign to Indigenous identities, lands, and narratives, wielding the potential of cyberspace as a critical outlet for Native futurity. Drawing upon a personal interview with the artist and methodologies of `decoloniality,' and `decolonization,' I will posit that Skawennati's virtual territories and digitally-rendered narratives envision Native futurity and sovereignty of land, and provide decolonial opportunities for Internet users, Native and non-Native alike, in cyberspace. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the importance of Skawennati's indigenously-determined territories in cyberspace as a “virtual elsewhere” established through decolonial knowledge and Native sovereignty. While processes of decolonization are far from complete, Skawennati's virtual territories m (open full item for complete abstract)

BA, Oberlin College, 2020, Comparative American Studies

Drawing on the wisdom of prison abolitionists past and present, as well as evidence from interviews and analysis of Illinois' Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) procedural documents, this work argues that Illinois' DCFS and the child protection system more broadly are an extension of the carceral state. Both the criminal punishment system and the child protection system (henceforth referred to as the family regulation system) use a diffuse network of actors to surveil, regulate, and punish the behavior of queer subjects: impoverished people and people of color. The present-day family regulation system builds on a long history of family regulation that predates the founding of the U.S., as is seen in chattel slavery, the cultural genocide of Native Americans, neoliberal and anti-welfare policy regimes, and continues today at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the formalized family regulation system (child protective services). This work explores how to keep children safe in the age of abolition, focusing on non-carceral responses that center strong, accountable communities and divest from dependence on the state.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2019, Communication Studies (Communication)

This project is concerned with the historical legacy of settler colonialism on indigenous-occupied lands and the ways in which land rights are rhetorically constructed and enacted across transnational geopolitical terrain. I utilize pan-historiography to develop Michael McGee's theorization of the ideograph towards what I term an “ideomap” – a place-based approach to comparative ideology that recognizes the rhetorical agency of subaltern collectives. In exploring four indigenous communities, I analyze the ways in which land is not only reflective of ideology but also produces culturally distinct possibilities for decolonization: first, the Standing Rock Sioux's Dakota Access Pipeline protest as a case for land as economy; second, Aboriginal Australia's Stolen Generations campaign as a case for land as family; third, Palestine's Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a case for land as law; and fourth, Brazil's Terra Livre camp as a case for land as environment. The connective thread among these cases explores the spatial rhetorics of indigenous land and the practice of place-making as one that ideologically disrupts settler invasion and physically exercises anticolonial resistance on physical, digital, and hybrid spaces. In particular, I argue these four movements speak to the possibility of collapsing colonial structures and redefining civil societies that not only acknowledge but actively build upon indigenous perspectives.

Master of Arts in Spanish, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Tras la nominacion de El abrazo de la serpiente de Ciro Guerra a mejor pelicula extranjera en los premios Oscar en 2016, muchos criticos periodistas colombianos celebraron el filme, a menudo enfatizando el cuidado con el que el director retrato a los pueblos indigenas de la Amazonia. Es cierto que la obra plasma un dialogo muchas veces didactico entre personajes arquetipicos—dos cientificos de Occidente y un chaman indigena—y que Guerra retrata en la diegesis, asi como provoca en el publico, un evento politicamente productivo, lo que el estudioso Boaventura de Sousa Santos denomina una “ruptura epistemica”. Por otro lado, el foco recurrente del filme en el consumo de medicina ritual y vegetal por parte de los visitantes de la Amazonia siembra semillas de fetichismo y exotismo, ademas de fomentar un extractivismo cultural y material. Al articular, visibilizar y valorar lo indigena, la pelicula desafia modos hegemonicos del conocimiento a traves de las representaciones de: a) ontologias relacionales prevalentes en la Amazonia colombiana, b) modos orales y rituales de transmision del conocimiento, y c) concepciones temporales no lineales. Con apoyo de pensadores poscoloniales, posestructuralistas y ecocriticos (i.e. Said, Haraway, Morton), esta tesis elabora sobre como el cine podria revelar lo incompleto de paradigmas hegemonicos del razonamiento. Asimismo, El abrazo sigue una tendencia historica a romantizar y consumir lo indigena (especialmente al otorgar permisos para la participacion en rituales amazonicos los de afuera de la comunidad indigena). Estas tendencias se exploran a traves del pensamiento (tambien) poscolonial, ademas de apoyo antropologo y sociologo (i.e. Pratt, Fotiou, Ulloa). Al fin, esta tesis subraya la urgencia y la importancia de esa ruptura epistemica mencionada anteriormente y reconoce que la forma en que los espectadores interpreten e interioricen la pelicula decidira la calidad del impacto social duradero de la obra.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2019, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

Can environmental youth leaders affect meaningful positive change in the global fight to reign in climate change? While the academic literature contains a vast array of youth leadership materials, there is a gap in the research of the effect environmental youth leadership programs have at the community level, and specifically how these effects can contribute to environmental sustainability of that community, region, or country. This mixed methods qualitative study narrows this gap by employing grounded theory and narrative analysis to determine how five Bangladeshi environmental youth leaders understand their role in influencing their school and communities' efforts to adapt to and reduce their contribution to climate change. The purposes of this study are to: (a) describe and understand the experiences of five Bangladeshi environmental youth leaders as they engaged in participatory social engagement as Participant Action Researchers (PARs) during their environmental youth leadership roles (b) understand the conditions necessary for these five environmental youth leaders to experience success in their leadership positions; (c) define environmental youth leadership and environmental youth leaders in this Bangladeshi context; (d) explore environmental youth leadership as an educative process that can facilitate widespread environmental literacy and engagement in Bangladesh, and throughout the world and; (e) contribute a new grounded theory analysis to environmental youth leadership theory. The findings of this study reveal that certain conditions need to be present for these five environmental youth leaders in Bangladesh to experience success in their roles. These conditions include the ability to `convince' others, the presence of other youth to support them, and the experience of individual transformation in worldview and character brought about by the development of an environmental consciousness and pro-environmental behavior. These findings might be valuabl (open full item for complete abstract)

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2019, Spanish

This thesis explains how three forms of contemporary Mayan art--music, weavings and murals--form part of the larger effort in Guatemala to revitalize Mayan languages and culture, known as the Mayan Movement. This movement began in the 1990's after the end of Guatemala's 36-year long genocidal and ethnocidal civil war. The research focuses on three case studies: 1) a Mayan hip hop group that retells ancient myths through Spanish and Mayan-language lyrics, 2) a Mayan weaving cooperative that has taken advantage of the often culturally damaging tourism industry to raise awareness about the lasting effects of the civil war, and 3) a mural painted by a Mayan art collective depicting the people's history of Mayans in Guatemala from the genesis of the first human beings to present day. Each chapter analyzes the symbolism and cultural knowledge communicated by a different form of artwork, often relating them back to ancient Mayan myths, and concludes that each form of art constitutes a form of survivance, a combination of “survival” and “endurance” that refers to the active presence of indigenous peoples, worldviews, and ways of life in the world today, that inherently defies the historical and contemporary attempts to erase them.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, History

This thesis examines the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and most representative Native American rights organization, and its lobbying efforts during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to define and develop the concept of Native American self-determination. Based on the preservation of tribal status by rejecting termination, consultation and participation in the process of policy formation, and self-sufficient economic development, the NCAI promoted this vision of self-determination through legislative action by way of resolutions and testimonials to influence a new direction of federal Indian policy during the transitional decade between the 1950s' termination era legislation and the 1970s' proclaimed self-determination.

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Hispanic Studies

"De pura cepa" is a collection of six short stories, each in a different time period and different conflict in Puerto Rican history: the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, the era of slavery and sugar plantations in the mid-19th century, the transition from Spain to the United States in the first years of the 20th century, the start of mass emigrations from Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century, and finally the immediate effects of Hurricane Maria in the latter half of 2017. There is also an introductory story that takes place in the early 2000s. The collection confronts and interrogates perceptions of Puerto Rico by showing different characters navigate their identities and the struggles they face as Puerto Ricans. It addresses themes such as race, gender, religion, class, and other forms of identity over time and within a family. The six stories are accompanied by a critical commentary, which analyzes Puerto Rico's cultural history and argues that storytelling serves as a means by which to research and explore this history.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon Church) in Hawai'i presents a specific context to studyLDS Church doctrine and Native members. In this thesis, I undertake an interdisciplinary analysis of LDS Church doctrine, practice, and ritual in Hawai'i alongside exploration of Native Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) belief and participation in the Church. The history of Mormon interaction with and doctrine on Native people leads to their focus on Hawai'i, with religious ingenuity and missionary work at the forefront of Mormon efforts to convert Native Hawaiians. I examine the histories that lead to and informed Mormon presence and activity in Hawai'i, and the subsequent success in conversion and establishment of a presence through land, institutions, and economic development. A study of the LDS Church in Hawai'i offers a site of exploration to make connections between theology, body, racialization, and settler colonialism. While scholars such as Hokulani Aikau, Simon Southerton, and W. Paul Reeve reveal the LDS Church's racialization and inclusion of Native/Indigenous peoples, I add to their work by focusing on doctrine, practice, and the body. I claim that ritual of baptism serves as an embodied practice with theological implications for Mormon material and spiritual bodies. Using Catherine Bell's theory of ritual, I analyze Mormon baptismal ritual and doctrine to magnify the centrality of bodies, racialization, and settler colonialism in LDS Church doctrine. The focus on baptism also points to the importance of Bell's concept of redemptive hegemony as an important part of how institutions and individuals interact and negotiate their power. I argue that Native Hawaiians engage with the Church through baptism as a means of claiming power through claims to the Lamanite identity while the Church also actively racializes them as a settler colonial institution.

MA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Extreme temperatures, radical weather events, and species' extinctions have all taken place or been foreshadowed during the Earth's current ecological crisis. Since this crisis was named the “Anthropocene” (new, human) epoch, scholars from a range of disciplines have sought to find both a reason for and start to this geological era. Usually, the Anthropocene is thought to have begun during the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, following the carbon dioxide that was released into the Earth's atmosphere from that period onward. However, this thesis argues that the roots of the Anthropocene, and the climate change that goes with it, can be traced back to the century before the Industrial Revolution. I argue that the roots of the Anthropocene are first apparent in Lydia Maria Child's 1824 novel, Hobomok. Set in early seventeenth-century New England, I seek to show that the Puritan settlers within the novel are carriers of what ecological philosopher Timothy Morton calls “agrilogistical” norms and subscribers to the reductive material philosophy of “Easy-Think Substances.” Moreover, I posit that the American Indians to which the Puritan settlers believe themselves superior to can be viewed as bearing material philosophies more akin to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost's new materialism and Jane Bennett's vital materialism, which offer a more ecologically sustainable viewpoint regarding nonhuman materiality. The competing viewpoints regarding nonhuman nature and materiality further serve to divide the Puritans and Amerindian characters, and this separation is seen further in ethnocentric colonialism apparent in Hobomok and furthered in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Set a century after Hobomok, Cooper's novel serves to show the advancement of agrilogistical policies that began in Hobomok, and would continue through “civilization,” farming practices, war, and colonialization. In tracing these agrilogistical norms through the (open full item for complete abstract)

BA, Oberlin College, 2017, Anthropology

This is a historical ethnography that examines how shifts Japanese national identity and values of homogeneity have affected Japan's minority Ainu population. I argue that the symbolic position of Ainu culture has historically been rearranged to suit prevailing ideas about Japanese nationality and culture without input from Ainu. Using theoretical understandings of Self-Other dichotomies, I examine the particular way these practices manifested in Meiji Japan to create modern Japanese national identity, and how these functioned both against the West and people colonized by Japan. From there, I look at how cultural nationalism was objectified as present from time immemorial in Japan through the installation of key parts of Japaneseness and Ainuness into symbolic objects (most notably food and the forms of food-getting) and using these symbols to retroactively label Ainu culture as an aspect of Japanese nationality. Finally, I look at how contemporary Ainu have subverted this practice using cultural objects to work against a “vanishing ethnicity” narrative and reject the idea that being Ainu is inaccessible in modern contexts.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2016, Leadership and Change

This case study examines the experience of residents of the Indigenous village of Embera Drua, Panama with 20 years of tourism. It addresses the lack of Indigenous voices in tourism literature by telling the story of Embera Drua through the lens of the villagers themselves. The study uses a mix of ethnographic observation and narrative inquiry and finds that the experience of Embera Drua mirrors the experience of other Indigenous villages offering tourism around the globe, particularly the impact of lack of community capacity on management and growth of such tourism initiatives. Findings of this study are relevant to the international discourse on tourism as a development tool. This dissertation is available in open-access at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd and AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/

MA, Kent State University, 0, College of the Arts / School of Art

This thesis explores various methods of visual representation used to portray non-white Others by white European artists throughout the Age of Discovery and the dawn of colonialism. There are three major phases of visual representation of Others in European Renaissance and Baroque art. These will be examined and compared to suggest a visual manifestation of the shifting ideas of race throughout these centuries. The representation of black Africans in Europe and the New World, the court commissioned paintings of Albert Eckhout in Dutch Brazil, and lastly, the development of the casta genre in New Spain will be investigated in connection with a changing perception of race. When explored as a group, these representations of Others offer insight into the contemporary racial mindset and expand upon the understanding of the development of established races based on physical appearance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By following the introduction of the black African into the works of Renaissance painters, over the bridge of Albert Eckhout's titillating Baroque works recording supposed ethnographic realities in Dutch Brazil, and ending in colonial Mexico with casta paintings, one can see European racial concepts forming, morphing, and leading to an almost explicitly visual understanding of race.

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Anthropology

This thesis discusses some of the main factors that have hindered Australian Aboriginal people in their efforts to use their art as a catalyst for stronger political standing and an improved standard of living. Accordingly, based on my interviews and surveys at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, it appears that the patrons appreciate the art but do not recognize the art's inward significance and its messages about Aboriginal political struggles. This thesis focuses on a few of the main factors that affect Western (including American) interpretations of Aboriginal art. Some of these factors are: hegemonic influences and Western categorizations; visual similarities to Modern art styles; and Western thirst for “primitivism.” There were correlations in the data between understanding of the art and education, travel, and “Entering Identity.” Data also reveal crucial omissions from patrons' comments, such as the idea of corporate identity, diffusion, syncretism, haptic touch, and the impact of commercialization. I address how these exclusions are related to patron misconceptions about the art. The latter part of the thesis analyzes American characteristics including: White Privilege; class ideologies; consumerism; “polite society;” and geographical tendencies, and how these characteristics reflect patrons' responses. Finally this thesis grapples with inherent paradoxes when Aboriginal art is reviewed on the world art market, and how anthropologists can help to resolve these issues.

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2015, Leadership and Change

As Indigenous peoples, we have a responsibility to our global community to share our collective truths and experiences, but we also deserve the respect to not be objectified, essentialized, and reified. Today, we are in a period of continual Native resurgence as many of us (re)member our prayers, songs, languages, histories, teachings, everyday stories and our deepest wisdom and understanding as Indigenous peoples--we are all “living breath” and we are “all related.” For eight years, Carmella Rodriguez and I have been nDigiStorytelling across the United States and have co-created over 1,200 digital stories with over 80 tribes for Native survivance, healing, hope, and liberation. By the making and sharing of nDigiStories, our training and consulting company called nDigiDreams is Healing Our Communities One Story at a Time.® This dissertation is a phenomenological study about nDigiStorytelling in an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) community in Northern Michigan; it explores two four-day digital storytelling workshops during November 2013 and May 2014. Using an emergent research design called “Three Sisters,” I combine Indigenous methodologies, community-based participatory research, and portraiture to explore the “lived experiences” of our nDigiStorytellers who are thriving and flourishing in their families and communities and who are widely sharing their nDigiStories to help others. An Indigenous approach to digital storytelling is much needed and provides a new avenue for understanding how we can use nDigiStorytelling and our visceral bodies to release ourselves from traumatic experiences and how we can utilize technology and media-making for healing ourselves and others. The electronic version of this Dissertation is available in open access at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd This dissertation is accompanied by a PDF that contains links to 24 media files on the nDigiStoryMaking YouTube Channel that are referenced in th (open full item for complete abstract)