Browsing by Subject "Native American"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

A Review of Community-Based Interventions and Educational Initiatives for Overdose Prevention & Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in the United States
(2024) Kulkarni, Sachi; Gonzalez, Sonia K.
Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a major health challenge facing the United States today, with 80,411 people dying from opioid-involved overdoses in 2021, accounting for 75.4% of overdose deaths. OUD disproportionately affects American Indian/Alaska Natives, people who live in rural areas, and young people ages 18-25. Each of these groups requires a distinct approach to reduce overdose deaths and OUD. This literature review included 22 papers to elucidate the specific aspects of successful community-based interventions and educational initiatives for overdose prevention deployed in the United States. Cultural sensitivity, peer involvement, and advancements in technology such as telehealth were found to be crucial next steps and key aspects of successful interventions.
DAC Blog 2019-11
(2019-11) Ramirez, Andres
Four winds across three campuses : indigenous community building in higher education
(2021-11-30) Pyle, Aaron; Reddick, Richard, 1972-; Sturm, Circe; Urrieta, Luis; Jabbar, Huriya; Garces, Liliana
This study examines how Indigenous people build communities in higher education settings. This focus frames the impact of connectivity on identity development through a correlation between cultural accessibility and improved post-secondary success for this population. The research centers on three institutions: The University of Texas at Austin, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and Queen’s University. Separate chapters are dedicated to each campus in order to emphasize the great variation of Indigenous identity across the North American continent and to reflect various opportunities for manifestations of cultural connectivity. Research is also included concerning each university’s relationship to the wider Indigenous communities of the regions in which they sit. This includes exploration of the institutions’ relationships with local nonprofit organizations, tribal governments, and initiatives which seek to include outside Indigenous voice in campus affairs.
Huibana : cultivating Bobonaza Quichua and forest animal relations of mutual care and utility
(2021-12-03) Beveridge, James Michael; Campbell, Craig A. R., 1973-; Speed, Shannon; Strong, Pauline; Hartigan, Jr, John; Cepek, Michael
This dissertation examines the relational philosophy of Quichua Indigenous people living along the Bobonaza river in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I argue that Bobonaza river Quichuas cultivate social relationships with nonhuman beings such as plants and animals to navigate the web of biosemiotic relations that constitute the Amazon forest. I examine Amazonian Quichua and anthropological notions of ‘self’ and kinship in more-than-human contexts. Bobonaza Quichuas understand nonhuman beings such as plants and animals to be selves imbued with intentionality, sociality, and subjectivity. They become yacharishka (familiar with or accustomed to) with nonhuman selves through specific practices such as songs, dreaming, and the ingestion of entheogens. By becoming yacharishka and come to intimately know and be aligned with nonhuman selves, Bobonaza Quichuas are able to cultivate intersubjective relationships of mutual care and utility with nonhuman selves to harness their attributes and powers. My principal intervention is to rethink the widespread Amazonian Indigenous practice of capturing and raising forest animals (huibana in Quichua). This practice has largely been theorized within the neostructuralist paradigm of predation, mastery, and ownership which frames the human-forest animal relationship as one of master/owner and pet. However, my ethnographic research shows how Bobonaza Quichua women raise huiba (forest) animals to act as sensors in locating dangers in the forest such as snakes, spiders, and ants. Bobonaza women become yacharishka with the huiba animals by being attentive to their particular calls, signals, and bodily movements. In this way, Bobonaza women are able to tap into the biosemiotic web of forest relations using the huiba animals as a sensory medium. I argue that rather than taming and ownership, the Quichua-huiba relationship is a semiotic intersubjective relationship of mutual care and utility. Furthermore, the centrality of women in navigating nonhuman relationships with huiba animals and other practices joins other scholarship in problematizing the neostructuralist theorization of women in dichotomous ways: consanguienty to men’s affinity, interiority to men’s exteriority, women’s domestic and domesticating, to men’s wild and predation. Finally, in contrast to scholars working in the vein of ontological politics and ontological turn that posit a pluriverse or multiple worlds, I argue that Bobonaza Quichua and nonhuman being relation-making is bound up in the overarching biosemiotic relational schema within all beings participate and co-become. Bobonaza Quichuas very much inhabit this relational and phenomenological world and are attuned to the political, social, and semiotic contours of the world they live in. The crucial difference is the ways that Bobonaza Quichuas are attentive to, become yacharishka with, and cultivate intersubjective relationships with the nonhuman plants and animals that constitute the world they share.
Interpreting the Native American World War II veteran in N. Scott Momaday’s House made of dawn
(2018-05-02) Pfaff, Nathan Daniel; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Bertelsen, Lance
Critical interpretations of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn consider Abel’s, the novel’s main character, World War II military experience only as an alienating psychological trauma without reference to the historical facts backgrounding his service or an informed interpretation of the textual evidence about his Army career. This essay aims to fill this critical gap and explore in depth what it means for Abel to be a Native American World War II veteran, what his specific experience as a Soldier was, and how this information shapes our understanding of his character. Fleshing out this part of Abel’s character brings to light new perspectives within House Made of Dawn on Native American identity, and closely examining Abel’s military service exposes biased perspectives accreted to the novel by the literary critical community stemming from reading this post-World War II novel through a post-Vietnam and/or a post-9/11 political lens.
Investigating regional human population histories in North America using genomics
(2018-10-10) Reynolds, Austin Williamson; Bolnick, Deborah Ann; Bolnick, Daniel I; Kirkpatrick, Mark; Galloway, Patricia; Nielsen, Rasmus
The application of genomic technologies to the study of ancient DNA over the past 10 years has revolutionized our understanding of human prehistory across the globe. A lot of work has been done resolving the past migrations of human populations on the continental scale, but less focus has been given to understanding the population history of small regions or answering archaeological questions presented at a single site. Moreover, despite the increase in genomic datasets American indigenous and admixed populations continue to be vastly underrepresented in the genomics literature, where ~95% of studies focus on either European or East Asian populations. A growing number of researchers are applying genomics techniques with modern and ancient populations in the Americas to fill in these gaps and answer exciting questions on these smaller geographic scales. This dissertation uses genome-wide data collected from indigenous populations in North America to address a number of regional and local questions. Ancient genomic data is used to address the population dynamics through time at the archaeological site of Xaltocan in central Mexico. Genomic data from modern populations is then used to understand the effects of geography and colonial history on genetic diversity within Mexico. Finally, using genomic data from populations around North America, I explore the evidence for adaptation of these groups to their various environments
Native Futures
(2021-10) Brooks, Lacey; Bastone, Gina; Brandt, Sarah
Neshnabe treaty making : (re)visionings for indigenous futurities in education
(2016-05) Pochedley, Lakota Shea; Urrieta, Luis; Salinas, Cinthia; Sturm, Circe
This work questions if there is a need for a Native-controlled school in central Oklahoma and evaluates what can be done to improve educational opportunities for Native students (particularly through a Native-controlled school). This research addresses the complex, multifaceted experiences of Native peoples with and in Oklahoma public schools. Three themes, including tribal sovereignty, equality vs. equity for Native students, and the importance of rural schools in Oklahoma, are explored throughout the thesis, which lead to a final tension between the community and colonial (imposed) governments—federal, state, and tribal. Recommendations for anti- and de-colonial action are drawn on traditional forms of nishnabe treaty making as a continual process of relationship building. In addressing the ways in which settler coloniality operates in the daily lives of Native peoples, indigenizing and decolonial literature is engaged to (re)(en)vision indigenous futures and possibilities for education outside of the settler state. The project is framed within the theories of Natives studies, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and Native anti-/de-colonial education and futures.
Planning with Native Americans : a study of the Fort Lawton redevelopment in Seattle, Washington
(2021-07-30) Stanley, August, M.S. in Community and Regional Planning; Sciara, Gian-Claudia; Zhang, Ming, 1963 April 22-
This paper will investigate the Fort Lawton redevelopment plan to examine the extent to which Native residents shaped the vision, process, and plan for the development. To understand current trends, concerns, and best practices for planning with Natives, particularly transportation planning for urban Natives, this report begins with a review of the literature. After examining the existing research, the report will explore the Fort Lawton case study of planning involving and impacting urban Natives. This report will also critically analyze how well a significant redevelopment project on important Duwamish land incorporated Native input and values. Additionally, it will analyze how well the redevelopment planning process incorporated Native considerations about transportation and access.
Staged encounters : Native American performance between 1880 and 1920
(2010-08) Evans, Katherine Liesl Young; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Gonz�lez, John M.; Moore, Lisa L.; Murphy, Gretchen; Paredez, Deborah
This dissertation explores the unique political and cultural possibilities that public performance held for Native American activists and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Not only did these performance texts, generated in multiple genres, offer a counternarrative to the mainstream discourse of Native assimilation, they also provided Native writer-performers with a vehicle for embodying tribally-specific epistemologies, cosmologies, and diplomatic histories. These Native dramatists transformed the stage into a site of political possibility left unrealized on the printed page, a site where they could revise images of their peoples from shadows and stereotypes to sovereign nations. Included in this study are analyses of the speaking tours of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins/Thocmetony (Northern Paiute), the performance poetry of Emily Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk), an opera co-written by Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota), and pageants performed by the Garden River First Nation (Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe). Drawing primarily on contemporary scholarship in Native American literary studies, including American Indian literary nationalism and internationalism, the burgeoning work in Native American performance studies, and methodologies from theater history, the following chapters contextualize both printed and performance versions of these texts with tribally-specific political, economic, and cultural histories, as well as performance reviews and broader federal Indian policy of the time.
Stoking the fire : nationhood in early twentieth century Cherokee writing
(2012-05) Brown, Kirby Lynn; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Sturm, Circe D.; Justice, Daniel H.
My research builds upon interdisciplinary trends in Native scholarship emphasizing tribal-specificity; attention to understudied periods, writers, and texts; and a political commitment to engage contemporary challenges facing Indigenous communities. My dissertation examines the persistence of nationhood in Cherokee writing between the dissolution of the Cherokee government preceding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and political reorganization in the early 1970s. Situating writing by John Milton Oskison, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs and Ruth Muskrat Bronson explicitly within the Cherokee national contexts of its emergence, I attend to the complicated ways they each remembered, imagined, narrated and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning state. Often read as a transitional “dark age” in Cherokee history, this period stands instead as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary debates in the Cherokee Nation and Native Studies today.
Táyshas and Enemies: The Caddo and the Atlantic World, 800-1859
(2023-05) Ross, Brian
In 1542, the first Europeans entered the territory of the Caddo, the indigenous peoples of northeastern Texas and adjacent areas. Over the next few centuries, the Caddo would be drawn into new economic, social, and cultural connections with both European and indigenous newcomers, connecting them to the growing “Atlantic world”. At the same time as they were drawn into the Atlantic world, the Caddo maintained much older and deeper connections with indigenous communities surrounding them. Despite the dramatic changes European colonialism brought to their homeland, the Caddo retained sovereignty, continuing to govern themselves and their lands. This paper seeks to explore how the Caddo were connected to the world around them, both before and after colonization, and to determine how the Caddo responded to and navigated the changes brought by the European invasion. To do so, I examine a variety of historical sources, including written European sources, modern-day archaeological data, and Caddo oral history, all of which document the era through different lenses and offer insight into Caddo connections and changes across time.
“Woven alike with meaning” : sovereignty and form in Native North American poetry, 1800-1910
(2017-07-20) Grewe, Lauren Marie; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Winship, Michael; Bennett, Chad; Fitzgerald, Stephanie
The story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. Alex Posey composes skeptical elegies, dialect poems, and political newspaper verse from western and Creek literary forms in Indian Territory to heal a divided Creek Nation, practicing poetic appropriations that offered ways of relating to genre that remain powerful for Native American poets today.
"You heal the spirit" : Anishnabe adaptations to historical loss and trauma
(2015-08) Brissette, Charlene Nicole; Steinhardt, Mary; Menchaca, Martha
Native American and Indigenous populations around the world face disproportionately higher rates of disease and mortality. There are many nuanced factors that contribute to this, but a common underlying theme is that they’ve all dealt with some form of oppression by colonialism. Native people today still feel the effects of historical trauma as it reverberates through generations that have directly experienced loss of land, language and culture. It’s important to examine the ways different tribal groups experience and perceive historical loss and trauma today in order to teach the next generation of tribal youth to carry on traditions and Indigenous knowledge. In this study we conducted four focus groups in a Midwestern Anishnabe tribe to examine the research question: What characteristics enable Native American people to cope with historical loss and trauma? Using a survey to supplement the focus group data, we also examined relationships among five variables: historical loss, historical loss associated symptoms, resilience, coping and sense of control. Results showed three over-arching themes that allowed our sample to make sense of historical loss and trauma, and trauma that is ongoing: Adaptations to Loss and Trauma, the Legacy Burden, and a Marked Protective Identity. Additionally, the survey results indicated that historical loss was significantly positively related to historical loss associated symptoms. Higher scores of resilience, percentage of adaptive coping, and perceived control were significantly related to lower scores on historical loss associated symptoms. The findings from this study indicate that loss and trauma are present within this community and having a collective Native identity provides strength in the form of resilience for multiple generations. Using the themes and relationships from this study the community can expand resources to facilitate growth of cultural reclamation and traditional knowledge.