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This dissertation presents the creative life of the Yanktonai Dakota modernist painter and educator Oscar Howe (1915-1983). The biography on Oscar Howe documents a comprehensive timeline of life events and traces the improbable educational odyssey from a shy and isolated boarding school student to emeritus professor with several honorary doctorates."Distinctly Oscar Howe: Life, Art, Stories" revisits and reinforces existing stories, and presents and interprets new stories in the biographical narrative of Howe's life as an influential figure in South Dakota's history as well as the history of American Indian art in the twentieth century. A talented artist uniquely isolated in South Dakota for much of his career, Oscar Howe was a principal figure and innovative artist who had a tremendous impact on the American Indian art world and beyond. Through words and actions, Howe symbolized a revolutionary individual at a time of great change for American Indian artists.Primary documents are the heart of this research. Letters, photographs, and artworks are reproduced to record the artist's relationship to the people, places, and ideas of central distinction to his life story in the twentieth century.This study reveals that Oscar Howe captured the nation's attention at a time in history when elements of his popularity stemmed from the nation's interest in its Indigenous people and pride in the nation's original American artists. Howe's chief importance in the field of American Indian art rests in three significant areas: (1) his role as an outspoken advocate of American Indian modernity, (2) his validation of the role of individualism and self-expression in American Indian art, and (3) the role of the arts within the greater community of people to teach about other cultures.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of using the Calico winter count, a 19th century Teton Lakota winter count, as a basis for reconstructing the history of the winter count-producing group. As emic history-keeping devices, winter counts are a crucial type of indigenous data set whose importance is defined through Lakota social theory, ethnohistory theory, and comparative analysis with other historical and cultural data sets. The results of these studies will reveal that winter counts, despite their peripheral utilization in Lakota historiography, are highly credible historical sources that can play central roles in the construction of tribal histories. Winter counts are able to convey a new dimension of pre-reservation life on the plains for the Lakota people. They can be used to relate the internal reality of tribal life, while providing a more complete ethnographic context for describing the tribe historically and to aid in the creation of a convincing historical narrative. This study has important implications for future historical methodology as well as a significant social value for modern Lakota people.

This thesis seeks to examine the factors that contributed to the development of Two-Spirit (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender/sexuality variant American Indians) communities in urban areas. Secondly, it explores how these communities are reflected in the poetry of American Indian women Paula Gunn Allen and Janice Gould. This paper investigates these questions within the context of two theories on community development and organization, one by Saul Alinsky and the other by Stephen Cornell. Next it discusses gender and sexuality variance in American Indian tribal societies as reflected in studies conducted during the 1910s through the 1950s. Thirdly, it examines the development of community and constituency of the international Two-Spirit community within the framework of Alinsky and Cornell's theories. Lastly, it will look at the role of contemporary American Indian poets, Paula Gunn Allen and Janice Gould, in the shaping and actualization of urban Two-Spirit communities.

The way in which land is understood and perceived among American Indians and non-Indians is the cause for vast cultural misunderstandings and divisions between the two groups. For American Indian communities, attachments to place are at the core of religious practices, therefore intrinsically linking the importance of one to the other. This thesis attempts to better understand the way in which American Indians maintain connections to sacred sites, the challenges of access to those sites, and how their conceptualizations differ from Western models of value. This thesis examines the ability of federal policies, cases, legislative processes, and legal frameworks to protect American Indian sacred sites when the cultural context in which this protection is afforded has undeniable discrepancies to American Indian beliefs.

This thesis will examine the environmental and sociocultural changes that have affected Tohono O'odham basketry and the reasons how these traditions, although altered, persist today. The Tohono O'odham basketweavers responded to drastic environmental and social changes and created opportunity as they adjusted to the loss of their subsistence resources. Tohono O'odham basketry and basketweavers are a testimony of survival and of the determination to preserve their distinct cultures within our contemporary pluralistic society despite numerous hardships. Tohono O'odham basketweaver's capacity to retain their cultural identity, continue their knowledge of basketry technology and plant materials, and express leadership through partnerships, demonstrates their cultural resiliency. This thesis will: (1) Introduce the environmental causes that contributed to the change in Tohono O'odham basketry material in the early 1900s; (2) Present contemporary issues that challenge basket weavers; and (3) Demonstrate the resiliency of Tohono O'odham basket weavers both past and present.

This research examines the role of traditions in the works of contemporary Navajo artist David K. John and demonstrates that art is used as a modern instrument of storytelling, to pass to the next generations, traditions of Navajo culture. John, a commercially successful artist especially known in the Southwest Native art circles, is continuing a tradition of representation of the Holy People that goes back to sandpainting and weaving. Although not 'original' in terms of subject matters, his works differ from all his predecessors because of the human touch present and clearly visible in them. In John's works, the superhuman becomes human and this is what makes his canvases so unique. This research takes into consideration some of his major works and analyzes them in terms of subjects portrayed and modality of the representation in an attempt to understand the cultural meanings they bear and John's art rationale.

The graduate internship and thesis option in American Indian Studies affords students a unique opportunity to directly apply their academic interests in a manner that address the contemporary needs of a Native nation. By engaging with tribes in this manner, students are assured that their academic efforts actively and positively contribute to ongoing and relevant tribal projects or programs, while the nation is assured that research concerning their community is being informed by a working experience with their community. This thesis documents my internship with the Jicarilla Apache Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Office in which I assisted the office in conducting oral history interviews and compiling a report for their project entitled: Rediscovering Trail Roots and Routes: The Jicarilla Apache and the Old Spanish National Historic Trail.

This study examines the traditional views surrounding Indigenous birthing and mothering, as well as the mother-child relationship cycle in contemporary Indigenous literature, and compares the traditional past to the contemporary present. Five contemporary Indigenous novels from four different American Indian and Indigenous Nations are included: Louise Erdrich's The Painted Drum (Ojibwe), Betty Louise Bell's Faces in the Moon (Cherokee), Dawn Karima Pettigrew's The Way We Make Sense and The Marriage of Saints (Creek), and Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors (Maori). Themes in the novels are studied individually and collectively, through the frameworks for literary analysis that Arnold Krupat terms nationalism, indigenism, and cosmopolitanism. Each novel will be analyzed first using Arnold Krupat's theory of literary nationalism, which suggests that in order to fully comprehend an Indigenous text, it must be explored using only a culturally-specific framework that focuses specifically on the Nation depicted within the novel. However, on a broader scope Krupat's literary theory of indigenism will addressed throughout this study, examining ways in which similar parallels within each selected text and Nation overlap to create common areas of study. Lastly, aspects of the mother-child relationship will be assessed using Krupat's theory of literary cosmopolitanism, which suggests that even though there are very unique aspects of Indigenous literature that must be viewed from a tribally-specific vantage point, there are also cosmopolitan, or common, elements within the human experience that link all individuals together like the act of birthing and mothering.

With both its inherent alienation and freedom, the experience of liminality, or the occupation of transitional spaces, is in many ways universally human. However, by nature of their bicultural liminality and the oppressive and pervasive demand for what Paula Gunn Allen terms "Indianness" American Indian authors must also confront and negotiate questions of authenticity. In so doing, many have taken the opportunity to subvert those demands, to juxtapose their actual multifaceted identities against them, to make meaning from the contrast, and to create from that re/integrated space. This thesis elucidates these points as an introduction to the body of poems that follow. The poems, often instruments of my own liminality, explore the broad themes of place, family, and identity.