This dissertation reports on an exploratory study conducted to better understand the social construction of Native Americans by new student affairs professionals in the Southwest and the ways in which professional socialization experiences impacts on that construction. Data were generated from interviews with student affairs professionals at institutions in the Southwest with significant Native American enrollments. Data were also generated from the professionals' graduate preparation program web sites and from the journals and conferences of two student affairs professional associations. Native Americans were constructed by professionals as coming from isolated, impoverished reservations where they lived a traditional lifestyle. Native students were seen as struggling to succeed as a result of culture shock and deficits including alcohol issues, different styles of communication, and different senses of time. The aspiration of Native students who graduate was believed to be returning to the reservation. References to Native Americans were rare in graduate program web sites reviewed and limited to the sites of two programs at institutions with significant Native enrollments. Interview data indicated discussion of Native Americans in graduate courses was very limited. Two programs, both with several Native American students enrolled in them, included more substantial discussion of Native Americans. References to Native Americans in the associations' journals and conferences were not uncommon but few articles or conference sessions focused substantially on Native Americans. The professionals interviewed had relatively modest knowledge of Native Americans and almost no knowledge of indigenous-based resources upon which to draw in working with Native students. However, student affairs professionals interviewed felt qualified to work with students who are Native American based on the professionals' cultural sensitivity, a shared sense of in group experiences, and the belief that knowledge of theories for other minority groups or minority groups in general would suffice. Data generated during the interviews indicated diversity and multiculturalism were absent from performance reviews and would enter into reviews on when there were problems. Professionals participating in the study constructed multiculturalism as a quality to be imbued in students and institutions for reasons of social justice and the marketplace.

This dissertation describes interactions between tribal and federal program bureaucrats of an education and labor training program for Indian youth, and tribal members on a reservation in the western United States. The goal of the program was to prepare Indian youth to enter the workforce through education, and training and then maintain employment. This goal was undermined at the program site by non-Native executive program personnel and tribal bureaucrats whose definition of "success" and expectation of youth achievement were culturally different than that of tribal youth workers and youth. Systems in which Indian people participate are in many cases socially disruptive as well as psychologically violent---they are often, quite literally, "out of control." Yet indigenous communities resist compliance within these systems. The focus of this study is on the complex nature of this historical matrix of power, control, resistance, and compliance. This dissertation uses a combined focus of social and psychological analysis to document the social history of Indian education administered as a ritual of assimilation, the bureaucratic processes that constrain Indian people from using education as a ritual of empowerment, and critically examines the people's resistance within the bureaucracies. The primary research questions are: (a) What are the bureaucratic processes that hindered the youth workers in successfully in advocating for their youth? (b) How do the youth workers resist these bureaucratic machinations? Through participant and non participant observation and ethnographic interview I describe how the bureaucratic processes which hinder collectively manifest from a deficit paradigm projected upon the workers. The youth worker's most consistent form of resistance was to voice their opinions about what was going on, and to explicitly name the actions of oppression.

This research examined Audubon magazine's representations of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Textual and image analysis spanned the years 1960 to 2002. Text and images were analyzed using cultural studies methods of critical textual analysis, critical discourse analysis, and ethnographic content analysis. Some of these representations were compared to other environmental magazines. Analysis included nature writing and news stories that covered the Keep America Beautiful Campaign, the use of eagles by Native Americans, the Nez Perce Wolf recovery project, the U'wa struggle against oil companies, and other issues. Contributors utilizing nature writing genre often utilized brief references to Indigenous peoples. These references provided a way to make points about nature, identities, and Indigenous peoples. I concluded that the imagery was not monolithic across time or across a particular topic. The "ecological Indian" image was both challenged and reinforced. A vast array of Indigenous images supported the magazine's goals, one goal being the encouragement of activism among readers. Letters-to-the-editor served as a dialogic space for perspectives not represented in the magazine's articles.

As a reform movement in education, multicultural education is one response to the realities of cultural diversity in the United States. Current programs in multicultural education rely on multicultural experiences to teach students to think and act multiculturally. Teachers are required to know and respond to learning differences which arise from students' cultural diversity. Goals for existing programs vary, but a generally held goal is equal access and open opportunity for all students to the benefits of education. Current multicultural education programs fail to address the cognitive patterns of students as they relate to the processing of information about cultural diversity. The information they bring to experiences enables students to inform and learn from their experiences. Without examining the a priori by which students determine the truth of their multicultural experiences, multicultural educators are perpetuating existing patterns of prejudice and discrimination. By creating a synthetic a priori, students are able to more effectively learn the intended lessons from the multicultural experiences provided in the curriculum. In anthropology, investigation into other cultures is guided by the Kluckhohn Model. This model stresses cultural relativism in the observation and collection of data about other cultures. Anthropologists suspend, as far as reasonably possible, their own cultural values as they describe other cultures in terms of those cultures' own systems of values, beliefs, and responses to the world. Once the other culture is responsibly understood, comparisons may be made in reference to the anthropologists' own culture, and evaluations may be made based on reliable data. By adapting the Kluckhohn Model to education, and implementing it as part of proposed and existing programs in multicultural education, the effectiveness of those programs will be greatly improved. Students will create a synthetic a priori which will empower them to approach multicultuiral experiences in the manner of the anthropologist. Their ability to make reasoned inquiry into and decisions about cultural diversity will be enhanced. Resistance to multiculturalism from a variety of sources cannot change the realities of global and national cultural pluralism. Through the Kluckhohn Model, education will provide students with the skills necessary to assume first-class national and global citizenship.

The identification of students who are gifted traditionally has been grounded in criteria with an emphasis on unitary measures of intellectual ability. Recently, multiple intelligences [MI] theory has been embraced as an alternative perspective with promise for addressing concerns about groups in which children seldom are identified as gifted when traditional methods are used. The purpose of this research was to compare the performance over a period of four years, on North Carolina's statewide mandatory end of grade tests, of elementary school children, who are identified as gifted with an assessment process based on MI theory, and a group of elementary school children referred for assessment, but not identified as gifted. The Problem Solving Assessment Process, which represents an application of MI theory, was used as an assessment for identification to the gifted program, and the North Carolina End of Course Tests was used as a standardized measure to evaluate progress of black and white students at the end of grades 3, 4, and 5. An analysis of data, over a four-year period, was used to ascertain whether the Problem Solving Assessment [PSAI] Process, designed to assess intellectual strengths in multiple intelligences is an accurate assessment for identification of students when compared to student performance on a traditional, standardized approach to achievement. Results show that black and white students identified as gifted using an alternative measure of assessment consistently do well consistently on mandatory statewide tests. The results are discussed with regard to ongoing practices and future implications for identification and education of gifted children.

This dissertation is a narrative ethnobiography based on anthropological fieldwork I conducted with my mother, Mae, who was both collaborator and subject. Between 1995 and 1998, I researched Mae's life history and cultural worlds by traveling with her to visit the places and people of her past in Ireland and New York. As such, this project contributes to the literature on life stories by employing conversations within a community rather than the single uncontested voice of an interview. This work provides the first-hand accounts of a group neglected in research, that of 20th-century Irish female immigrants, and examines the impact of patriarchal economic and domestic constraints on this group. The theoretical concerns of this work include discussions about the nature of place, memory, and constructions of individual and cultural self. I argue beyond academic and popular functionalist "sense of place" discourses, a constructive phenomenon I call "the Brigadoon Syndrome," to illuminate the "senses of displace" felt within Irish and Irish American cultures. The sense of Ireland as a transatlantic place in a liminal state between traditionalism and global modernity is also emergent in the narratives. Although centered in dialogical anthropology, my methodological and theoretical approach shifts in focus from an anthropology of culture to an "anthropology of place." This shift occurs along the lines of recent phenomenological philosophy concerned with place, anthropological innovations concerned with the multiplicity, interconnectedness, cultural meaning of place, and cultural studies in transnational and global modernity. In order to understand Irish and Irish American culture, the analysis herein is attentive to social dialogical constructions of place, memory, gender, migration, local and nationalistic identities, religion, death, and family.

The Tohono O'odham and their predecessors have occupied southwestern Arizona and northern Mexico (Pimeria Alta) for thousands of years. During that time the physical environment as well as the occupants' cultural patterns changed. This historical geographic study chronicles that change. It starts 10,000 years ago with a brief description of the early environment and how the people survived, continues with a discussion of agricultural crop introduction from central Mexico, and is followed by the period of Spanish colonization and Mexican occupation. The majority of this study, however, focuses on the post 1824 period when contact between the United States and the O'odharn began. Prior to United States takeover the O'odham lifestyle, owing to their isolated position in the harsh, and Pimeria Alta and utilization of a policy of cultural/ecological opportunism, had changed little. However, during the twentieth century their lifestyle has undergone considerable modification. They have reached a point in time where their economic base has changed from subsistence farming to wage labor and finally to owners of profitable gaming casinos. Now they must decide if they are going to continue as a unique cultural unit or blend further with the dominant society.

For many the study of rhetoric has become a study of dialogue and difference, of communication across metaphorical and literal borders, and of the ethics of such communication. Using letters written in French by my great-grandfather, Mordecai Ben-Ami, a Russian Zionist, journalist, and fiction writer, as a site for analysis, I argue that a dialogic ethic of response offers scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition a way to move beyond identity politics in our writing classes and the oppression of the other in our scholarship. I suggest that some of this field's most common theoretical lenses and practical sites of analysis--historiography, identity construction, gender, and translation--can be complemented by the application of dialogic ethics. Using conceptions of discourse and dialogism in work by Bakhtin and the concept of an ethics of responsibility in work by Levinas, I demonstrate that an intersubjective understanding of ethics rooted in the necessity of response to the other can help us meet the challenges of multicultural dialogue. The letters date from 1924-1928 and originate from Milan, Berlin, Odessa, and Chaiffa, among others. The dissertation is organized in chapters that employ, examine, and problematize a different postmodern approach to rhetorical analysis. Each chapter begins with an examination of a theoretical approach in relation to the letters, then analyzes sample letters using that approach. Each chapter then examines the analysis to discuss particular strengths and flaws of the theoretical framework and to suggest how a dialogic ethics can complement it. The chapters discuss the following: the historical situatedness of the letters, the shifting constructions of ethnicity and identity in the letters and in the dissertation, the gendered aspects of the reading and writing processes of the author and the translator, and finally the cultural politics involved in the translation of Russian Zionist letters by a postmodern American.

In this dissertation, I explore the political implications of racial and ethnic diversity. Unlike previous research, this study seeks to provide a more inclusive examination of race and ethnicity. More specifically, the analysis of this dissertation encompasses multiple racial and ethnic groups, including whites, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Asian Americans. The focus of the examination centers on the impact of racial and ethnic diversity on individual-level attitudes and congressional election outcomes. The specific questions posed herein revolve around the issues of when and how racial and ethnic diversity impacts American politics. The findings produced in this study not only indicate that diversity is related to attitudes and electoral outcomes, but also suggests the nature of the relationship is complex. The analysis indicates that individual-level attitudes vary across racial and ethnic groups. Indeed, attitudes across minority groups are more similar than when compared to the majority. Additionally, the findings suggest that the impact of racial and ethnic diversity varies across racial and ethnic groups. When considered concurrently, this portion of the dissertation suggests that the impact of diversity on attitudes is complex. The second portion of the dissertation examines the electoral implications of racial and ethnic diversity. The analysis indicates as diversity increases electoral volatility increases. In fact, the findings suggest that increased diversity is associated with an increased risk of incumbent turnover and electoral competition. Further, the examination indicates the increased volatility associated with higher levels of diversity increases the likelihood that quality challengers will emerge to oppose the incumbent candidate. The findings presented in this dissertation offer valuable insight to the role of racial and ethnic groups in the American political system. This information serves not only as a stepping stone for future research, but is also suggestive of implications for individual-actors involved in the political system. Future research must extend previous work to provide a more inclusive and systematic analysis of the implications of racial and ethnic diversity. Finally, politicians may find the results useful in their attempts to represent constituents and seek election (and re-election).

This study examined the acculturation level of 88 Chinese-American students at UCLA, and whether there was any relationship between their acculturation level and academic performance of the same persons. The Cultural Life Style Inventory developed by Mendoza for Mexican-Americans was adapted as the primary measurement for this research. The difference of cultural shift score between the U.S. born group and the immigrant group was not significant. However, a repeated measures t test on the difference between cultural resistance and cultural shift in the U.S. born group showed significance. In addition, a t test on two sample independent groups showed the differences between cultural resistance and cultural shift were not the same in the U.S. born group and the immigrant group. No dominant cultural life style tendency was found in these subjects. The differences of acculturation level between being in the U.S. for 6-10 year group and 16-20 year group, between 11-15 year group and 16-20 year group were significant. This indicated that acculturation takes a considerable amount of time. There were no significant differences between acculturation level and college grade point average among these subjects. Nor did neighborhood or work environment affect their acculturation level. Since the versions of the Cultural Life Style Inventory are now available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, cross-cultural comparisons between the Hispanic and the Asian could be designed in a single study in the future.