<p> Native American women's leadership, information communication technologies (ICTs), work-life balance (WLB) and human capacity building (HCB) are grounded in social justice issues due to their long history of overall cultural decimation, inequitable access to technology, monetary resources, and social power (agency), and influence. Currently, there is a lack of research regarding Native American women leaders' use of ICTs for WLB and HCB. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study is to explore ways in which ICTs can enrich Native American women's leadership aptitude, work-life balance, and overall capabilities. Grounded in Giele's (2008) life course research and President Obama's (U.S. White House, 2011) recently signed, "The Executive Order (13592) on Improving American Indian and Alaska Native Educational Opportunities and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities". This order reasserts his <i>cradle to career</i> (Galbraith, 2012) commitment to all Native Americans and Alaskan Indians, this study seeks to answer the following research questions: How are Native American women leaders utilizing ICTs for WLB and capacity building. To answer these questions, narrative life-story framework (Giele 2008; Weber, 2010) based interviews were be conducted and coded for the following themes: Identity, adaptive style, and ICT use. The researcher's intent is to help bridge the existing literature gap and potentially inform culturally ICT use for Native American and global Indigenous women's WLB and capacity-building to empower their efforts for preserving and revitalizing their culture. </p><p> <i>Keywords</i>: Native American, global, Indigenous, women, leaders, information communication technology, education technologies, learning technologies, ICTs, work-life balance, WLB, capacity building, cultural preservation and revitalization</p>

<p> This critical analysis of the literature explores the potential of liberation psychology to address the sequelae of historical trauma in Native American communities. 21st century Native America faces significant health and wellness challenges including socio-economic disparities, interpersonal violence, substance abuse, psycho-spiritual distress, and physical health issues (Brave Heart, 2004; Dickerson &amp; Johnson, 2010; Manson, 2000; Manson, Beals, Klein, Croy, &amp; AI-SUPERPFP, 2005; United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). The literature questions the validity of mainstream psychological science to effectively conceptualize and treat Native Americans, and calls for the identification of specific, culturally relevant interventions to increase physical and psychological wellness (Duran, 2006; Manson, 2000; Wendt &amp; Gone, 2011). The concept of historical trauma helps to elucidate the psycho-spiritual distress experienced by many Native Americans, including internalized oppression, as the sequelae of unhealed wounds from 500 years of physical and cultural genocide (Brave Heart, Chase, Elkins, &amp; Altschul, 2011; Duran, 2006; Gone &amp; Alcantara, 2007; Manson, 2000; Struthers &amp; Lowe, 2003; Whitbeck, 2006). Duran, Firehammer, and Gonzalez (2008) suggest a liberation psychology approach may alleviate suffering related to historical trauma. This dissertation further integrates the literature on the historical trauma response with the literature on liberation psychology. Native American wellness goals are identified in the literature of scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists, community members, and allies. Concepts and strategies from a liberation psychology framework are then explored for their potential to help illuminate challenges, address needs, and support goals, in alignment with cultural values and work currently being done in this field. Implications in the areas of epistemology, research, clinical practice, practitioner training, and public acknowledgement are explored in depth, and recommendations for incorporating liberatory strategies in therapeutic interventions are made. This dissertation also identifies its own theoretical and methodological limitations, and proposes areas for future investigation. Emerging hypotheses suggest that incorporating liberatory practices in therapeutic work with Native American communities may offer a congruent and compatible pathway to promote psychological well-being in this community.</p>

<p> This dissertation is an examination of how epistemologies that I participate in that are mapped/mappable, in terms of authenticity, through three coordinates: the biological/political, the cultural and place. These coordinates are then processed through the interlocutor (in the case of this dissertation, the reader) who filters the data through the lenses of their positionality. This work necessarily recognizes that the interlocutors frames of reference are, like mine, shaped by their positionality. </p><p> The three prime ethos/culture based epistemologies that are examined are the NDN (more commonly referenced as Native American), the United States Marine and the Academic. The analysis performed is done through my personal experiences, as processed through a number of theoretical frames. While this limits the scope of the work to my interactions through and within the epistemology, it also recognizes that these epistemologies are keys to formulating identities that are living, moving, contradictory shifting concepts. </p><p> I conclude that the various Ideological State Appartatuses (Althusser) and Panoptic policing or disciplining discourses/structures (Foucault) that shape and authenticate these three discourses of authenticity are both internally contradictory and mutually contradictory in ways that illuminate several hegemonic processes at play in the contemporary US and NDN country. While recognizing the inherent limits of an autoethnographic methodology, I believe I have elaborated an approach that can be widely used in examining not only these three but other identity-based communities.</p>

<p> Tlingit culture, as with many Indigenous cultures that exist under colonial rule, is often described as being in danger of disappearing. Despite this, the appropriation of and subsequent use of cultural practices by non-Tlingit people, and especially white people, is a continuation of the process of colonization when it is enacted in a manner that is not critical of current and historical racism, capitalist pressures and colonial violence. This project addresses the topic through recorded conversations with seven Tlingit women in Sitka, Alaska in an attempt to place Tlingit cultural production and use in the broader contexts of Indigenous cultural sovereignty and resistance to US imperial power. While various types and extremes of cultural appropriation are examined and compared to theory examining privilege and oppression, this project does not delineate general rules for appropriate and inappropriate use of culture. </p>

<p> This thesis is an historical archaeological study of how Chinookan peoples at three villages and employees of the later multicultural Village at Fort Vancouver negotiated the processes of contact and colonization. Placed in the theoretical framework of practice theory, everyday ordinary activities are studied to understand how cultural identities are created, reinforced, and changed (Lightfoot et al. 1998; Martindale 2009; Voss 2008). Additionally uneven power relationships are examined, in this case between the colonizer and the colonized, which could lead to subjugation but also resistance (Silliman 2001). In order to investigate these issues, this thesis studies how the new foreign material of vessel glass was and was not used during the everyday practice of tool production. </p><p> Archaeological studies have found that vessel glass, which has physical properties similar to obsidian, was used to create a variety of tool forms by cultures worldwide (Conte and Romero 2008). Modified glass studies (Harrison 2003; Martindale and Jurakic 2006) have demonstrated that they can contribute important new insights into how cultures negotiated colonization. In this study, modified glass tools from three contact period Chinookan sites: Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village, and the later multiethnic Employee Village of Fort Vancouver were examined. Glass tool and debitage analysis based on lithic macroscopic analytical techniques was used to determine manufacturing techniques, tool types, and functions. Additionally, these data were compared to previous analyses of lithics and trade goods at the study sites. </p><p> This thesis demonstrates that Chinookans modified glass into tools, though there was variation in the degree to which glass was modified and the types of tools that were produced between sites. Some of these differences are probably related to availability, how glass was conceptualized by Native Peoples, or other unidentified causes. This study suggests that in some ways glass was just another raw material, similar to stone, that was used to create tools that mirrored the existing lithic technology. However at Cathlapotle at least, glass appears to have been relatively scarce and perhaps valued even as a status item. While at Middle Village, glass (as opposed to stone) was being used about a third of the time to produce tools. </p><p> Glass tool technology at Cathlapotle, Meier, and Middle Village was very similar to the existing stone tool technology dominated by expedient/low energy tools; however, novel new bottle abraders do appear at Middle Village. This multifaceted response reflects how some traditional lifeways continued, while at the same time new materials and technology was recontextualized in ways that made sense to Chinookan peoples. </p><p> Glass tools increase at the Fort Vancouver Employee Village rather than decrease through time. This response appears to be a type of resistance to the HBC's economic hegemony and rigid social structure. Though it is impossible to know if such resistance was consciously acted on or was just part of everyday activities that made sense in the economic climate of the time. </p><p> Overall, this thesis demonstrates how a mundane object such as vessel glass, can provide a wealth of information about how groups like the Chinookans dealt with a changing world, and how the multiethnic community at Fort Vancouver dealt with the hegemony of the HBC. Chinookan peoples and the later inhabitants of the Fort Vancouver Employee Village responded to colonization in ways that made sense to their larger cultural system. These responses led to both continuity and change across time. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

<p> I would like to think that I chose this study to add to the literature on human development in the prison system. However, I would have to say that the study chose me. It became a deep discovery of what is required for human beings to grow within the context of a prison setting and afterwards in the community. The study explored the life history of an Aboriginal woman once considered to be a volatile, violent, and unmanageable female prisoner by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). Changing her life she became a valued volunteer within that prison system.</p><p> Human growth and development must be considered with attention to the exogenous influences of all the systems people have to negotiate. I walked with Lora for 14 years: 7 while in custody and 7 afterwards until her death in 2013. During that time she became a mother, a volunteer, peer researcher, cancer patient, and always a teacher.</p><p> Since the 1970s there has been a pervasive decline in recognizing rehabilitation potential in people with lives plagued by addictions and the crimes supporting them. I observed the opposite: hundreds of lives changed for the better. There are interventions that kindle the flame and support a fire in people to build a healthy, productive life. Society has a responsibility to fan that fire, rather than feeding the despondency and hopelessness so prevalent in our prisons. </p><p> Information was gathered from interviews with Lora, video and audio recordings, her journals and poetry. Interviews were also conducted with family to gain clarity of her childhood and complex trauma history and with people who walked with her after prison to elucidate her change process.</p><p> The study encompassed literature from modern, post-modern, and Aboriginal epistemology, integrating theory from multiple disciplines. What emerged was how powerful the deleterious influences of complex childhood trauma are, in all domains, over the life span. Counteracting this damage most significantly are the mechanisms of hope and the inspiration of believing in the possibility for successful and lasting change: This is the key-stone to the archway through which people re-enter the community from prison.</p>

<p> This study focuses on how secular, governmental, and ecclesiastical Hispanic Empire institutions influenced the response and resistance of San Francisco Native American groups from 1769 to 1846. This project draws on late 18th and early 19th century primary Spanish documents and secondary sources to help understand the context of indigenous people's adaptive and response behaviors during this period as well as the nuances of their perspective and experience. Using both electronic and physical documents from a number of archival databases, primary Spanish documents were translated and correlated with baptismal and death mission records. This allowed for formulating alternative perspectives and putting indigenous response and resistance into context. The results of this study indicated that when acts of resistance to the colonial mission system led by charismatic Native American leaders are placed into chronological order, it appears these responses did not consist of isolated incidents. Rather, they appear to be connected through complex networks of communication and organization, and formal Native American armed resistance grew more intensive over time.</p>

<p> Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) have inhabited the southern Great Basin for thousands of years, and consider <i>Nuvagantu</i> (where snow sits) in the Spring Mountains landscape to be the locus of their creation as a people. Their ancestral territory spans parts of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. My research identifies and describes the heterogeneous character of Nuwuvi ecological knowledge (NEK) of pi&ntilde;on-juniper woodland ecosystems within two federal protected areas (PAs) in southeastern Nevada, the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area (SMNRA) and the Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR), as remembered and practiced to varying degrees by 22 select Nuwuvi knowledge holders. I focus my investigation on four primary aspects of NEK. First, drawing from data obtained through ethnoecological research, I discuss how Nuwuvi ecological knowledge evolved through protracted observation and learning from past resource depletions, and adapted to various environmental and socio-economic drivers of change induced since Euro-American incursion. Second, I argue that Nuwuvi management practices operate largely within a framework of non-equilibrium ecology, marked by low to intermediate disturbances and guided by Nuwuvi conceptions of environmental health and balance. These practices favor landscape heterogeneity and patchiness, and engender ecosystem renewal, expanded ecotones, and increased biodiversity. I then consider the third and fourth aspects of NEK as two case studies that consider NEK at the individual, species, population, habitat, and landscape scales. These case studies operationalize NEK as a relevant body of knowledge and techniques conducive to collaborative resource stewardship initiatives with federal land management agency partners. In the first case study I suggest that the Great Basin pi&ntilde;on pines are Nuwuvi cultural keystone species (CKS), evaluating their central importance to Nuwuvi according to several criteria including number of uses, role in ritual and story, and uniqueness relative to other species. In the second case study I contend that local social institutions regulated Nuwuvi resource use in the past and in some cases continued to do so at the time of study. These local social institutions included a system of resource extraction and habitat entrance taboos that may have mitigated impacts and supported sustainable resource use and conservation. The implications of this research are that Nuwuvi ecological knowledge, disturbance-based adaptive management practices, and resource and habitat taboos are relevant to contemporary land management concerns in pi&ntilde;on-juniper woodlands, offering complementary approaches to adaptive management as practiced in the SMNRA and the DNWR despite divergent epistemological foundations. My research contributed to the Nuwuvi Knowledge-to-Action Project, an applied government-to-government consultation, collaborative resource stewardship, and cultural revitalization project facilitated by The Mountain Institute among seven Nuwuvi Nations, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.</p>

<p> Comprehensive planning can help communities engage in purposeful and sustainable land use development. Previous research has indicated that Indian reservations in the United States often face unique roadblocks to these planning efforts: checkerboard patterns of tribal and nontribal ownership, and the presence of both tribal and local governments exercising land use authority within the same shared space. These roadblocks can lead to uncooperative, uncoordinated, or unsustainable development. Despite these noted problems, there remains an important gap in the current literature regarding solutions to overcome these roadblocks. The purpose of this study was to address that gap. Guided by Forester's critical planning theory to critically examine the social and historical roots of planning within a particular community, this qualitative case study examined government records and conducted 18 interviews of tribal and local government officials. Data analysis consisted of coding data to reveal emergent themes relating to cooperative land use planning in the future. These themes included: (a) approaching planning with a regional philosophy in mind, (b) strengthening interpersonal relationships, (c) finding ways to fairly compensate each other for government services, (d) continuing to acknowledge each government's ability to govern within this shared space, and (e) refraining from asserting authority over a neighboring government. This research is an important contribution to the existing literature and enhances social change initiatives by providing guidance for tribal and local government officials to increase cooperative land use planning.</p>

<p> This thesis aims to provide a normative evaluation of the Western U.S. water law of prior appropriation through a contextual analysis of water value pluralism. The first chapter begins with a preliminary account of the major justificatory arguments made in defense of prior appropriation, followed by two critiques that undermine some proposed advantages of the water policy. The purpose of this analysis is to elucidate the normative claims that underlie many of the arguments within this debate but which fail to be made explicit. It becomes clear that these normative claims assume a utilitarian criterion for resource distribution, according to which water is primarily viewed as an economic good with a monetary value. The second chapter challenges the legitimacy of this assumption by introducing non-monetary water values, with attention to the particular social and cultural contexts in which they emerge. Through a review of four economic proxies, these non-monetary water values are shown to be incommensurable with monetary valuations. Finally, the third chapter offers a theoretical framework for the incorporation of non-monetary water values into resource distribution decisions. From this normative analysis, it is concluded that a necessary condition for achieving just resource distribution decisions is for prior appropriation to incorporate value pluralism by recognizing the legitimacy of non-monetary water values.</p>