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Answering the call to decenter whiteness and coloniality within communication studies (#RhetoricSoWhite), this project attempts to reclaim space for indigenous knowledge and to serve decolonial struggles. Written as a project of love for my fellow indigenous scholars and peoples, I expand upon Tiara Na'puti's conceptualization of "Indigeneity as Analytic" and chart how indigenous Pacific Island decolonial resistance operates through a paradigm of decolonial futurity. By recognizing Guåhan (Guam), as well as Chamoru, bodies as (de)colonial borderlands, I demonstrate the radical potential of indigeneity through three different case studies. First, I name indigenous feminine style as a strategic mode of public address adopted by Governor Lou Leon Guerero to resist the spread of COVID-19 by US military personnel on the island of Guåhan. Second, I showcase how the process and practice of indigenous Pacific Island tattooing delinks away from coloniality. Finally, I demonstrate how the celebration of a Chamoru saint, Santa Marian Kamalen, provides a spatial-temporal intervention that articulates an indigenous religion and enacts a decolonial futurity.

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ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to focus on the effects of Anglo-American and US language on the Navajos. During that time the language was bias and exclusionary. The Civil War 1861-1865, over time caused a change in the language used during the US subjugation of the Navajo 1863-1868. Data was selected from; The American Antiquarian Society and Historical Newspapers [Series I, 1718-1876]. Searched all of Americas Historical Newspapers dated 1863-1868, for Navajo and received 200 results. Other documents such as letters, reports and visually evidence were used. My research revealed a variety of language and how this language was conveyed minimized the Navajos humanity and sovereignty that also provoked and inspired harsh, unsympathetic and racist treatment of the Navajo. Anglo-Americans changed over time through altruism, the military and legislation. This paper has an introduction, three sections and a conclusion. The first section explains why the language during the Civil War was harsh, unsympathetic and racist to the Navajo. The next section explains why after the Civil War, the language begins to change altruistically, legislatively and militarily, but still remained harsh, unsympathetic and racist to the Navajo. The last section, explains why several years after the Civil War the language shifts through the Sherman Treaty, Congressional legislation, and Military Orders. Anglo-American racialization was shown by comparing and contrasting language from the overlap between the Civil war and the US subjugation of the Navajo. Research revealed the dissemination of racist and exclusionary language. But not until humanitarian efforts were made on behalf of the Navajo by whites, would the language begin to change overtime. The Navajo were excluded from the language by biases, racism, and exclusionary practices. The paper shows an array of concern for the Navajos. My research will be expanded on this subject, also this methodological approach will be employed over time on an array of historical topics and time periods. / History

This thesis focuses on the diasporic Lumbee community of Philadelphia that formed following the Second World War and developed throughout the late twentieth century. Faced with economic hardship, thousands of Lumbees migrated out of Robeson County and settled in urban centers including Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia. While segregation barred Indians from industrial jobs in the southeast, Lumbees found employers in Philadelphia less concerned about their ethnic background. In the 1940s and 50s, many Lumbees were apprehensive about leaving their ancestors’ original places in North Carolina, fearing that they would lose the ties that bound them to their sense of self. Lumbees from North Carolina continued to migrate to Philadelphia in the 1960s and 70s, many settled and raised their children in the city. Using archival records and original oral history interviews, I argue that Lumbees were able to retain and reaffirm a distinct Indian identity through traditional kinship practices, transcending geographical bounds, and despite new challenges of urban life in 20th century Philadelphia. The retention of this identity is seen through the establishment of a Lumbee church, Lumbee involvement in Philadelphia’s urban Indian center, and participation in homecoming traditions. Lumbees were able to carve out a space in Philadelphia where they found belonging with one another, while making a deep and enduring impact on the city. / History

““Fraught with Disastrous Consequences for our Country”: Cherokee Sovereignty, Nullification and the Sectional Crisis” explores how the national debates over Indian sovereignty rights contributed to the rise of American sectionalism. Although most American citizens supported westward expansion, the Cherokee Nation demonstrated effectively that it had adopted Western civilized standards and, in accord with federal treaty law, deserved constitutional protections for its sovereignty and homelands. The Cherokees’ success divided American public opinion over that nation’s purported rights to constitutional protections. When Georgian leaders and the state militia harassed Northern white American missionaries who supported Cherokee sovereignty rights, even citizenship rights seemed in question. South Carolina’s leaders capitalized on the Cherokee debate by framing their own protest against federal tariffs as a complementary states’ rights issue. Thus, in 1832, nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cherokee sovereignty protections against Georgia’s removal efforts in Worcester v. Georgia, South Carolina issued an Ordinance of Nullification, proclaiming its state right to nullify federal taxation. Current historiography tends to suggest that most Americans at that time ignored Cherokee sovereignty to confront South Carolina’s Nullification challenge. Alternatively, this project proposes that the debates over Cherokee sovereignty exacerbated Americans’ fear over South Carolina’s Nullification crisis, because together they representing a two-state challenge to federal authority. While current historiography also recognizes that expansion was a critical feature of American sectionalism, the debate over Indian sovereignty within already established Eastern states demonstrates that the politics of expansion was not simply a Western borderlands issue. Nullification threatened the Union because Georgia and President Andrew Jackson simultaneously ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret constitutional law, while promoting the vital importance of constitutional law. To explore the sectional tensions that linked Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification, this project reviews the earlier period in American politics when these issues evolved separately to demonstrate the effect of their eventual connection. The first chapter provides an example that shows how the Cherokees protected their treaty rights successfully during this earlier period. Chapter Two considers the unique histories of South Carolina and the Cherokee Nation, and their collective challenges to the evolving American political economy. Chapter Three explores how the non-white republic of the Cherokee Nation contributed to the weakening of race-based slavery positivism, despite its own investment in slavery. Chapter Four demonstrates how a widening circle of congressional figures began connecting publicly the debates over Cherokee removal, tariffs, and slavery, made especially visible during the Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate. Chapter Five delineates the national discord over the extra-legal violence against white missionaries who protected Cherokee interests. As evident through the recently discovered prison journal of Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester—of Worcester v. Georgia—this chapter also demonstrates that despite their rhetoric otherwise, Jacksonians recognized the sectional toxicity when the American public connected Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification. / History