Mainstream institutions have, historically, dismissed Indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and research approaches (Bowman-Farrell, 2015; Harrington & Pavel, 2013). However, in recent years, a literature has emerged articulating Indigenous research methodologies (IRMs), and their distinctiveness from Western, Eurocentric perspectives on inquiry (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; Kovach, 2009; Smith, 1999 & 2012; Wilson, 2008). This has coincided with increased need for IRM scholars and practitioners to secure extramural funds to support their activities. But questions remain as to how the U.S. federal grant making enterprise has accommodated Indigenous frameworks. This research explores synergies in the ways that grantees, grant makers, and other related stakeholders understand and navigate the federal funding enterprise in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEM-H) fields; and the impact of how, and to what extent, this space is successfully navigated. To align with Indigenous worldviews, I use triple theoretical lenses of Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2005), Storytelling, and Interstitial Spaces (Cram & Philips, 2011), and an indigenized case study design. Eleven participants from Tribal Colleges and Universities and tribal communities, federal funding agencies, and consulting firms participated in unstructured interviews to tell their views about Indigenous approaches in the federal funding environment. Coupled with document review, the analysis showed that perceptions of risk, evidence, and expertise were sources of tension, although there were also areas of real and lasting success. I suggest that despite policies to diversify STEM-H grant making, Indigenous perspectives have largely been excluded from these discourses. This may have the effect of compromising the integrity of the validity construct as used in the dominant research methodology literature. I offer a model, called Fifth Paradigm Grantsmanship, as one means to usher transformative change in grant making.

<p>All of the work described in this dissertation involves the use of Indigenous research frameworks to design research projects, to facilitate communication with Indigenous communities that I have collaborated with, and also to teach and mentor undergraduate and graduate students. Indigenous research frameworks emphasize the importance of place in relation to the integrity of cultural values espoused by many Indigenous communities. This entails a respect for the spirituality component of Indigenous people because this is often directly tied to relationships between the land, animals, and plants of their local environments.</p> <p>While some research has been conducted to help understand Indigenous people’s understandings of geoscience, less emphasis has been placed on recognizing and leveraging common connections Indigenous students make between their Traditional cultures and Western science. Thus, the research presented in this dissertation identifies connections Indigenous learners make between geology concepts and their everyday lives and cultural traditions in both formal and informal settings. Some of these connections have been integrated into place-based geoscience education modules that were implemented within an introductory environmental science course. </p> <p>Qualitative analysis, using a socioTransformative constructivism theoretical lens, of semi-structured interviews after implementation of a Sharing/Learning program for an Acoma pilot project, implemented informally, and for a series of geoscience education modules at a private university provides evidence that elements reflective of the use of sociotransformative constructivism (e.g. connections between global and localized environmental issues) were acknowledged by the participants as particularly impactful to their experience during implementation of the geoscience-focused activities. In addition to the socioTransformative theoretical perspective, Indigenous research frameworks (i.e. Tribal Critical Race Theory) were used to contextualize the educational interventions for two different Indigenous communities, Acoma Pueblo and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Tribal Critical Race Theory was not used to analyze the semi-structured interviews. Instead the Indigenous research frameworks were used to ensure that the research practices undertaken within these Indigenous communities were respectful of the Indigenous community’s cultural values, that Indigenous data sovereignty was paramount, and so that the research objectives were transparent. In addition, permission to publish the results of this research was sought from the governing entities of both Tribal Councils of Acoma Pueblo and the Yakama Nation.</p> <p>The research presented in this dissertation provides evidence that academic research can be undertaken in respectful ways that benefit Indigenous communities. The connections that participants in the Acoma Sharing/Learning program could potentially be used to create more culturally relevant educational materials for the Acoma Pueblo community, if that is what the governing entities of the Acoma Pueblo community desire. The modules implemented more formally at a private university could potentially, with permission from the governing entities of the Yakama Nation, be integrated into geoscience programs at a broader level creating opportunities for contemporary Indigenous perspectives to be valued alongside Western modern science. Moving forward, this could potentially increase interest among Indigenous community members in pursuing academic pathways within geoscience disciplines.</p> <p>The research pursued in this dissertation is only a beginning. Approaches to research that promote the agency of local communities in the types of research questions asked and how that research is conducted should be a priority for Western scientists to maintain a respectful relationship with the many communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in which they work. It is my intention to be part of this revolution in how academic researchers interact with contemporary Indigenous communities as well as the next generation of scientists. In the future, my research will continue to serve and benefit Indigenous communities, but I will also begin asking research questions that will help increase the use of diverse and equitable practices within academia. In this way, I hope to bridge the two worlds of Indigenous Knowledge systems and Western science with the primary purpose of maintaining respect among these two communities. In the future, my research will focus on how these respectful practices can move beyond academic research and pedagogy into the realms of professional development, mentoring, and community revitalization.</p>

Environmental racism has recently entered the realm of academic inquiry and although it currently sits in a marginalized category, Indigenous and environmental communities and scholars have acknowledged it as an important subject of critical inquiry. With roots in southern Americana history, environmental racism has had a limited scope of study within Canadian universities. Few Canadian scholars have presented the rippling effects of this critical phenomenon to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and the challenge to bring this discourse to the universities of Canada remains significant. Mainstream educators and environmentalists dismiss discourses of environmental racism, ecological destruction and the correlating demise of Indigenous peoples’ knowledges, cultures and wellness as an insignificant and sometimes radical propaganda. In opposition, Indigenous peoples globally are countering this dismissal by telling their stories to ensure all have access to the discourses of environmental racism found within the ecological destructions of traditional lands and the cultural genocides of their peoples. The stories of their histories and the subsequent activism define the resistances found within Indigenous communities. These same stories show the resiliencies of Aboriginal peoples in their quest for self-determination. Using an Indigenous research methodological framework, this study seeks to provide an understanding of the complexities associated with incidences of environmental racism found within Canadian Aboriginal communities. It further seeks to find, analyze and report the depth of resistance and resilience found within the storywork of Aboriginal women. The researcher attempts to gain perspective from eight Aboriginal women of four distinct Nations by focusing on the context of their lives in relationship to their leadership decisions and actions from a worldview of Indigenous knowledge, eco-justice and peace. The lived experiences of Aboriginal women from the traditional lands of the Cree, the Denesuline, the Inuit and the Métis are critical to an analysis of how environmental racism is dismantled and wellness sought. The storywork of these participants provides answers as to how these Aboriginal women have come to resist environmental racism and why they currently lead others in the protection and sustainability of traditional lands, Aboriginal knowledge, culture and kinship wellness. Framed within Indigenous research methodology, all researcher actions within the study, including the collection, analysis and reporting of multiple data sources, followed the ceremonial tradition and protocols of respect and reciprocity found among Aboriginal peoples. Data from semi-structured qualitative interviews and written questionnaires was analyzed from the supportive western method of grounded theory. Findings revealed the strength of Storywork through the primary themes of Woman as Land and Woman as Healer. These are discussed through the Sisters’ embodiment of resistance, reflection, re-emergence and re-vitalization. The ways in which these Indigenous women have redeemed their knowledges and resurged as leaders is integral to the findings. The study concludes with an emphasis on the criticality of collective witnessing as transformation.

Indigenous values, epistemologies, and indicators have always been ways of teaching and learning about change, and planning for the future. Indigenous food systems are central capacities supporting social-ecological resilience and resistance. Settler-colonialism and environmental degradation are two drivers of rapid and cumulative change over the past century that are at the root of health challenges experienced by Indigenous people and impacts to Indigenous food systems. Indigenous food sovereignty is a framework many Indigenous communities have been working within to support the restoration of Indigenous food systems, knowledges, and relationships to land in this time of resurgence. Recent scholarship highlights the importance of biocultural and culturally grounded values frameworks, aligning with Indigenous epistemologies, for measuring social-ecological resilience and resistance. Indigenous scholars and communities are also calling for more respectful and meaningful research practices in alignment with Indigenous priorities and worldviews. The Neskonlith Band’s Switzmalph community near Salmon Arm, British Columbia, has been working towards restoring Secwépemc plants and food systems through land-based education projects and collaboration in multi-scalar partnerships. This study highlights two cultural concepts or values related to Secwépemc food systems restoration and land based education in Switzmalph and Secwépemc territory more broadly, and their role in guiding future pathways and multi-scalar relationships supporting Secwépemc food systems restoration. This study also highlights the role of storytelling as a method and context for teaching and learning about cultural concepts and values in land-based settings. This study discusses the importance of process-oriented approaches to research for demonstrating how Indigenous ways of knowing can guide ongoing and embodied applications of ethical frameworks. The results of this work highlight the importance of culturally-grounded values in measuring, guiding, and reflecting on change, as well as the vital importance of Indigenous ways of knowing in guiding ethical research processes, and participatory and community-led research throughout all stages of research design. / Graduate

abstract: This study examines the genesis, practice, and Native experiences of stakeholders with two Arizona kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) statute that mandate instruction of Native American history. The research questions relate to the original intent of the policies, implementation in urban school districts, how Native American parents experienced Native American history in their own education and their aspirations for this type of instruction in their children's education. Lomawaima and McCarty's (2006) safety zone theory was utilized to structure and analyze data. Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM) (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, & Solym, 2012; Smith, 2012) was used in this interpretive policy analysis and phenomenological research study. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, a department of education official, urban school district personnel, and Native American parents with children in the pertinent school districts. Data included in-depth interview and legislative committee meeting transcripts, artifacts including bill versions, summaries and fact sheets, school board manuals, and the state social studies standards. The findings indicate that the intent of the statutes was to foster a better understanding among students (and hence, the state's citizenry) leading toward reciprocal government-to-government relationships between tribal nations and non-tribal governments. Teaching sovereignty and self-determination were fundamental. Although the school-based participants had limited knowledge of the policies, the district personnel believed they implemented the mandates because the state social studies standards were utilized to frame instruction. However, the 45 social studies standards related to Native Americans focus on extinct (referred to as historic in the standards) Native societies. The social studies standards ignore contemporary tribal nations and are thus inefficacious in supporting the goal of a better understanding of sovereignty, or in supporting Native American self-determination. The Native parent participants defied stereotypical images; they were involved in their children's educational attainment and were reintroducing cultural and tribal capital. Recommendations include allocating funds to support implementation of the policies at the local school and state levels, establishing culturally responsive curriculum that recognizes and promotes tribal nations and tribal sovereignty, and strengthening relationships between tribal nations, school districts, and the state department of education. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Administration and Supervision 2014

Over centuries, Hmong people have moved from mountain to mountain, home to home, country to country, crossing rivers and valleys in search of an escape from oppression. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) ritual and chant has survived serial exodus and diaspora that Hmong people have experienced. This ritual encodes Hmong historical and cosmological understandings as an oral text, passed down from master to student, and performed at funerals to apply that understanding in the management of souls--ultimately to send them home. The Txiv Xaiv (Plig) serves as a glue, connecting the past generations to the generation of today and the generations of tomorrow. A funeral without a Txiv Xaiv is like a tree without its roots. Its ability to preserve Hmong history, morals, and traditions is unparalleled, but the dispersion of Hmong communities across a now global diaspora threatens the vitality of this oral text. An ethnographic film constitutes a critical and central empirical element of this thesis. This film, entitled Returning Home, draws on the affordances of visual and sonic mediums to both depict this oral text and the practices associated with it, and to unpack the cosmology of personhood encoded in the text, which Hickman (2014) calls "ancestral personhood". The film centers on a particular form of the Txiv Xaiv Plig that was preserved by a paramount Master, Shong Ger Thao, who passed down a critical version of the ritual to the director of Returning Home (and author of this thesis) before he passed away. This version of the ritual has the unique capacity to manage the soul of a person who did not receive a complete funeral and proper burial when they passed away, such as the post-1975 exodus from Laos, when Hmong families had to flee for their lives and many people were killed in the jungle along the way. By fate or coincidence (most Hmong would err on the side of fate), the first time that the director of this film was called upon to perform this Txiv Xaiv Plig was for an ex-post-facto funeral for Master Shong Ger's wife, Kia Yang, who had passed away during the lock-down phase of the Covid-10 pandemic, when large gatherings (necessary for a proper Hmong funeral) were not permitted. This film draws on this poetic circle of the passing down of knowledge and putting it into practice, in order to demonstrate the value of the knowledge that Master Shong Ger had preserved, specifically through the use of that knowledge to manage his own late wife's soul, thus completing the circle from one generation to the next in Master Shong Ger's family. This project--the written thesis in conjunction with the film--advances a "Hmong Oral Knowledge" approach that is critical to both understanding and preserving Hmong cosmology. This approach puts Hmong cosmology and philosophy into dialogue with scholarship being produced about Hmong communities across the world which tends to treat Hmong ideas as mere data-to-be-analyzed. The thesis focuses on the substance of Master Shong Ger Thao's philosophy (derived from Hmong oral ritual), in order to "look" and not just "see" (MacDougall 2019) human experience from a Hmong theoretical perspective. Given the primacy of oral and physically performative ritual practice, this thesis employs the medium of film in order to engage with Hmong ritual knowledge and practice in its own terms. The film provides a 'thick depiction' of these practices, and seeks to explicate the cosmology of the 'three souls' model of personhood that underpins these practices, while also focusing on the legacy of Master Shong Ger Thao, who cultivated and preserved the details of this cosmology and the oral texts that encode it.