<p> The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to examine the relationships between demographic characteristics, self-efficacy, and persistence factors that attribute to the academic performance of American Indian college students who completed 24 semester credits or one year of college. The data collection instrument used were three surveys administered as one web-based survey. The surveys included a 10-item demographic survey, 15-item Modified General Self-Efficacy Exam, and 34-item College Persistence Questionnaire used to obtain data on student self-efficacy and factors that attribute to college persistence. The respondents were American Indian undergraduate students (<i>N</i>=201) who attended a community college branch located in the rural Southwest. The collected data were interpreted using a bivariate correlation and multi-regression statistical analysis using SPSS version 21. The study findings described characteristics of American Indian college students who showed high levels of self-efficacy. The study findings also showed that college persistence factor, academic conscientiousness, was statistically significant in predicting students&rsquo; cumulative grade point average (GPA) range. The findings of this study shed light on the need to explore additional factors that perceive to affect the self-efficacy, college persistence, and academic performance of American Indian college students in the rural Southwest. </p>

The Canterbury Basin is located on a passive margin on the east coast of the South Island, developed by the rifting of the New Zealand continental fragment from Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous. Well cuttings produced during petroleum exploration in the offshore Canterbury Basin have been examined for secondary minerals and textures. Minerals and textures have been identified primarily from optical examination in reflected light, with a particular focus on producing high-resolution images. Additional identifications are made using thin sections, SEM, XRD and XRF analysis. The focus of this study is the Clipper-1 well in the Clipper sub-basin as it contains the most abundant mineralisation and covers the full depth of the Canterbury Basin sedimentary sequence. Examination of cuttings from this well has revealed intrusive igneous carbonates and native metals including iron, aluminium and copper. The trace element concentrations in the igneous carbonates indicates they are derived from crustal material. Textures indicating fluidisation and recrystallisation of sedimentary material are also present. The proposed mechanism for producing these unusual mineral assemblages is a late Pliocene or younger mafic intrusion into the schist basement of the Canterbury Basin. The igneous carbonates are inferred to be derived from melting of carbonates in the schist. The native metals have been produced from melt due to highly reducing conditions produced by interaction of the intrusion with coal and limestone. The combination of native metals and igneous carbonates with a conspicuous absence of typical silicate igneous rocks is inferred to represent a new type of intrusive environment that has not previously been described in the scientific literature.

This report documents the religious concerns of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma, the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma, the Southern Ute Tribe, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe for cultural resources remaining in the Fort Carson – Pinon Canyon Maneuver Area in southern Colorado. The involvement of these Indian people in the study area is placed in an ethnohistorical perspective that spans more than five hundred years. Report includes bibliography, photos, and maps.

A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / American Indians and American Native (AI/AN) populations have faced health disparities for a period of time. Although their incidence for some chronic diseases such as cancer, may be lower than the general population, they suffer from the poorest survival rates of any ethnic group. As the AI/AN populations age and live longer with chronic disease as seen with the rest of the general population, the discussion of palliative care is becoming more important. Currently, there is not a lot of literature about palliative care that is specific to the AI/AN population. The paucity of research serves as an impetus to learn and examine the need of available palliative care resources for the AI/AN populations. We present the analysis of twenty interviews with staff members of local hospice organizations and hospitals. The interview questions ask participants about their views and experiences in delivering palliative care. Through these discussions, we investigate the current needs, social and cultural barriers, and the infrastructure of how palliative care is accessed and delivered.

Contemporary Indigenous women's literature illustrates how American Indian women facilitate adaptation from "traditional" communities to diverse urban communities. The objective of this study is to examine how Northern Athabascan women lead in communities which are not exclusive to these Indigenous peoples. The use of Athabascan values such as self-sufficiency, hard work, practice of traditions, caring, sharing, family relations, and respect for elders and others, can be seen as one example of how women lead in non-"traditional" communities. This thesis examines Athabascan women leaders who have worked at two seasonal Native-owned hotels in Alaska as a case study to examine how women lead. By analyzing the women of Doyon Tourism Inc. through the framework of Athabascan values, evidence of cultural continuity can be seen through the sustained use of "traditional" values.

The original face-to-face encounter of American Indians in portraits and pictorial field studies reiterates the encounter between the colonial state, settlers and Indigenous communities. Mechanical reproduction had extended visual technologies creating a revolution in communications which began with the early use of the woodcut (around 1461). A tradition of portraiture from the eighteenth century then re-imagined American Indian peoples for new social and political uses. This dissertation begins by introducing the frontier representations of artists Benjamin West, George Catlin, Paul Kane and William G. R. Hind. Attention then shifts to the collaborative relation between photographer and subject required by the photographic technology of the period. The pictorial contact moment was an interactive communication between photographer and subject. Hence the image-making contact moment is a dialogue, an interchange. Thus the image became a meeting ground where cultural processes were intersubjective and where the present interacted with the past. At the centre of these representations is a two-way looking within a dialogical imagination. As colonial powers expanded and increased control territorially, changes in the dialogic relations were marked in the subject’s presentation of self, the artists’ renditions and the photographer’s aesthetics. Earlier artists like Benjamin West in “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) used the publishing industry to challenge monologic stereotypes. However, as colonial powers exerted greater repressions, lucrative popular culture industries like the Wild West Shows constituted an imagined frontier which called for several other perspectival approaches: Lakota Chief Red Cloud used the photographic medium for peace activism and community building, Harry Pollard’s photojournalism documented Indigenous communities in Alberta and Edward S. Curtis’s pictorialism became a genre of ethnography in the twenty volume, "The North American Indian". Using a historical framework and interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation examines early representations of the North American West in a dialogue as a frontier of difference iterated through technologies of illustration and photography.

The original face-to-face encounter of American Indians in portraits and pictorial field studies reiterates the encounter between the colonial state, settlers and Indigenous communities. Mechanical reproduction had extended visual technologies creating a revolution in communications which began with the early use of the woodcut (around 1461). A tradition of portraiture from the eighteenth century then re-imagined American Indian peoples for new social and political uses. This dissertation begins by introducing the frontier representations of artists Benjamin West, George Catlin, Paul Kane and William G. R. Hind. Attention then shifts to the collaborative relation between photographer and subject required by the photographic technology of the period. The pictorial contact moment was an interactive communication between photographer and subject. Hence the image-making contact moment is a dialogue, an interchange. Thus the image became a meeting ground where cultural processes were intersubjective and where the present interacted with the past. At the centre of these representations is a two-way looking within a dialogical imagination. As colonial powers expanded and increased control territorially, changes in the dialogic relations were marked in the subject’s presentation of self, the artists’ renditions and the photographer’s aesthetics. Earlier artists like Benjamin West in “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) used the publishing industry to challenge monologic stereotypes. However, as colonial powers exerted greater repressions, lucrative popular culture industries like the Wild West Shows constituted an imagined frontier which called for several other perspectival approaches: Lakota Chief Red Cloud used the photographic medium for peace activism and community building, Harry Pollard’s photojournalism documented Indigenous communities in Alberta and Edward S. Curtis’s pictorialism became a genre of ethnography in the twenty volume, "The North American Indian". Using a historical framework and interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation examines early representations of the North American West in a dialogue as a frontier of difference iterated through technologies of illustration and photography.

<p> <b>Background:</b> The smoking rate among young Alaska Native adults (ages 19-29) in Southeast Alaska is 70% as compared to the statewide adult smoking rate of 21%, the Alaska Native adult rate of 41%, and the overall young adult rate of 32%. Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), the non-profit tribal health consortium serving Southeast Alaska, commissioned this research to inform development of a young adult-specific, social marketing-based smoking cessation intervention. </p><p> <b>Methods:</b> Using purposive sampling, 23 individuals were recruited for five focus groups and four individual interviews in Juneau, Alaska. Following a social marketing framework, the research assessed participant beliefs about the benefits and negative impacts of smoking, barriers to quitting, and preferred quit support methods, as well as participant reactions to particular anti-smoking advertisements and quit support methods. </p><p> <b>Results:</b> Almost all participants reported an interest in quitting smoking. Stress relief, boredom relief, relaxation, and oral satisfaction were the main benefits of smoking. Downsides to smoking included negative short-term health impacts, negative impacts on children in the extended family, and negative cosmetic impacts. Barriers to quitting included loss of listed benefits, addiction and habit, fatalism, and the high prevalence of smoking among family and friends. The preferred method of quitting was cold turkey (unassisted quitting), with very few participants reporting use of counseling or pharmacotherapy. Participants preferred high emotional level anti-smoking advertisements with either strongly negative emotional valence (e.g., fear and disgust) or strongly positive emotional valence (e.g., joy, happiness). Reaction to quit support methods was most favorable to texting support and a smart phone app, and most negative toward a smart phone video game. Reaction to counseling was strongly supportive among those who had tried it and largely but not totally negative among those who had not. </p><p> <b>Conclusion</b>: Young Alaska Native adults in Juneau who smoke are interested in quitting but prefer cold turkey to counseling and pharmacotherapy. They are more concerned about short-term than long-term health impacts, and they are sensitive to the impact of smoking on their appearance and on children in their extended family. Findings formed a foundation for a proposed social-marketing based intervention.</p>

This thesis examines the conflicted relationships between the construction of a national culture and identity located in landscape painting and the continuing presence of Native art and identity in Canada in the 1920s. It contends that the first was predicated on the assumed disappearance of the second. The first of five case studies examines and questions the validation of the Group of Seven at the imperial centre: the British Empire Exhibitions held at Wembley in 1924 and 1925, from which Native presence was excluded. The critical responses, collected and republished in Canada, are analyzed to show the unspoken influences of British landscape traditions, the means by which Group paintings were used to re-territorialize the nation, and to destabilize the myth of an essential Canadian national consciousness. The first confrontation between Canadian native and Native art occurred when a small group of Northwest Coast carvings was included within a related exhibition in Paris in 1927. The French critical responses validated the Native pieces but withheld recognition of the Group's works as national and modern. The reviews were collected but suppressed. The third study examines the work of the American artist Langdon Kihn. He was employed by the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways to work with the folklorist/ethnologist Marius Barbeau in producing images of the Stoney in Alberta and Gitksan in British Columbia. His ambiguous works supported claims to Native presence and cultural continuity, which ran contrary to repressive government policies, but were critically disciplined to ensure a message of discontinuity. The fourth investigates a program to restore the poles of the Gitksan, while changing their meaning to one signifying cultural decrepitude. Gitksan resistance testified to their agency, cultural continuity and identity. The fifth examines a program fostered by Barbeau to turn the Gitksan and their poles into the subjects of Canadian painting as "background" for the emerging nation's identity. This confrontation, which included Jackson, Carr and others, foregrounded all the problems. The exhibition which resulted in 1927 unsuccessfully attempted to join Canadian native and Native art and effect closure on the "narration of the nation".

<p> This study examined the common essence of language restriction and then resurgence among Quechan Native American elders. The data suggests that Quechan elders' sense of culture and identity was influenced by speaking the native language. Bourdieu's work on language and power were supported as socially constructed means of communication. Findings from this study provided empirical support for Hatch's Cultural Dynamics model. Erikson's work on identity was also supported with additional suggestions made to expand his final stage of psychosocial development for the Quechan Native American. </p><p> This research primarily focused on the individual level of analysis and provided practical application for the constructs of language, culture, and identity. In addition, this research also provided theoretical contributions for identity while embracing the existing body of knowledge. The research question, <i>"How does speaking the native language affect one's sense of culture and identity?"</i> was addressed through ten interviews with elders of the Quechan Native American Tribe. </p><p> Three distinct findings emerged from data gathered in this research. The first major finding indicated that language is a means of survival for the Quechan elders who forms much of their current reality on historical knowledge. The second finding suggests that the identity of Quechan elders is under reconstruction through the resurgence of the Quechan language and subsequent legitimization of that linguistic symbol. Lastly, the Quechan elders may be realigning their individual view of culture based on a combination of long-standing tribal knowledge and documentation presented by the dominant culture. </p><p> This study suggests a need to draw stronger theoretical connections between the constructs of identity and culture. On the individual level of analysis, culture and identity form and reform constantly to emerge as new entities. However, as this research has suggested, the individual may greatly influence the group's fundamental ideas of culture and identity.</p>