<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>

<p> This dissertation challenges the traditional histories of rhetoric in early America by examining how Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric affected those outside of the white, male-dominated social hierarchy of the early eighteenth century through an examination of works by white women, Native Americans, and African Americans that confluence around national calls for Native American removal and African colonization. Scholars have shown the influence of Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric on the early Republic, specifically the rhetoric of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, and historians have shown the relationships between abolitionists, Native Americans, and African Americans during the nineteenth century. However, these scholars have not shown how writers deployed Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric in these debates. By examining writings by Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, I show how both women incorporated the ideas of sympathy in their works about Native Americans and African Americans. I also explore how activists such as William Apess, David Walker, and Hosea Easton all implemented Campbell's rhetorical ideas into their arguments and discuss how their rhetorical practices can be seen in relationship to one another. Drawing on Blair's thoughts on taste, I explore how newspaper editors John Russwurm and Elias Boudinot viewed taste and how they presented their views to their African American and Cherokee readers respectively. Looking forward, I conclude with a brief examination of the poet Albery Allson Whitman who wrote epic poems centered on the confluence of Native American and African American experiences. Overall, this dissertation works to show how those outside of the social hierarchy wielded rhetorical principles taught in the hallowed halls of the university, and it also explores the understudied links between activists who fought for Native American and African American rights during the early nineteenth century.</p>

<p> Individual burials are always representative of both individuals and collective actors. The physical remains, material culture, and represented practices in burials can be used in concert to study identities and social personas amongst individual and collective actors. These identities and social personas are the result of the interaction between agency and structure, where both individuals and groups act to change and reproduce social structures. </p><p> The three burials upon which this study is based are currently held in the collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum. They are all indigenous burials created in Wisconsin in the 19^th century. Biological sex, stature, age, and pathologies were identified from skeletal analysis and the material culture of each burial was analyzed using a Use/Origin model to attempt to understand how these individuals negotiated and constructed identities within a colonial system.</p>

<p> Alaska Native populations have undergone relatively rapid changes in nearly every aspect of life over the past half century. Overall lifestyles have shifted from subsistence-based to wage-based, from traditional to Western, and from self-sustainability to reliance on Outside sources. My research investigates the effects of these changes on health and well-being. The literature appears to lack concern for and documentation of Native peoples' perceptions of the changes in food systems and effects on their communities. Additionally, there is a lack of studies specific to Alaska Native individual perceptions of health and well-being. Therefore, my research aims to help identify social patterns regarding changes in the food that individuals and communities eat and possible effects the changes have on all aspects of health; it aims to help document how Alaska Native individuals and communities are adaptive and resilient; and it aims to honor, acknowledge, and highlight the personal perspectives and lived experiences of respondents and their views regarding food, health, and community well-being. </p><p> I conducted interviews with 20 Alaska Native participants in an effort to document their perspectives regarding these changes. Many themes emerged from the data related to subsistence, dependency, and adaptation. Alaska Natives have witnessed what Western researchers call a "nutritional transition." However, Alaska Native participants in my research describe this transition as akin to cultural genocide. Cut off from traditional hunting and fishing (both geographically and economically), Alaska Natives recognize the damage to individual and community health. Studies attribute rising rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental illness to the loss of culture attached to subsistence lifestyles and subsistence foods themselves. Alaska Natives report a decrease in cultural knowledge and traditional hunting skills being passed to the younger generations. Concern for the future of upcoming generations is a reoccurring theme, especially in regard to dependence on market foods. When asked what changes should be made, nearly all respondents emphasized education as the key to cultural sustainability and self-sufficiency. The changes sought include means and access to hunting and fishing. This is seen as the remedy for dependence on Outside resources. From a traditional Alaska Native perspective, food security cannot be satisfied with Western industrial products. </p><p> When considering Arctic community health and cultural sustainability, food security must be considered in both Western and Indigenous Ways. Control over local availability, accessibility, quality, and cultural appropriateness is imperative to Native well-being. Many participants point to differences in Western and Native definitions of what is acceptable nourishment. Imported processed products simply cannot fully meet the needs of Native people. Reasons cited for this claim include risky reliance on a corporate food system designed for profit with its inherent lack of culturally-appropriate, nutrient-dense, locally controlled options. Respondents are concerned that junk food offers dependable, affordable, available, and accessible calories, whereas traditional foods often are not as reliably accessible. Based on these findings, I named the concept of "nutritional colonialism." </p><p> Respondents expressed a desire to return to sustainable and self-sufficient subsistence diets with their cultural, emotional, social, spiritual, and physical benefits. Although they expressed concern regarding climate change and environmental pollutants, this did not diminish the significance of traditional foods for respondents.</p>