This dissertation examines the organizational aspects of fish and wildlife management for Native American nations. Fish and wildlife management is an arena of great importance to many Native nations in subsistence, economic and cultural realms. Additionally, fish and wildlife, being common-pool resources, offer interesting management challenges. My research focuses on what happens when Native American nations exercise self-determination in this arena which requires them for both political and practical reasons to interact with state and federal governments and for economic reasons to deal with markets, all while attempting to meet the needs of their nations. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and drawing upon survey and case study research with Native American fish and wildlife programs, I examine how tribes manage their fish and wildlife resources and with what results.This research helps identify under what conditions tribes may achieve various management goals. In some important ways, tribes are limited in what they can do, particularly in regards to land base size and degree of jurisdiction over non-Indians. More importantly, however, this research identifies some of the many ways tribes can work to take charge of or support tribal fish and wildlife management without having to appeal to outsiders. While there are some very real limitations to fish and wildlife management external to tribes, within those limits, tribes have opportunities to assume and be effective in resource management.This dissertation also provides evidence to suggest that as tribes are better able to determine their own management and governance paths, elements of clan structures and logics develop where the organizational literature would predict they would not. Studying tribal fish and wildlife programs in particular offers an examination of these clan-like features typically found only on the societal fringes. Perhaps even more importantly, this dissertation research demonstrates that there are different governance structures, or logics, co-existing and operating in hybrid forms. For tribes, these hybrid structures create some challenges and inconsistencies that more pure governance structures would not. Nevertheless, these hybrid structures also allow for flexibility and effectiveness in responding to the diverse stakeholders invested in or influencing tribal fish and wildlife management.

The Tohono O'odham Nation of southern Arizona and northern Sonora Mexico has two distinct and distinctive cultural, social, political and federal histories. The American government politically acknowledges one group while the other is entrenched in Mexican social policy that regards Indigenous peoples as equals to the Mestizo population known as campesinos or peasants. The Sonoran Tohono O'odham community of Al Pi'ichkin or Pitiquito, Sonora, Mexico, has managed to persist and survive into the twenty first century despite the presence of an international boundary and the assimilative efforts of Mexican socio-federal Indian policy.This is an exploration of the issue of cultural continuity within the community of Pitiquito, Sonora Mexico via the following eight themes which emerged from my field work: the oral tradition; kinship; tradition and modernity in 2007; the Feast of St. Francis at Magdalena de Kino; nationalism; importance of photography; identity; and cultural persistence. The final ceramic mural along with the accompanying essay will constitute my Ph.D. dissertation project.

One method by which student success or failure is measured is whether or not students graduate or dropout. The current educational policy, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, aims to close the achievement gap among different ethnic groups. Despite these goals, American Indian students have the highest dropout rate and lowest graduation rate in the country. For well over a century, federal educational policy has failed to meet the educational needs of American Indian students. This research project shows the need for perspectives to change in terms of "dropping out" and "graduating" in order to address and improve the success rates for Native American students in K-12 public schools. This thesis focuses on urban Native American student schooling experiences, calling for a need to avoid labeling students and for schools to place a greater emphasis on building positive interpersonal relationships with students and families.

Tonto National Monument was established by President Theodore Roosevelt on December 19, 1907 in order to protect and preserve the cliff structures and other archeological sites that were deemed places of “great ethnographic, scientific and educational interest” for future generations. The land that encompasses Tonto National Monument has been used by Native American peoples for at least 10,000 years. For the purpose of addressing their consultation responsibilities under the federal law and mandates, the National Park Service contracted with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona (UofA) to complete a Native American site interpretation study at Tonto National Monument. The purpose of this study is to bring forth Native American perspectives and understandings of the land and the resources. This study has helped to foster relationships between the Monument and the tribes. Close relationships with contemporary tribes hold the potential of learning more about the Monument’s cultural history and its continuing significance to Indian peoples. This increased awareness of contemporary Indian ties to the Monument, and to the surrounding region, will help the NPS design interpretative programs and manage resources in a culturally sensitive manner.

For Muscogee Creek poet Joy Harjo, poetry is a real world force that can empower the reader by utilizing mythic memory, recovery of history, and a spiral journey to regain communal identity. Her poetic career transforms from early lyric poems to a hybridized form of prosody, prose, and myth to accommodate and to reflect Harjo's concerns as they progress from personal, to tribal, and then to global. She often employs a witnessing strategy to combat the trauma caused by racism in order to create the possibility for renewal and healing. Furthermore, Harjo's poetry combats forces that seek to define Native American existence negatively. To date, Harjo's poetic works create a myth that will refocus humanity's attention on the way in which historical meaning is produced and the way difference is encountered. In an effort to revise the dominant stories told about Indians, Harjo privileges the idea that Native Americans are present and human, and it is this sense of humanity that pervades her poetry. Sequentially, Joy Harjo's volumes of poetry-She Had Some Horses (1983), In Mad Love and War (1990), and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994)-create a regenerative cycle that combats the effects of oppressive history and racism. Through her poetry, violent and tragic events are transformed into moments of hope and renewal. Her collections are powerful testimonies of endurance and survival. They directly defy the stereotype of the "vanishing" or "stoic" Indian, but more importantly, they offer regeneration and grace to all peoples. The poems create a map to help navigate the multiple simultaneous realms of existence, to find a way to travel through the barriers that separate existence. In this dissertation, I employ various reading strategies to support my contentions. Blending a postcolonial standpoint with feminism, I believe Harjo uses a feminist ethnic bildungsroman to explain how a woman of color achieves maturation of self-identity given the many layers of restrictions that act to muffle her voice. Utilizing mediational theory, I study the way in which Harjo's poetry addresses multiple audiences in an attempt to achieve renewal. Furthermore, I posit that Harjo questions the validity of history, and through her retelling of the historical narrative, she impacts the collective consciousness of a nation in an attempt to combat the ill effects of historical trauma. Finally, Joseph Campbell's ideas about the sustaining power of myth, an idea shared by many Native Americans, shapes my arguments regarding Harjo's use of myth as a source of renewal and strength.

This dissertation is grounded in stories of how Chickasaw people have restructured and dedicated their lives to ensuring the continuance of Chikashshanompa', their Indigenous heritage language. Building on an earlier study of what motivates Chickasaw people-across generations-to engage in language reclamation, these pages explore how: 1) Chickasaw young adult professionals who have established careers with the Chickasaw Nation Department of Language have made language reclamation their life's pursuit; 2) Chickasaw citizens-at-large, who reside outside of the Chickasaw Nation, engage in language reclamation, and 3) the study of Chikashshanompa' in school has impacted Chickasaw high school and university students' conceptualizations of their personal and social identities. Together, the perspectives of these groups of language learners comprise a case study of Chickasaw people's resilient and tireless efforts to ensure that Chikashshanompa' ilanompohóli bí­yyi'ka'chi¹ [we will always speak the Chickasaw language]. As a Chickasaw person and language learner myself, I worked from culturally-grounded research methodology which embraced my cultural identity and personal relationships with other Chickasaws involved in language reclamation. One key feature of this methodology was my reconstruction of in-depth, phenomenological interviews as participant profiles-or stories-as a means to present and analyze data. Individually, these stories tell of the nuanced and diverse experiences of Chickasaw language learners representing distinct generational categories and demographics. Collectively, they reflect three key themes enabling the vitality and efficacy of Chickasaw language reclamation: 1) a raised critical Chickasaw consciousness, 2) the conception of Chikashshanompa' as cultural practice, and 3) the (re)valuing of language learners.

This paper looks at economic factors and water rights quantification on 95 Native American reservations economies in the western United States (U.S.). The study looks at the issues in two parts: (1) the characteristics of reservations quantifying their water rights compared to those who do not and (2) the effects of water rights quantification on reservation economic characteristics. Data was compiled from the U.S. Census Bureau, USDA, water specialists, court decrees, news articles, and scholarly papers. Results found that tribes who operate casinos and have higher revenues from agricultural goods are more likely to have quantified their water rights. Tribes with quantified water rights also had increased income levels. This study can help tribes design policies to create sustainable water management policies and economies on tribal reservations.

<p>In 1760, when British victory was all but assured and hostilities in the northeastern colonies of North America came to an end, the future of the southeastern colonies was not nearly so clear. British authorities in the South still faced the possibility of a local French and Indian alliance and clashed with angry Cherokees who had complaints of their own. These tensions and events usually take a back seat to the climactic proceedings further north. I argue that in South Carolina, by destabilizing relations with African and Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians raised the social and political anxieties of coastal elites to a fever pitch during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Threatened by Indians from without and by slaves from within, and failing to find unbridled support in British policy, the planter-merchant class eventually sought to take matters into its own hands. Scholars have long understood the way the economic fallout of the French and Indian War caused Britain to press new financial levies on American colonists. But they have not understood the deeper consequences of the war on the local stage. Using extensive political and military correspondence, ethnography, and eighteenth-century newspapers, I offer a narrative-driven approach that adds geographic and ethnographic breadth and context to previous scholarship on mid-eighteenth century in North America. I expand understandings of Cherokee culture, British and colonial Indian policy, race slavery, and the southeastern frontier. At the same time, I also explain the origins of the American Revolution in the South.</p> / Dissertation

Though bound historically through hundreds of years, the African-Native American relation has not received much attention by scholars of literature; hence, the emphasis of this thesis is to investigate the literary portrayal of the interethnic relation between African Americans and Native Americans through the blues trope. The blues trope provides an intriguing literary platform for the psychological and physical struggles in finding an identity within such a diverse multiethnic society like the United States. For African American writer Alice Walker and Native American author Sherman Alexie the blues trope is a successful literary device in expressing long lost and rediscovered emotions, identities and hopes among an ever growing multiethnic nation.

I did not create an abstract for this thesis.