My master's thesis explores the photographic series "This Land is Mime Land," which Shelley Niro made in 1992. Despite this work's complex form and structure, there are currently no sustained studies of this series alone, or books solely dedicated to Niro's art. Instead, "Mime Land" is often discussed in compilations that address a number of Native artists, Western feminist practices, or multiple works in Niro's oeuvre. My thesis fills this gap, as I closely investigate how "Mime Land" asks the viewer to look at visual culture, histories and Niro herself. Bell hooks's definition of the "oppositional gaze" - meaning a way of looking that challenges the conventions of visual culture by implementing the media's tools (film and photography) to construct new images of self - provides the framework for my analysis. Specifically, I contend that the subject, form and structure of "Mime Land" critically intervene in mainstream visual culture by asking the viewer to look at Native American women's identities, cultures and histories in new ways; ways that disavow the conventions of dominant visual representations and return the power over one's image to Niro, her family and community. My study demonstrates this thesis through a close consideration of the context contemporary to the work's production; a detailed examination of the photographs in the series; and an analysis of the work's overall structure.

My research builds upon interdisciplinary trends in Native scholarship emphasizing tribal-specificity; attention to understudied periods, writers, and texts; and a political commitment to engage contemporary challenges facing Indigenous communities. My dissertation examines the persistence of nationhood in Cherokee writing between the dissolution of the Cherokee government preceding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and political reorganization in the early 1970s. Situating writing by John Milton Oskison, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs and Ruth Muskrat Bronson explicitly within the Cherokee national contexts of its emergence, I attend to the complicated ways they each remembered, imagined, narrated and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning state. Often read as a transitional “dark age” in Cherokee history, this period stands instead as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary debates in the Cherokee Nation and Native Studies today. / text

The period from 1969 until 1973 represented the height of “Red Power” for American Indians. Pan-tribal activists participated in hundreds of demonstrations and dozens of militant takeovers demanding tribal sovereignty. The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was at the forefront of this period of direct action even though it continued to receive funding for educational programs and advocated reform through legal means. Operating under an entirely new leadership, the NIYC of the early 1970s resembled the Youth Council of the mid-1960s by continuing to balance indirect action and legal reform with direct action and militant language. But by the end of 1973, the Youth Council ceased supporting direct action as a legitimate tactic for pressuring social change. By 1973 it became clear that pan-tribal protests could quickly upset the gains that American Indians were making in federal reform. Wealthy benefactors funded the NIYC throughout the period, but they never overtly pushed the Youth Council into a more moderate direction. Instead, outside funding increased the NIYC’s operational space and allowed it to gain a modicum of power within the federal agency responsible for Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The NIYC found itself able to pressure the BIA into negotiating on a range of issues, and the NIYC developed allies that shared its goals and ideology within the agency. However, the NIYC’s continued ability to negotiate with the federal government was vulnerable to controversy, and the highly confrontational episodes led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) tended to upset the pace of reform within the federal government. AIM’s 1972 takeover of the BIA national headquarters and AIM’s 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee created setbacks for the NIYC even as the events garnered national attention and support. Moreover, the political climate became receptive to supporting the self-determination of tribal governments, and pan-tribal organizations like the NIYC had to shift their focus in the context of newly empowered tribes. Foundation support allowed the NIYC to help open the way for tribes to negotiate with the U.S. state directly, and this very success made pan-tribal demonstrations increasingly obsolete by the mid-1970s. / text

This presentation was prepared for a conference focusing on risk assessment and facility siting issues in Sweden in 2001. This talk presents key findings from the Hoover Dam Ethnographic Studies.

Native Americans start fewer businesses than do other U.S. populations, and the receipts and employment of those businesses are 70% lower than the U.S. average. However, little knowledge exists concerning Native American (NA) business success. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the likelihood that attitudes toward entrepreneurship, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control predict business success amongst NA business owners. Understanding the factors that contribute to NA business success is imperative to developing best practices for business owners and business support agencies. The theory of planned behavior served as the theoretical framework for this study. Of the 550 invited NA business owners registered within a single tribe in the South Central United States, 79 participated in this study. A binary logistic regression analysis produced conflicting results: significant goodness-of-fit yet insignificant individual predictors. Information obtained from this study could assist NA and other underdeveloped business populations with understanding factors influencing entrepreneurial endeavors; however, readers must interpret findings with caution because of conflicting logistic regression results. NA business formation and success could enhance economic prosperity and decrease unemployment in NA communities.

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. / text

The purpose of this story rug is to acquire a deeper understanding of 10 Navajo students' experiences as they journey toward college. Utilizing Indigenous theoretical frameworks including Tribal Critical Race Theory, Cultural Resilience, and Cultural Threads, this story rug centered attention on the systematic, structural forces and students' sources of strength that have shaped and continue to influence educational pathways for Navajo students. This story rug was guided by a qualitative mixed-method approach including Indigenous Storywork and narrative analysis. Through the assertion of the Navajo traditional oral story of the Twin Warriors, this story rug weaves in 10 Navajo students' experiences including the sociocultural and personal barriers, referred to as "monsters," that hindered their life and their college enrollment goals, how they internalized those "monsters," and then what were the sources of strength, referred to as "weapons," that guided them in life and toward college. The findings revealed systematic and personal monsters that intertwined within community, school, family, and self. The Financial Hardship Monster illustrated the struggles of poverty and its influence on students' educational aspirations. The Addiction Monster revealed how alcohol and drugs within community and family shaped students' pre-college journey. The Educational Deficit Monster uncovered Reservation schooling challenges that limited students' academic ability and college access. The final and more intimate monster, The Personal Struggles Monster, shed light on private and often unspoken challenges that students faced during a crucial time in the college-choice process. To overcome the monsters, students activated powerful weapons. The first set of weapons, Trusting Relationships and Vulnerability, entailed students' awareness of lessons learned during vulnerable moments and stories shared with mothers, grandmothers, and teachers. The Courage to Challenge Self weapons demonstrated that participation in college readiness opportunities and applying to high-stakes scholarships affirmed confidence that they were college material. The Transforming Obstacles to Positives weapons uncovered students' abilities to transform negative conditions into positive intentions, which motivated them to continue their journeys toward college. The final weapons, Faith in Spiritual Teachings, were spiritual and traditional teachings that reminded students that they were not alone and that they were unstoppable in proceeding toward college. This study underscored how context matters and penetrated in students' lives including systematic poverty, structural forces that fueled addiction, and systematic educational deficit and meritocracy ideologies. These stories have the power to transform discourses of deficiency to those of strength and honor for future Native student warriors and their educational attainment.

Few activities have the power to bring people together as sports; victory is contagious, defeat unifies, and the concept of a team can create common goals and unbreakable bonds among teammates, communities, and even an entire nation. In a sense, sport has the power to change lives. The lessons that athletics can teach--preparation, competitiveness, overcoming obstacles, persistence, mental and physical health, problem solving, and setting life goals--seem particularly apt for American Indian youth today. Athletics can serve as a pathway to college for American Indian students who participate in individual or team sports. Access to higher education, in turn, offers the opportunity for larger income and greater economic opportunities. The American Indian students' college experience, including statistics on enrollment, retention and drop-out rates, is prevalent in both quantitative and qualitative research. Moreover, research concerning the roles athletes and athletics have within higher education institutions is historically rich. The intersection of these two topics however, has received little to no attention. This dissertation will explore the impact of sports on American Indian collegiate athletes to determine the factors that both inspired and inhibited them from the pursuit of athletics in college. It will provide the first in-depth look at several American Indian collegiate athletes who can document how sports helped or failed to help them reach their educational aspirations.

The concept of cosmopolitics identifies a multispecies political practice within the framework of multinaturalism. The dissertation, "Multispecies Thinking from Alexander von Humboldt to Leslie Marmon Silko: Intercultural Communication Toward Cosmopolitics," is concerned with understandings of multispecies relationships, with the human intercultural communication that could prepare for a cosmopolitical practice, and with the ways Native American fiction supports this endeavor. This research draws from Native American literary studies and ecocritical scholarship to illustrate the potential of transdisciplinary thinking about multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and Indigenous paradigms as providing a promising communication zone against the grain of scientific imperialism. It thus traces the development of pluralist and multispecies-oriented thought and its points of connection to Indigenous paradigms from Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos Studies of the early 19th century to 21st century Indigenous cosmopolitics. First, this study discusses the insights and obstructions to Western pluralist and multispecies thinking in relation to Native American paradigms from Humboldt via 19th century nature writers-Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and John Muir-to contemporary interdisciplinary research. Opening to wide potential with Humboldt's holistic Cosmos Studies, intercultural communication was tempered by the colonial enterprise in the 19th century United States, including a nature-culture dualism and the notion of degenerated, vanishing Indigenous peoples. The resulting conceptual understandings, terms, and attitudes have been influential until today and are what contemporary Native American authors and activists are confronted with when engaged in their work. Detailed textual analysis of exemplary Native American literature outlines how contemporary authors criticize, counter-narrate, and/or integrate Western intellectual traditions. Furthermore, this study outlines 20th and 21st century scientific concepts that refine much earlier ideas, provide helpful terminology regarding Western approaches to Indigenous ontologies and multispecies thinking, and facilitate a new, insightful reading of contemporary Native American fiction as cosmopolitical texts. The analyses of works by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, and Leslie Marmon Silko demonstrate the value of these works to enhance multispecies thinking and respective political practices. Therefore, Native American literature plays a major role worldwide as an educational and critical tool for an intercultural communication toward cosmopolitics.

This research is the result of a long-standing interest in the work of one individual, George Sword who composed two hundred and forty-five pages of text in the Lakota language using the English alphabet in the period 1896 through 1910. In the past scholars have studied Lakota narratives and songs and with each study new insights are gained. However, the focus generally in oral literary research has been in the study of content and not process in Lakota oral traditions. In order to better understand the characteristics of Lakota oral style this study shows how it is composed and structured in the work of George Sword. The research focus is from a qualitative perspective concerned with exploring, describing, and explaining a culturally specific Lakota oral narrative more commonly found in history and ethnographic disciplines, where it is a special type of case study research. The primary method used is an analysis of historic documents and original text in Lakota to address the issues raised in the general research problem: How do you define Lakota literature? In the end this study shows the way in which Lakota oral narrative is composed, how its practice produced a distinct form. During the course of this study, what became apparent in George Sword's Lakota narratives were the formulaic patterns inherent in the Lakota language used to tell the narratives as well as the recurring themes and story patterns. The primary conclusion is that these patterns originate from a Lakota oral tradition. This analysis can be used to determine whether any given written narrative in Lakota oral tradition is oral or not; and leads the way for further research