Browsing by Subject "Native American"
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Item Embodied Storying, A Methodology for Chican@ Rhetorics: (Re)making Stories, (Un)mapping the Lines, And Re-membering Bodies(2012-10-19) Cobos, CasieThis dissertation privileges Chican@ rhetorics in order to challenge a single History of Rhetoric, as well as to challenge Chican@s to formulate our rhetorical practices through our own epistemologies. Chapter One works in three ways: (1) it points to how a single History of Rhetoric is implemented, (2) it begins to answer Victor Villanueva's call to "Break precedent!" from a singly History, and (3) it lays groundwork for the three-prong heuristic of "embodied storying," which acts as a lens for Chican@ rhetorics. Chapter Two uses embodied storying to look at how Chican@s are produced through History and how Chican@s produce histories. By analyzing how Spanish colonizers, contemporary scholars/publishers, and Chican@s often disembody indigenous codices, this chapter calls for rethinking how we practice codices. In order to do so, this chapter retells various stories about Malinche to show how Chican@s already privilege bodies in Chican@ stories in and beyond codices. Chapter Three looks at cartographic practices in the construction, un-construction, and deconstruction of bodies, places, and spaces in the Americas. Because indigenous peoples practice mapping by privileging bodies who inhabit/practice spaces, this chapter shows how colonial maps rely on place-based conceptions of land in order to create imperial borders and rely on space-based conceptions in order to ignore and remove indigenous peoples from their lands. Chapter Four looks at foodways as a practice of rhetoric, identity, community, and space. Using personal, familial, and community knowledge to discuss Mexican American food practices, this chapter argues that foodways are rhetorical in that they affect and are affected by Chican@ identities. In this way, food practices can challenge the conception of rhetoric as being solely attached to text and privilege the body. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how Chican@ rhetorics and embodied storying can affect the field(s) of rhetoric and writing. I ask three specific questions: (1) How can we use embodied storying in histories of rhetoric? (2) How can we use embodied storying in Chican@ rhetorics? (3) How can we use embodied storying in our pedagogy?Item Identification of activity areas through lithic analysis : The Longhorn Site (41KT53) in the upper Brazos River Basin, Kent County, Texas(2010-12) Smith, Kathryn M; Houk, Brett A.; Johnson, Eileen; Walter, Tamra L.The Longhorn site (41KT53) represents a protohistoric Native American encampment positioned along the border between the Rolling Plains and Southern High Plains of western Texas. Original interpretations for the site are re-examined using lithic tool and debitage analysis under the theoretical perspective of behavioral archaeology. Cultural and non-cultural processes are studied to determine their role in the creation, distribution, and disturbance of the site’s lithics and related features. Research orientation is focused on potential causes for the skewed ratio of unifacial to bifacial stone tools, thermal alterations present on some lithics, artifact distribution, and the correlation between lithics and features. Behavioral chain analysis is utilized to identify lithic activity areas that reflect the life history stages of procurement, manufacture, use, maintenance, and discard. ArcGIS maps assist in displaying the distribution of the lithics and their related activity areas, which in turn reveals patterns of the site’s spatial organization. Lastly, aspects of trade and mobility are inferred based on the site’s position on the landscape, creating a larger representation of the daily lives of the inhabitants.Item Investigations at the Sloan Site (41 SS 51) a stratified alluvial terrace site in San Saba County, Texas(2006-12) Butler, Joel Byron; Walter, Tamra L.; Hall, Grant D.A Master's Thesis on excavations and results from Texas Tech Archaeology Field Schools 1993-1996 at the Sloan Site, a stratified alluvial terrace site with a burned rock component in San Saba County, Texas. Site stratigraphy and recovered artifacts are discussed in detail, along with comparisons to similar sites in Central Texas. Deposits range in age from Early Archaic to Late Prehistoric.Item Neshnabe treaty making : (re)visionings for indigenous futurities in education(2016-05) Pochedley, Lakota Shea; Urrieta, Luis; Salinas, Cinthia; Sturm, CirceThis work questions if there is a need for a Native-controlled school in central Oklahoma and evaluates what can be done to improve educational opportunities for Native students (particularly through a Native-controlled school). This research addresses the complex, multifaceted experiences of Native peoples with and in Oklahoma public schools. Three themes, including tribal sovereignty, equality vs. equity for Native students, and the importance of rural schools in Oklahoma, are explored throughout the thesis, which lead to a final tension between the community and colonial (imposed) governments—federal, state, and tribal. Recommendations for anti- and de-colonial action are drawn on traditional forms of nishnabe treaty making as a continual process of relationship building. In addressing the ways in which settler coloniality operates in the daily lives of Native peoples, indigenizing and decolonial literature is engaged to (re)(en)vision indigenous futures and possibilities for education outside of the settler state. The project is framed within the theories of Natives studies, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and Native anti-/de-colonial education and futures.Item Staged encounters : Native American performance between 1880 and 1920(2010-08) Evans, Katherine Liesl Young; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Gonz�lez, John M.; Moore, Lisa L.; Murphy, Gretchen; Paredez, DeborahThis dissertation explores the unique political and cultural possibilities that public performance held for Native American activists and artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Not only did these performance texts, generated in multiple genres, offer a counternarrative to the mainstream discourse of Native assimilation, they also provided Native writer-performers with a vehicle for embodying tribally-specific epistemologies, cosmologies, and diplomatic histories. These Native dramatists transformed the stage into a site of political possibility left unrealized on the printed page, a site where they could revise images of their peoples from shadows and stereotypes to sovereign nations. Included in this study are analyses of the speaking tours of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins/Thocmetony (Northern Paiute), the performance poetry of Emily Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk), an opera co-written by Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota), and pageants performed by the Garden River First Nation (Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe). Drawing primarily on contemporary scholarship in Native American literary studies, including American Indian literary nationalism and internationalism, the burgeoning work in Native American performance studies, and methodologies from theater history, the following chapters contextualize both printed and performance versions of these texts with tribally-specific political, economic, and cultural histories, as well as performance reviews and broader federal Indian policy of the time.Item Stoking the fire : nationhood in early twentieth century Cherokee writing(2012-05) Brown, Kirby Lynn; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Sturm, Circe D.; Justice, Daniel H.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.Item Transforming Native American Youths' Concepts of Geoscience Through a Connection to Culture, Nature and Community(2014-05-07) Ricci, Jamie LeighThis qualitative study examines the experience of twelve Native American youth who participated in culturally appropriate geoscience summer programs throughout California. These programs have been shown to change participating youths? perceptions of science. After the programs, the youth are more likely to describe science as something tribes use to manage natural resources and have been using for a long time, something that is not only learned in classrooms, that they like science and they can live a cultural way of life and still be scientists. Hermeneutic phenomenology is used to understand the experience of the youth participating in the program. Semi-structured, life-world, pre- and post- interviews were designed to elucidate participants? program experience, conceptions of science and home life. From these, salient themes were found and organized into meaning units. It is suggested that having a supportive community, which youth have identified as a group of people described as familial, supportive and empowering, where youth can express their culture while enjoying outdoor programming provides the foundation and safe space to approach program science. Moreover, positive connections between nature and program science are made in this context. This provides scaffolding where these new conceptions of science as nature, and nature as science, can be applied to participants? lives outside of the program.Item "You heal the spirit" : Anishnabe adaptations to historical loss and trauma(2015-08) Brissette, Charlene Nicole; Steinhardt, Mary; Menchaca, MarthaNative American and Indigenous populations around the world face disproportionately higher rates of disease and mortality. There are many nuanced factors that contribute to this, but a common underlying theme is that they’ve all dealt with some form of oppression by colonialism. Native people today still feel the effects of historical trauma as it reverberates through generations that have directly experienced loss of land, language and culture. It’s important to examine the ways different tribal groups experience and perceive historical loss and trauma today in order to teach the next generation of tribal youth to carry on traditions and Indigenous knowledge. In this study we conducted four focus groups in a Midwestern Anishnabe tribe to examine the research question: What characteristics enable Native American people to cope with historical loss and trauma? Using a survey to supplement the focus group data, we also examined relationships among five variables: historical loss, historical loss associated symptoms, resilience, coping and sense of control. Results showed three over-arching themes that allowed our sample to make sense of historical loss and trauma, and trauma that is ongoing: Adaptations to Loss and Trauma, the Legacy Burden, and a Marked Protective Identity. Additionally, the survey results indicated that historical loss was significantly positively related to historical loss associated symptoms. Higher scores of resilience, percentage of adaptive coping, and perceived control were significantly related to lower scores on historical loss associated symptoms. The findings from this study indicate that loss and trauma are present within this community and having a collective Native identity provides strength in the form of resilience for multiple generations. Using the themes and relationships from this study the community can expand resources to facilitate growth of cultural reclamation and traditional knowledge.