American Indian Studies

"Traditional Navajo Culture is a Protective Factor" is intended for those who have a stake in Indigenous spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional health. Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians are Indigenous minorities in the USA that tend to consistently top the charts in deficient measures like depression, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, domestic violence, substance use/abuse, and suicide. The West does not offer any explanation as to the cause but is trying to fight these diseases and disorders by allocating federal funds for tribes, urban Indians, and Native groups to devise ways to minimize negative health effects by employing prevention practices that respect and are informed by the local Native cultures. This thesis examines these public health issues from a modern Indigenous perspective that use Navajo specific examples that combine both Western and Indigenous philosophies and paradigms to propose a solution that is strength-based, culturally-informed, and locally-driven

This dissertation explores the adaptation of traditionally objectified women's spaces, into an arena for leadership development, research which incorporates the development of culturally relevant mechanisms of leadership training within Indigenous societies.  Cultural pageants offer a place for young women to become spokespersons on social justice issues, without the sexual objectification of entering beauty pageants.  Such pageants also provide a glimpse of how cultural groups wish their national identity to be portrayed to the general public.  Fifty years in the making, today's Native Nations cultural pageants have been decolonized to present images of young leaders, confident in their heritage, introducing themselves in their Native language, and committed to cultural continuity and sustainable Nations.  This research examines a state-wide Alaska Native pageant, Miss World Eskimo Indian Olympics, from three perspectives: 1) the young women who develop culturally based leadership skills; 2) the community, who gains language and cultural, revitalization and maintenance role models; 3) and the general public, who gains a much needed positive representation of a contemporary Indigenous woman.  This study draws from interdisciplinary theories and research methodologies (including observation, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and archival research) and follows the young women through to the contest at the national level, Miss Indian World, run annually in Albuquerque, through Gathering of Nations.  The underlying hypothesis is that women use cultural pageants as a stepping stone to advance their cultural leadership.  In doing so, they promote factors of community well-being affecting Indigenous communities, such as suicide prevention, substance abuse, and language and cultural revitalization.

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.

When the World Eskimo Indian Olympics first began in 1961 the organizers wanted a woman representative to oversee the games.  The surrounding villages were asked to send in their prettiest young women to vie for the title.  Fifty years later the Olympic Games and the pageant contest have grown significantly.  While the games have grown in size, attracting more competitors and drawing larger crowds each year, the pageant has grown in maturity.  The original concept of a woman representative to oversee the games is still the same, yet the contest has been adapted.  The beauty contest, in which the participants had to parade in a swimsuit and learned to walk like a lady, has now become a fully-fledged cultural ambassador program with a focus on leadership and community service.  But how exactly has the contest evolved over the years?  What do the young women do in their roles as cultural ambassadors?  And how is that different from what the young women did as beauty pageant contestants?  This article gives the history of the Miss World Eskimo Indian Olympics pageant, illustrating significant changes between the first ten years and the current contest.  The conclusion suggests how the contest has become a venue to promote, sustain, and revitalize Indigenous cultures through youth leadership.

In November 1906, just weeks after a major Hopi division in the village of Oraibi, Arizona, 71 Hopi pupils left their families and homes to attend Sherman Institute, an off-reservation Indian boarding school in Riverside, California. Accompanied by their Kikmongwi (Village Chief), Tawaquaptewa and other Hopi leaders, the Hopis embarked on an adventure that forever changed their lives. For the majority of Hopi students, the adventure to the "land of oranges" lasted no more than three years. Between 1906 and 1909, Hopis excelled at the school in academics, vocational training, music, art and various other programs the federal government used to assimilate Hopis into mainstream "white" society. This paper tells the story of Hopis at Sherman, who in spite of cultural tensions, made remarkable advancements by using and practicing their culture at a school that government officials initially created to destroy Hopi and other Indian cultures.

Convinced that Transnational and American Indian scholars are talking about the same thing when they consider colonial statecraft processes and the US’ assimilationist policies, the author explores how the two disciplines might dialogue with one another. Where and how might one apply Transnational theories of migration, borders and identity in the context of American Indian Studies? How might American Indian Studies’ focus on distinguishing categories of sovereignty, identity and place inform Transnational Studies’ analysis? This discussion considers indicators of transmigrant experience as applied to the Indigenous peoples of North America and how expanded intersectional analytics in both disciplines can support more nuanced understandings. Using a focused review of foundational texts, the author considers the connections that both Native/American Indian and Transnational Studies have to developing Settler Colonial Studies discourse and scholarship supportive of decolonization.

Keywords
Transnational Studies, American Indian Studies, Border Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, interdisciplinary scholarship, intersectionality, statecraft, transmigrant, identity reformation, border theory, Indigenous theory, decolonializing theory

In this chapter, I critically consider the ways that heteronormativity, homonormativity, and the politics of respectability come together to both haunt and produce the digital narratives that constitute the Arizona Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Storytelling Project, in order to discover how memories are sometimes disciplined to re-produce normative narratives about queer pasts. I look and listen for the queering potentials in shared stories and in the digital and participatory technologies that record them. While conversations about “queering the archive” are not new and are, in fact, taking place transnationally, these conversations are extended here to explore the ways in which conformity to archival norms can be treacherous. I ask whether an archive can be a space of radical intervention or if it must always and only be a repository for stories that reproduce normative iterations of histories that inform powerful and normativizing national imaginaries. For those of us committed to intervening in traditional archival constructs and related practices of collecting and documenting, we can see that such practices run the risk of reproducing sexual normativities and social divisions.We should, therefore, understand the queer/ed archive as always in motion—forming and re-forming itself as we constitute and re-member its collections. Ultimately, this chapter argues for the need to develop a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, to help ensure that complex, non-normative, and even contradictory histories have their places in society’s record.

This paper explores the nature of the archival body and the ways in which it is temporally situated and yet also always in motion. Applying transdis-ciplinary logics, it argues that the affective nature of archival productions follows the machinations of metamorphoses and (un)becoming. Using two queer/ed and transgender archives as sites of inquiry, the paper explores the erotic and affective nature of accessing the archival body in its multimodal forms. Although touching, smelling and stroking what remains of distinct material lives might elucidate arousal and certain other affective and haptic responses within the visitor to the archives, the records themselves hold and cradle their creators and their storytelling techniques along with their relationships to longing for and belonging in the archival body of knowledge. This approach suggests that understanding of the record and its affects can be enriched by temporal perspectives that acknowledge distinct and diverse temporalities and promote generative understandings of potentially meaningful progressions of time and everyday rhythms embodied within archival materials.

Through hands-on work collecting digital video oral histories for the Arizona Queer Archives, bodies and bodies of knowledge in ongoing affective states of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming can be observed and encountered. Both interviewing and storytelling techniques in select oral histories are considered here to stress the salient and affective processes of mediation and (un)becoming that unfold in front of and behind the camera as part of the production of digital archival stories and subsequent access to streaming technologies. In order to explore the details of archival production, the oral history interview is understood here as a space of both intimate and public storytelling—an affective assemblage. This paper introduces archives as affective multimodalities that work to tenderly hold and structure bodies, technologies, and stories especially as these come together and apart in states of (un)becoming.

LEE, Jamie A.. Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions: Archival Bodies of Affective Evidences. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, [S.l.], v. 9, n. 6, p. 72-85, dec. 2016. ISSN 1755-9944. Available at: <http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/484>. Date accessed: 09 dec. 2016.