This project investigates the potential of Indigenous fishing in the Columbia River Basin to challenge the genocidal hegemony of the settler state, and advocates for fishing as a decolonial praxis that can disrupt the logics of recognition and interpellation that rest on a rights-based framework for understanding Indian sovereignty. Ongoing practices of Indian food production affirm not only the existence of Indigenous peoples but also the permanence of indigeneity in ways that pre-exist and supercede the settler state.

Barraza, Vania and Carl Fischer (editors). Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World. Wayne State University Press, 2020. 372 pp.

This dissertation examines the environmental activism of (im)migrants and their kin in the Inland Empire, CA to explore what their relationships might tell us about nations, borders, place, and relationality. As concerns about climate change and “mass migration” heighten in American discourse, a relational, no-borders approach to (im)migrant and ecological justice enables us to consider how borders organize societies and limit particular struggles within national lines. In order to demonstrate an alternative path forward, I asked: What kinship networks are formed between Latinx (im)migrants after migration/displacement and by extension, what are Latinx (im)migrants’ definitions of place? What sorts of ephemeral ecological relations are formed between non-human and humans and what do these ecological kinship networks tell us about Latinx futurities and world-making projects? In order to address these questions, I engaged with existing migration and environmental scholarship in the following ways: 1) I argue that (im)migrants defy borders and citizenship claims, even while they remain locally and nationally politically engaged by drawing particular attention to the ways that diasporic dialects are less about negotiating with states, and more about fleshing out the global from the local and national. 2) I also integrate the importance of the more-than-human world for diasporic dialects by paying particular attention to the ways that land, water, and non-human animals come to be represented, inform, and transform (im)migrant political struggles. 3) Finally, I analyze the ways in which (im)migrant kinship networks are imaginative and embodied calls for the abolition of borders and nations.

The intellectual field of Black Studies has historically served as an organ of critique against western normativity. Additionally, the work of black studies has been an opportunity to examine intraracial concerns and debates impacting the black scholarly community and the everyday lives of black folks. My scholarship on Black Camp emerges from these practices and concerns. Camp is a queer aesthetic and cultural practice utilizing incongruity, exaggeration, theatricality, spectacle, and satirical humor to challenge western overinvestment in the stability of gender categories, objects, and behavioral practices. Black Camp extends this practice to unsettle western investment in the idea of race, specifically racial blackness, as a fixed category of distinction. By doing this Black camp disrupts the assumption that camp is a primarily European and Gay male cultural practice; while also addressing silences in black uplift discourse concerning the utility of Clack camp for creating social alternatives– or Otherwise Worlds– for black culture workers seeking to queer normative expectations of blackness

Most Indigenous peoples in the United States live in cities, meaning a large portion of Diné (Navajo) people live in urban areas. As urban dwellers, Diné peoples must make their way amidst an environment where Indigenous peoples and epistemologies are not readily represented or affirmed. What complicates urban Native existence is having to contend with harmful stereotypes. Urban Indigenous peoples are discounted as inauthentic and disconnected by both non-Indigenous and Indigenous societies. These stereotypes can have powerful implications for Diné self-concept and well-being and can compound the effects of preexisting intergenerational and historical trauma. Negative self-image can contribute to an overall negative state of mental health, and, in extreme cases, it can lead to harmful health outcomes like substance abuse and suicidal ideation. Using a Diné feminist and weavers’ methodology, this paper theorizes ways to affirm urban Indigenous and Diné peoples. Using Diné teachings of hózhǫ́ (beauty, harmony, confidence, and peace) and k’é (kinship and relationality) as a foundation for understanding wellness, this dissertation uses a hózhǫ́ǫ́ji or Beautyway analytic to see beyond urban stigmatization, assimilation, and Indigenous erasure. By applying a radical practice of k’é (kinship and relationality) and hózhǫ́ǫ́ji meaning making, it is theorized that Diné people can navigate their urban environment in ways that affirm and validate their Diné identity and personhood. I argue that regardless of the level of cultural knowledge, the perspectives of Diné people have value in the realization of vibrant Diné futurities. Hózhǫ́ǫ́ji meaning making is a tool that can help individuals see beyond powerful theoretical constructs like death-worlds, instead positioning individuals for a turn toward life in all ways. This turning toward life can help Diné peoples make peace with the traumatic and genocidal histories of the Long Walk and internment at Bosque Redondo. It also can help in reconceptualizing present conditions of life in urban areas for Indigenous peoples. In reconceptualizing the urban area, urban spaces become places replete with possibility for innovation and futurity. The result of applying a hózhǫ́ǫ́ji analytic is a more positive outlook on life and self, which is a prerequisite for wellness within Diné and Indigenous communities.

There is growing recognition that violent crime victimization is pervasive in the lives of Native women, impacts the sovereignty of Native nations, and destroys Native communities. Numerous scholars, activists, and politicians have considered Congress' findings that violent crimes committed against Native women are more prevalent than for all other populations in the United States. Unfortunately, however, relatively all of the attention given to this topic focuses on reservation or near-reservation communities despite the fact that at least 60% of Native peoples now reside in urban areas. In Un-Settling Questions: The Construction of Indigeneity and Violence Against Native Women, I posit that this oversight is intimately connected to the ways in which urban indigeneity has been and continues to be constructed, marginalized, and excluded by the settler state and Native peoples.

Thus, heavily informed by Native feminisms, critical ethnic studies, and indigenous epistemologies, Un-Settling Questions addresses settler colonial framings of violence against Native women by decentering hegemonic narratives that position "reservation Indians" as the primary victims and perpetrators of said violence while centering an exploration of urban indigeneity in relation to this topic. I do so not to "fill a gap in the literature" but rather to analyze the ways in which particular Native peoples become figured as the objects of state attention while other Native peoples become eliminated, both figuratively and literally, through the processes of colonialism.

To accomplish this task and formulate a theoretical praxis that articulates the intersections between marginalization, colonial spatialization, identity formation, biopolitics, and gendered violence, I arrange my dissertation to address three primary concerns: the multifaceted ways in which the United States has utilized a politics of location to facilitate the biopolitical management of Native peoples, the biopolitical nature of identity construction and regulation as it manifests in liberal legislative efforts directed at Native peoples, and indigenous employment of settler colonialist frameworks. Lastly, I apply a Native feminist analytic to the prevalence and conceptualization of violence against Native women in order to present the potential for such theorizations to alter our understanding of and fight against said violence.