American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 2020, the Office of Hawaiian Education (OHE) created the Student Research Program, a research internship for high school and college students in Hawai‘i. Student researchers conducted participatory action research (PAR) on educational issues and impact reports on various Hawaiian educational initiatives. Educational equity has remained an important issue for these researchers, as longitudinal educational data continues to report negative “lagging” student indicators (e.g., absenteeism, school suspensions, adolescent arrests and incarceration) for its Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) student populations. Of particular concern is the connectivity among these student data points, school-to-prison pipeline data, and the alarming rates of suicide and suicide attempts among student populations. As the COVID pandemic swept across the Hawai‘ian islands, “loss of learning” became another indicator that disproportionately affected NHPI students. Throughout the hulihia, or seasons of change (COVID, Black Lives Matter, anti-CRT, antiwokeness), OHE’s student researchers sought to understand the conditions and P4 (practices, projects, programs, policies) that strengthened student sense of BREATH (belonging, responsibility, excellence, aloha, total well-being, Hawai‘i). This paper follows the student researchers’ journey of a‘o (teaching and learning) over the last five years as they engaged in PAR to understand how community readiness is being developed beyond a set of standards, indicators, and desired outcomes into a process that develops ontological self-efficacy. The research team sought to answer the following questions during their investigation: How do students articulate or experience community readiness? What conditions and/or P4 strengthen community readiness for students? In what ways do students activate ontological self-efficacy?

This article argues that Indigenous practices of eviction can serve as a method of territorial reclamation that challenges state claims to property and jurisdiction within unceded Indigenous homelands. In the coastal seascapes of British Columbia, Indigenous leaders travel to docks, corporate offices, fish processing factories, and sites of aquaculture production with notices of eviction, seeking to evict industrial aquaculture facilities from the coast and asserting that coastal waterscapes are unceded Indigenous territories. This article suggests that attempts to evict aquaculture facilities go beyond specific companies, infrastructures, and industrial practices to also refuse the legal status of coastal waterways and seabeds as a “public commons” under state ownership. In positioning the state as a landlord of the sea and seabed, I further explore how evictions intervene in the landlord-tenant relationships between state and industry that are characteristic of how resource development and extraction occur within public lands and waters in settler states. While practices of eviction offer emerging avenues for realizing Land Back and Water Back objectives, the article ends by considering how the enduring legal classification of coastal waterways as “public” causes Indigenous claims to seascapes to come into friction with historical and international components of marine governance. In this context, the politics and processes of evicting industrial aquaculture facilities from the waterways of BC offers insights into how colonial histories inform contemporary coastal and ocean governance and how the exercise of Indigenous rights and sovereignties are influencing how ocean-based development unfolds.

The narratives or stories we tell about our history shape how we act in the world. We compared how institutions in the Phoenix Metro explain their beginnings with a review of academic literature detailing the history of the Keli Akimel (Gila River) and Onk Akimel (Salt River). Using qualitative methods, we analyzed narratives from (1) institutions' beginning stories found on their websites and in publications, and (2) literature identified through Boolean searches in JSTOR, EBSCO, and American Indian Histories and Culture databases. We observed that institutions’ beginning stories often overlook Indigenous legacies and contemporary experiences, mentioning Indigenous nations only when historical events align with settler state objectives. In contrast, the literature review revealed seven moments in time that challenge the myth of Anglo settlers arriving in Arizona to Terra nullius. Our findings highlighted the tenacity and resistance of Native communities, such as the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash Nations, enabling them to thrive despite the expansion of Mexican and US settler states. Our work acknowledges historical oppression to inspire and support practices that promote dialogue and reconciliation among Indigenous nations and settlers currently residing in Arizona.

Bloodroot, puccoon, and Sanguinaria canadensis are three of the names used to term a particular plant with blood-red roots. It is ever-present below the soil of continental America’s East Coast, Central, and Northern woodlands, but it is not always visible. The plant, which I call "bloodroot," requires close attention and bears a fast orange-red dye to those who respect its limits. Yet its histories, livelihood, and futurity have been deeply unsettled by the promulgation of settler colonial extractionism and exploitation.

In my efforts to understand bloodroot as a locus of Native kinship and colonial violence, I undertook a hands-on, site-specific project of listening, watching, and waiting. I worked intimately with the plant to coax out its dye for wool and weaving canes, and I traced its appearance in colonial records from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, where it became a signifier for colonial fears of alterity, a tool for the settler-salvage rhetoric of the "disappearing Indian" and, recently, a site for Native-led restorative care. 

My work is informed by Zoe Todd’s critique that "realizations" of environmental sentience risk erasing millennia of Native kinship with land; by deepening my personal relationship with bloodroot, detangling colonial namings, and tracing settler understandings of Native-bloodroot relations, I aim to elucidate the obfuscation (not absence) of Native land stewardship under colonial occupation. With bloodroot as a case study, “Digging for Dye” highlights the need for hands-on scholarship and historiographic redress in support of Native land kinship.  

Native Americans may resist colonial expansion in multiple ways. Some methods of resistance are direct confrontations, while others utilize subtlety. This paper examines resistance to the concept of the frontier by Native American authors, a term prevalent in settler colonial narratives connoting borders and “progress.” We claim that the term frontier is used differently by Native American authors compared to non-Native authors. The term frontier, given its centrality to American historiography, frames westward expansion and “open land” as shaping the national character. To Native Americans, the frontier ushered in a different experience. Displacement, geographic sequestering, and often genocide accompanied colonial expansion. We offer a novel approach to resistance by first employing “text mining” to identify differences in tone by Native authors. We then explore these results through a qualitative analysis for greater context. By analyzing Native-authored and non-Native-related works in the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) for the years 1826–2009, we demonstrate that writing by Native authors qualitatively differs in its use of frontier themes, and algorithmic methods successfully detect this difference. We suggest that one interpretation of these differences is that many Native American authors subtly resist the legitimacy of the framing of colonization as understood in terms of a frontier. 

This article is the first biography written of Florence Shotridge (1882–1917), a Tlingit woman who was the first Indigenous American to lead an anthropological expedition alongside her husband, Louis Shotridge. Louis is a well-known Tlingit ethnographer and collector, but much of his work in his early career was accomplished in collaboration with Florence—yet she is often not mentioned in these early years of his work. This paper seeks to fill in the historical gaps on Florence’s life history and highlight her contributions to her husband’s career and the field of anthropology. I discuss her early life, the Tina’a Chilkat blanket she wove, the expositions she performed in with Louis across the United States, her career at the Penn Museum, and her death at the age of thirty-five. In addition to this paper, I have created an accompanying short film that aims to breathe new life into Florence’s story, to be shared widely in order to ensure her life and legacy extend beyond the periphery of the Penn Museum and the Tlingit community.

Link to the film Florence Shotridge (2021): https://youtu.be/dQTTGmLd63k 

This paper examines how the Rapid City Indian School (1898–1934) was mobilized to advance white settler economic interests in western South Dakota. Using a political-economy lens, the study traces two linked processes: the promised economic benefits to Rapid City from siting a large, off-reservation boarding school, and the redistribution of RCIS land after closure. Contemporary boosters aggressively pursued the school for jobs, contracts, and federal spending; enrollment grew to nearly 350 students, and local firms captured sustained construction and supply work. Following closure, Congress authorized the secretary of the interior to dispose of RCIS lands. Of the roughly 1,370 acres associated with the school, a master plan allocated about 1,200 acres to public and civic entities, enabling transfers to the city, school district, National Guard, and multiple churches—often at nominal cost and without durable public-use restrictions. By contrast, provisions for housing “needy Indians” were delayed, diluted, or displaced, even as Native families formed camps near school grounds. Recent disputes over parcels, reversion clauses, and city financing further reveal how historical dispossession structures contemporary politics in Rapid City. The RCIS case shows that, beyond assimilation, boarding schools functioned as engines of local accumulation: converting Indigenous land and federal appropriations into municipal assets while externalizing social costs onto Native communities.