Contentious debates among Natives and non-Natives concerning the fate of wild horses on Yakama tribal lands in Washington State have waxed and waned for more than a century. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the Yakima Indian Agency welcomed non-Indian sheep and cattle ranchers onto Yakama tribal lands against Native wishes, taxing rangelands, and resulting in widespread overgrazing. By the 1920s, agency concerns for the economic stability of non-Indian ranchers facilitated a need to gain access to communal tribal grazing lands that served to sustain Yakama horses. Because of this, agency officials orchestrated systematic assaults on Yakama horse herds, citing horses as the primary culprits of overgrazing and land degradation. However, Yakamas showed little interest in removing their horses at the behest of non-Native officials, and instead vehemently opposed settler encroachment on communal grazing lands. Through an interrogation of archival sources, conducting interviews, and reviewing scholarly sources across disciplines, I argue that Yakamas and non-Natives used wild horses as a terrain of struggle, whereby asserting competing claims to Indigenous lands and resources. Thus, examining wild horses as a tool of Indigenous resistance during the early twentieth century provides a useful lens for understanding the many forms of Native opposition to colonial hegemony, while simultaneously calling attention to the multiplicity of problematic and archaic tropes employed by non-Natives in an effort to provide justification for divesting Native communities of meaningful lands and resources.
 

Arctic areas such as coastal Alaska are experiencing some of the most severe effects of global climate change. These effects include melting of the permafrost, shorter winters and longer summers, more frequent and severe storms, and a drastic loss of shoreline. These factors have led to the endangering or destruction of many archaeological sites. Interdisciplinary scientists have worked together to form a model to help monitor the condition of coastal archaeological sites and the effect that the climate has upon them. However, in formulating this model they were unable to include the perspective of local indigenous groups and other local community members. The goal of this project is to add to the existing model a way of collecting and including the perspectives of the local communities and indigenous groups who often have better access to and knowledge of these sites than outside interests do. The fieldwork for this project takes place at an archaeological site near Barrow, Alaska which is currently eroding into the ocean due to shoreline loss. By utilizing the existing community ties that the archaeologists working at this site have cultivated I will show that through the involvement of all members of the local community the monitoring of local sites can be more comprehensive.

My research focuses on the understanding of agro-ecological practices in small, marginalized indigenous communities. Sustainable and cultural agricultural practices are increasingly oppressed by global corporate policies which often erase traditional indigenous expertise. My goal is to explore why the legacy and practices of traditional knowledge in small indigenous farming enterprises may be threatened. Jocotepec is a region that has been drastically affected by the North American Free Trade Alliance and as a result community members have lost most of their cultural tradition to the modernization of agricultural methodologies that were implemented roughly 20 years ago. Small scale campesinos are grateful that they can rent their parcels and make a profit, yet regret the establishment of big industrial American raspberry farms. My research focuses on traditional agricultural practices of the Jocotepec Region of Mexico, analyzing the impact of three large American raspberry farms. My methodological approach includes collecting data gleaned from semi-structured interviews with twelve indigenous small scale farmers and community Elders who shared critical perspectives of outside pressure generated by the three large American raspberry farms in Jocotepec, Mexico.

Nongovernmental organizations have become important actors and contributors to global governance as states have been superseded as the primary representatives of constituents since the neoliberal era. Many of the current studies on NGOs are moving beyond generalizations of NGO work that provide binary accounts of good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, taking an approach that studies the processes that occur in NGO work and highlighting issues of power. It is argued that NGOs, particularly those that work on issues of gender and women’s rights, are part of what Keck and Sikkink call “transnational advocacy networks” where a set of values and meaning are shared among various actors working on a particular issue at global, national, regional, and local levels. This study addresses the communication that occurs between the various, diverse actors of this transnational network and how those values and meaning are interpreted and shared at each level with a particular focus on NGOs as intermediaries. Organizations that work specifically on issues of women’s rights become new spaces for feminist activism and a renegotiation of prescribed identity. This study is a case study of a women’s organization, Réseau Siggil Jigeen, in Dakar, Senegal that relies on a series of qualitative interviews and a gender-based analysis of women in development to explore feminist struggles and transnationalism in Senegalese women’s organizations. The findings illustrate that actors within these networks hold power in various ways and that values are often negotiated or transformed throughout the network to fit the diverse contexts in which they function. This paper contributes to a broader understanding of transnationalism and transnational networks, where it is ideas that are shared across borders and how the re-negotiation of those ideas in different contexts can lead us to more inclusive discourses and research methods.

Conventional wisdom concerning labor migration in Southern Africa holds that cheap, migratory labor was necessary for the extraction of base metals and the profitability of colonial mining. The different geologic, political, economic, labor and domestic conditions of mines across the region has, as a result, been obscured. The deterministic view of labor migration within “cheap-labor theory” does not consider the individual reasons why workers and other migrants chose to migrate. As self-perception has become embedded in ideas of work-membership, able-bodiedness, and gender, specific historical analysis of urbanization in different contexts has become necessary. Using health data, colonial and mining company records, and anthropological accounts, along with secondary scholarship, this study addresses dependency relationships between urban black populations, native leaders and colonial and mining authorities. The hypothesis is that relationships of dependence may have translated into forms of citizenship that were not institutionally recognized or that may be antithetical to Western, liberal ideas of freedom. Assessing these relationships in the context of health offers an understanding for how individuals navigated issues of social and political change that are important for decision making in the fields of global and public health, and urban planning. Structural and institutional inequalities created by historical circumstances have resulted in the different quality of state membership experienced by marginalized communities. Understanding how membership and self-perception has been historically created is an essential element for deconstructing institutional and social barriers that contribute to global health inequalities in crucial ways.

Immigrant agricultural workers experience a sense of cultural confusion, an interruption of their sense of identity, and a disconnection from their sense of Historical Self. I describe the Historical Self as a Self that is informed and complicated by history. Although many individuals survive in the dominant American culture, through assimilation or assimilation of their children, many still struggle with a sense of existential loss. In this paper, I use Henry Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis as a framework for analyzing space, time, and energy in the fandango, a practice of participatory community music. I argue that participatory, community experiences in traditional art and music provide one fulfillment of the demand for connections to culture, identity, and history.

The principle objective of this research is to contribute to a critical body of work by recent scholars who have challenged the popular understanding and the perceived differences of both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Minister Malcolm X. Scholarship has not yet adequately compared and contrasted the political messages and insights that each leader presented in the final years of his life. This research engages with Malcolm X’s and MLK’s later works, which were critical for understanding new developments in their political messages and strategies. In order to comprehend the final years of both leaders, this paper will use a close reading of primary and secondary sources to provide a comparative analysis of their work. Also, the paper seeks to explore the commonalities and divergent strategies that MLK and Malcolm X used in their final messages and suggests ways that these messages are still relevant to US society.