Centering relationality in online Indigenous language learning: Reflecting on the creation and use of Rosetta Stone Chickasaw

Drawing on the authors’ experiences developing Rosetta Stone Chickasaw (RSC), an asynchronous online Chikashshanompa' (Chickasaw language) course, this article shares examples of how relationality is enacted in online Indigenous language learning. We discuss the RSC interface and ways that it created opportunities and barriers to centering Indigenous and Chikasha (Chickasaw) relational epistemologies in which people are related to one another, the land, the spirits, and to the language itself. Our reflections on relationality in RSC are guided by the following questions: What relationships are required to create an online Indigenous language course? How do people create and strengthen relationships in online education spaces? How can online language work be re-emplaced in off-line relationships? Sharing examples from RSC, we consider relationality in video, audio, images, written instruction, and assessment. We conclude by returning to our guiding questions, offering our reflections and encouragement to others who may undertake similar work.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Indigenous Lands in a Developing Region: A Historical Ethnogeography of the Pech Indians of Eastern Honduras, With Emphasis on Recent Settlement and Land Use Changes.

Since before Spanish Contact, the Pech Indians have occupied a large portion of northeastern Honduras. Like other native American populations, they have suffered significant territorial reductions and cultural alterations at the hands of European colonists and modern ladino immigrants. Utilizing the methodologies of cultural geography, ethnohistory, and ethnogeography, the Pech, formerly known as the Paya, are scrutinized to illustrate the process by which indigenous peoples are reduced and incorporated into a developing national setting. Part One examines the scholarly record on the ethnohistory of the Pech and their neighbors to delimit their habitats and to document Pech incorporation into the Spanish colonial realm. Part Two describes their post-Independence settlement and land use patterns, and explains the most recent changes. The pivotal role of Padre Manuel Subirana in establishing the original Pech land grants is highlighted, and early Honduran censuses and travelers\u27 accounts by Karl Sapper and Eduard Conzemius are employed to reconstruct settlement locations. From fieldwork in 1991-2, the author identified the Pech\u27 current three-fold use and characterization of the local habitat: montana, serrania, and vega. The eastward expansion of Honduran (ladino) population and the accompanying economic activities that forged into the Pech lands of eastern Olancho during the last three decades is proposed as the mechanism that recently altered the settlement and land tenure of the Pech. National and local migration studies, mapped intensively, indicate clearly the movement of the ladino frontier eastward to overwhelm the lands of the Pech. Road improvements triggered alterations of Pech lands and their attempts to reconstruct their land tenure system. Today, of the approximately 1,900 Pech, about 90 percent occupy a much-reduced bi-nodal core region in two upland valleys in the municipios of Dulce Nombre de Culmi and San Esteban. eastern Olancho. A few Pech also live in outlier lowland aseas at Silin (near Trujillo) and at Las Marias on the Rio Platano

Misappropriation of Shuar Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Trade Secrets: A Case Study on Biopiracy in the Amazon

Where the murkiness of biopiracy as a general matter leaves little room for legal theory to anchor, the relative clarity of specific instances of biopiracy may provide sufficient factual information from which to develop appropriate legal theories. In particular, the way biopiracy has been used to misappropriate the traditional knowledge (TK) of the Shuar Nation of Ecuador suggests that there may be legal theories for which the process of misappropriation may give rise to liability under international law as well as under developments in the domestic laws of the United States and Ecuador. The possible efficacy and legal coherence of any such theory are dependent upon an understanding of the background of the problem of biopiracy, the general and specific methods used by biopirates, and a clarification of the nature of the interests in question as misappropriated property. Part II of this Article provides an outline of the importance of biodiversity and TK for medical and pharmaceutical interests and develops a generic model of bioprospecting, which has been used as a cover for acts of biopiracy. The model is drawn from general experience as well as the specific facts in our possession. This section then details how the bioprospecting and biopiracy process actually works in practice, including an outline of the operations of biopiracy in the specific case of the Shuar. Part III raises the proposition-widely accepted as conventional wisdom-that indigenous societies have no legally recognizable concept of property and a fortiori cannot have a notion of TK as a property value. This section then addresses the ensuing question of whether TK has the requisite qualities to be considered protectable property at all, and proposes the central principle that indigenous people indeed have concepts of property well recognized in contemporary analytical jurisprudence. Moreover, this section suggests that these same insights are firmly established in legal anthropology as well as in conventional jurisprudence. Finally, the section deals specifically with TK as property, contained within the secretive Shaman tradition of the Amazon Rain Forest, recognizing that it is because the Shaman TK was held to be a secret in the first place that bioprospecters have used extraordinary means of deception to misappropriate such knowledge. Part IV explores the concept of TK in the context of the development of such ideas as the “new property,” which includes, in particular, intellectual property, providing an appraisal of the problems of protecting TK against the ideological assumptions and misconceptions of certain aspects of intellectual property law. This Article concludes by proposing that the concept of property under the Inter-American system may well include TK as property for the purpose of protecting such property under the Inter-American Convention

Whither bound

An address delivered at the eighteenth commencement convocation of the Rice Institute by Edwin Grant Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osborn Professor of Biology in Princeton University

Baba Is You: Doing Things With Words

Baba is you is a 2D electronic game in which the player-controlled character pushes word-blocks around in order to build sentences, which make up the rules governing the simulated environment. With Baba is you as the case in point, we bring up parallels between video games and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, J.L. Austin’s pragmatics, and Gregory Bateson’s levels of learning. By considering self-reference paradoxes, metalanguage, and the map-territory distinction, Baba is you becomes an intuitive philosophic playground by enticing players to question not only language and its uses, but some conceptions about games – and life, as well

Colonial and Postcolonial Histories: comparative reflections on the legacies of empire

human development, culture

“From Behind The Plow”: Agrarianism And Racial Uplift In African American Literature, 1881-1917

My study challenges our current valorization of movement and flow in readings of African American literature. I do so through an exploration of the representations of the black agrarian masses who either choose to remain or could not afford the spectacular forms of escape to urban life which many essentialized as freedom. In the dramatic and pivotal decades following emancipation, African American leaders attempted to check the growing apartheid by the “combination” of diverse African American communities: North and South, professional and working class. This required that they move beyond the question of whether one was free or slave to the more tangled questions of freedom related to economic class, access to and distinctions of culture, and the opportunities of the city versus the country. Their writing was one means to seek out a more nationally defined community, but their efforts towards racial unity had to resolve the conspicuous differences regarding region and class. A difficult negotiation of difference ensued. In this negotiation, I argue, an agrarian form of freedom manifests itself in the literature of the professional class despite the intraracial pressures of “uplift” ideology which skewed representation toward middle-class life. The politics as well as the values and culture of the agrarian class surface. The agrarian themes of community, remaining, and an environmentalism of the poor contest the valorization of urban industrialism and self-made man ideology which are linked to presentations of a city-life as a life of freedom

An Inquest into the Quests and Conquests of the Radiography Profession in Nigeria

Background: As at 1942, there were neither indigenous radiographers nor radiography training institutions in Nigeria. Presently, progress made is breathtaking. Despite the strides, there were no readily accessible records to give researchers insight on the trajectory of the profession since the beginning of the 20th century. Objective: To trace the origin, investigate the quests, ascertain the conquests of the radiography profession in Nigeria and then document them for easy accessibility. Methods: A prospective, longitudinal historical research spanning 6 years (2013 – 2019). Data emanated from   records of the professional association (ARN), publications in the radiography profession, and interview of older radiographers, especially those who were witnesses to professional milestones. Internet search complemented retrieved information. The draft of the work was uploaded continually on radiographers’ Facebook and WhatsApp platforms for inputs. The author resolved discrepancies in account through weight of evidence for or against. Results:  Approximately 5,000 persons have passed through basic radiography training in Nigeria, with ≤ 5% having postgraduate qualifications. Training institutions have evolved from two monotechnics to ≥ 10 universities, with three of those are involved in postgraduate education. Radiography has witnessed considerable role extensions from traditional x-ray to more advanced practices and complex modalities. Conquests were however, sometimes reversed, or jeopardized by internal upheavals and meddlesome interlopers.  Conclusion: Radiography in Nigeria has witnessed breathtaking evolution in training and practice from the time of World War II (WWII) until date. Radiographers themselves, with significant assistance from non-radiographers, engineered those milestones. A consolidation of intra-professional cohesion and inter-professional synergy is needful, for more focused and dedicated services to humanity. &nbsp

Afghanistan Before the Invasions: The Subversion of Democracy in 1973

Using the Wikileaks PlusD Archive of US State Department cables from Kabul in 1973, this thesis presents an analysis of the politics of the Helmand Water Treaty between Afghanistan and Iran and the role of the US in Afghanistan's politics at the time. The analysis of the cables shows: a) that US policy was directed towards the promotion of neoliberalism in Afghanistan; b) that Afghanistan in 1973 was the site of a largely neglected struggle for democracy, and c) that the US, as well as the Afghan establishment, worked together to suppress this democratic struggle. These broader political dynamics are illustrated through a focus on the Helmand Water Treaty as discussed in the cables