16 research outputs found
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Drifting Identity Formation : A Disaggregation of Indo-Fijian Ethnic Labels
Approximately 37.6% of Fijiâs population is comprised of individuals that have Indian descent (2007 census). This is primarily due to the recruitment of Indian indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations of Fiji during British colonial rule in the 1880s. Many descendants of these servants have since moved to industrialized nations including the United States of America. The ethnic identity of this immigrant population and their children is hard to distinguish when taking into consideration the cross-cultural influences of both Indian and Fijian culture and there residence in the US. Factors that contribute to ethnic identity formation, such as: parent-child relationship, gender, language assimilation, co-ethnic members in community, and location of birth. A survey was conducted in order to learn about the variety of ethnic labels used by these individuals and assess their identity formation. A total of 14 different ethnic labels were provided, with the majority of individuals using âIndianâ, âAsianâ, or âIndo-â, to provide their ethnic identity. This thesis contributes to the general knowledge of Indo-Fijian identity
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Words are monuments: Patterns in US national park place names perpetuate settler colonial mythologies including white supremacy
1. Ecologists, outdoor professionals and the public work and play in lands with complex histories. Part of decolonizing our professional and recreational practices is to expose settler colonial biases and recognize the histories of colonized lands and the peoples who have stewarded these lands for millennia prior to colonization.
2. To provide a quantitative example of settler colonial biases in a familiar context, we examined the origins of over 2,200 place names in 16 national parks in the United States (US; 26% of the parks). Through iterative thematic analysis of place name origins and meanings, we constructed a decision tree for classifying place names according to emergent categories, which enabled the quantification and spatial analysis of place name meanings.
3. All national parks examined have place names that tacitly endorse racist or, more specifically, anti-Indigenous ideologies, thus perpetuating settler colonialism and white supremacy at the system scale for future generations.
4. Looking east to west across the US, the proportion of place names per national park that appropriated Indigenous names increased in parallel with the westward expansion and evolution of US settler colonialism.
5. This examination of place names, name origins and their consequences is an opportunity to make everyday complicity in systemic oppression more visible and to more actively advance decolonizing practices for land and language
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Inhabiting Indianness: Colonial Culs-de-Sac
This article outlines original research on the scale and scope of Indian-themed street names in white residential spaces across the United States, and theorizes how these forms of spatial production are implicated in contemporary forms of colonization and occupation. Given that place is crucial to indigenous identity, this research reveals how Indian-themed street names participate in the abstraction and incorporation of Indianness, and further dis-locate contemporary American Indian identity, presence, and claims to sovereignty. The study also contrasts these 'Indianâ spatial markers with those used for other racialized peoples (African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos), noting how street names referencing Native people are unique in that they have historically functioned to mark demographically white places, and to discursively reproduce white residential space
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Chief Benderâs Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. By Tom Swift.
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The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual Sovereignty. By Noenoe K. Silva.
Inhabiting Indianness : US colonialism and indigenous geographies
This comparative study demonstrates a uniquely spatial phenomenon targeting American Indian peoples and communities that I call "inhabiting Indianness." Inhabiting Indianness refers to the ways that everyday citizens deploy notions of Indianness in the creation of White residential spaces and in reasserting national and therefore colonial geographies. Chapter three serves as the core of the study, examining the construction of a racialized American geography through mundane American Indian-inspired spatial markers. I document and analyze the use of Indian-themed street names throughout the United States, and compare their uses and meanings to street names referencing other racialized groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. After reviewing nationwide data, I provide a more detailed case study of Clairemont, California, a suburb of San Diego. Chapter two serves as an intellectual and pedagogical bridge for my study of the street names. This chapter documents how Indianness functions not only through visual and spectacular representations, but also through more mundane cultural practices. I analyze the use of Indianness at two northern California high schools, one that uses a non-caricatured mascot derived from a historical figure and a second where the school name itself recognizes a local native person. In my final chapter, I present a reading of four American Indian artists. Framed in reference to the use of Indianness for marking US-claimed land, I examine how these artists articulate resistance to the production of colonial space, and reveal how their works reflect a shared effort to reassert and recognize indigenous geographies. I present the film and writing of Sherman Alexie, the poetry of Louise Erdrich, a visual art piece from Bunky Echo-Hawk, and a series of installation art works by Edgar Heap of Birds. These works of art illustrate that the artists not only speak back to appropriated notions of Indianness, but also creatively interrogate how American space must be seen as the ongoing work of colonizatio
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First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians. By L. Frank and Kim Hogeland.
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