Civilizing the Guam Museum

The University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s series of “Working Papers in Museum Studies” presents emerging research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, all focused on the multiple concerns of the modern museum and heritage studies field. Contributions from scholars, members of the museum profession and graduate students are represented. Many of these papers have their origins in public presentations made under the auspices of the Museum Studies Program. We gratefully thank the authors published herein for their participation.This paper was first presented as part of the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s “Issues in Museum Studies” lecture series on April 16, 2009. It is the product of research supported by a U-M Museum Studies Program Fellowship for Doctoral Research in Museums. Tina DeLisle is a member of the 2005 cohort in the U-M Museum Studies Program and is currently a research fellow and lecturer in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/77460/1/4_delisle_2010.pd

Navy wives/native lives: The cultural and historical relations between American naval wives and Chamorro women in Guam, 1898--1945.

This dissertation builds on scholarship in various fields of history (women's history and Pacific history) and interdisciplinary studies (new colonial studies, feminist critiques of power, and native Pacific cultural studies). Combining archival work and oral histories, it draws on native and non-native sources to explore the dialogical social relations between native Chamorro women and white American U.S. Navy wives in the American territory of Guam in the first half of the twentieth century. The dissertation explores how the gendered and racialized work of U.S. Navy wives, and their efforts to transplant white womanhood in Guam, encountered equally determined Chamorro women. Their interactions would forge new political, social, and cultural spaces from which both sides aided and abetted American military colonialism and also constructed new forms of Chamorro and American female consciousness and subjectivity. On the Chamorro side in particular, these new forms comprised an emergent Chamorro modernity, or new ways of being native Chamorro in relation to American practices such as speaking English, donning American-style dress and fashion, wearing make-up, attending schools, hospitals, dramas, dance halls, and saluting flags, without necessarily abandoning deep indigenous values and practices. In tracing the historical development of native modernities under naval colonial rule, this study examines the emergence of indigenous forms of modernity, and challenges conceptual and political frameworks that have viewed indigeneity and modernity as mutually exclusive social and cultural categories.Ph.D.American historyAsian historyModern historySocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127073/2/3343049.pd

Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community: A Reading List

Throughout the first year and a half of the grant, participants in the project have shared and discussed texts to create a common foundation for moving this work forward. Below is a selection of the readings that form this core

Navigating Indigenous Futures Gallery

... the River is also a place upon and a relationship with whom we might also build relations of kinship and reciprocity with Dakota and Ojibwe communities in the shared hopes of together building new / old ways of knowing and being for a more just future, one that flows from renewing proper relations in decidedly Indigenous terms

Navigating Indigenous Futures with the Mississippi River

Relationalities, or the web of interconnected relations of kinship and ethical regard among Indigenous people, land, water, and sky scapes, include the agential or personhood status of otherwise non-human “natural” elements, their interconnectivity that occurs at multiple and simultaneous temporal scales and logics, and the need for intellectual and social agility and nimbleness to keep apace with, in our case, “water” and Indigenous knowledge about water and interconnected relationships

Indigenizing Environmental Thinking

we asked people to respond to the following prompt: As we face environmental challenges, such as climate change, extraction economies, (over)development, loss of habitats and ecosystems, pollution, and other harms, what might Indigenous ways of knowing offer to address these global concerns? How might Indigenizing and/or decolonizing our methodologies transform higher education teaching and research