The Grandmother Language: Writing Community Process in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows

In Whispering in Shadows, Jeannette Armstrong deftly employs non-standard English phraseology to convey Okanagan perceptions of the world. The author enacts a decolonizing process in her writing, exploring ways to evoke a proximate (but ultimately limited) experience of an Okanagan orality and world view in English. Penny Jackson’s sensibilities, which synthesize perceptions of sound, colour, and linguistic images as organically interrelated, are the primary manifestation of this process. The author's symbiosis of land, language, and community produces a creative well-spring, which encourages community-centered creative practices in keeping with the metaphoric implications of En’owkin, an Okanagan conception rooted in the belief that nurturing voluntary cooperation is essential for everyday living

Growing the Green Unknown: Teaching Environmental Literature in Southeastern North Carolina

Walking to class, we're still lesson planning. Indeed, although we had thought about and discussed since we were hired in fall 2006 the idea of team-teaching an environmental literature class from the perspectives of our disciplinary specialties (American Indian Studies for Jane, African American literature for Scott), our class still was a work in progress. We were excited on this first day of our brand new course at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, “Literatures of Ecoliteracy and Environmental Justice,” the first ever of its kind here. Despite its evolving character, our collaboration was strong, for we were united in our convictions: respecting our students, their communities, and their heritages; enacting environmental justice; and reconnecting ourselves, our students, and our university to our shared world

Comparison of regime‐sorted tropical cloud profiles observed by CloudSat with GEOS5 analyses and two general circulation model simulations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94863/1/jgrd16832.pd

Solemn laughter: Humor as subversion and resistance in the literature of Simon Ortiz and Carter Revard

Since earliest contact, Europeans have projected myriad qualities onto the being they erroneously named "Indian." Through text representations, Euramericans have constructed and reproduced profound distortions of indigenous peoples that have shaped political and material realities for Native Americans by reducing them to delimiting "types." Simultaneously, Native writers have a parallel history of representing whites as the embodiment of confusing and "uncivilized" strangeness. In writing which resists colonial definitions of externally imposed "Indianness," contemporary Native writers have increasingly recast historically racist representations by asserting authentic self-descriptions while depicting whiteness as "Other." This thesis examines the ways in which two contemporary Native writers---Simon Ortiz, Acoma, and Carter Revard, Osage---use humor as a literary strategy to subvert the Euramerican stereotypes of the "Indian" as "noble" or "wild savage" and "unscientific primitive" in order to reconstruct authentic Native identity from the true center, that lived by Native people themselves

The Grandmother Language: Writing Community Process in Jeannette Armstrong’s whispering in shadows

In whispering in shadows, Jeannette Armstrong deftly employs non-standard English phraseology to convey Okanagan perceptions of the world. The author enacts a decolonizing process in her writing, exploring ways to evoke a proximate (but ultimately limited) experience of an Okanagan orality and world view in English. Penny Jackson’s sensibilities, which synthesize perceptions of sound, colour, and linguistic images as organically interrelated, are the primary manifestation of this process. The author's symbiosis of land, language, and community produces a creative well-spring, which encourages community-centered creative practices in keeping with the metaphoric implications of En’owkin, an Okanagan conception rooted in the belief that nurturing voluntary cooperation is essential for everyday living

Patient Perceptions of Shared Decision-Making in the Acute Care Hospital and Their Association with Patient Experience and Readmission

Avoidable hospital readmissions continue to be a concerning and costly healthcare issue. While the emphasis on reducing avoidable hospital readmissions persists, incentivization strategies are evolving. Initial strategies prioritized medical care delivery, but recent regulation highlights the value of effective transitional (discharge) care planning, and particularly, patient involvement in that process. This latter aspect of care has a clear indication for the application of shared decision-making. Shared decision-making (SDM) practice in the acute care setting largely represents a gap in the literature; yet understanding patient perceptions of SDM during hospitalization is an important and timely first step in exploring the effectiveness of newly implemented regulation-driven hospital initiatives. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships between perceptions of SDM during hospitalization, patient experience, and readmissions. This study utilized a prospective cohort design, including participant recruitment and survey distribution upon day of hospital discharge followed by an observation period to monitor for 30-day readmission. The target population was adults who were hospitalized for general medical conditions at a single community hospital. The final sample size was 83. Patient perceptions of SDM were measured using the CollaboRATE Measure of Shared Decision-Making, which was validated as part of this study. Study findings indicated that patients perceive the occurrence of SDM and participation in both care decisions and transitional planning. Most also agreed with their discharge disposition. Perceptions of SDM: varied based on patient, provider, and organizational factors during care decisions; varied based only on nurse communication during transitional care planning; were significantly related to hospital patient experience, as measured by HCAHPS subscales; were not found to be related to 30-day readmissions; however, patient agreement with discharge disposition was predictive of readmission. These findings were largely consistent with the proposed conceptual model and establish a foundation for future related research

“It Just Seemed to Call to Me”: Debra Magpie Earling’s Self-Telling in Perma Red

Debra Magpie Earling, author of the 2002 novel Perma Red, does not appear as a named character in her text, which has been designated as a work of fiction. Yet the content and construction of the novel have been major forces both arising from and shaping Earling’s autobiographical experiences within her immediate biological family and as a member of the Salish-Kootenai community. Intertextual readings of the interviews, short stories, and personal dedications Earling has published before and since Perma Red’s publication powerfully articulate the autobiography embedded in this novel. Eighteen years in the making, Perma Red is an intricate, intimate expression of self-life narration that is Earling’s act of publicly honoring the Aunt Louise she never met but who has lived with Earling daily through family and community stories. Perma Red is set on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in the 1940s, where turbulent Native-Anglo antagonisms continue to constrict social, educational, and economic spaces for the reservation’s Native inhabitants as part of the colonial legacy. In lush prose, with minimal dialogue, Earling describes Louise White Elk’s difficult, dangerous life and in doing so offers up an eloquent fictionalized eulogy to Earling’s actual Salish Aunt Louise, who died brutally and young on the Flathead Reservation in 1947. In rendering this fictionalized portrait of her biological aunt (whom I refer to exclusively as “Aunt Louise” in this essay, to distinguish her from the fictional “Louise White Elk” or “Louise”), Earling not only demonstrates her characters’ bonds of female kinship through memory as a site of empowerment, but Earling herself becomes a significant “cotagonist” through her storyteller’s memory and voice, constructing her own family history within the continuum of Bitterroot Salish community

Dry eye symptom questionnaires show adequate measurement precision and psychometric validity for clinical assessment of vision-related quality of life in glaucoma patients.

PurposeTo ascertain the presence of Dry Eye Syndrome (DES) in patients being treated for glaucoma, using subjective and objective methods and to examine DES impact on their quality of life (QOL).MethodA cross-sectional study was conducted by employing 156 glaucoma patients recruited from treatment centers in the Cape Coast Metropolis in Ghana. All the participants underwent dry eye examination and completed the 25-item National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ), the Dry Eye-related Quality of Life Score (DEQS) and the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI). Comparisons of the clinical tests, NEI VFQ-25 subscale item and composite scores and scores of DEQS and OSDI were made among subgroups divided according to the presence of dry eye symptoms or signs. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was performed to investigate the factors that influence DES related-QOL among the patients.ResultsThe study involved 156 subjects with a mean age of 47.88 ± 16.0 years and made up of 81 (51.9%) females and 75 (48.1%) males. A One-Way ANOVA was conducted, and the F-statistic (F) indicated that there was a significant difference in the mean scores of the groups. There were significantly lower Tear break-up time (TBUT) values found in the group with definite dry compared with the group without DES and the group that was symptomatic with no signs DES in both eyes, [(F(3,151) = 13.703, pConclusionThe study established a high presence of DES and consequently low DES related-QOL in glaucoma patients. Dry eye questionnaires are able to discriminate those who have definite dry eye from the other groups, showing its appropriateness for clinical use in glaucoma patients. Ocular surface evaluation should be conducted among glaucoma patients on topical anti-glaucoma therapy to ensure the timely detection and treatment of signs and symptoms of DES and improvement of dry-eye related QOL