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My dissertation is in three parts: a journal article, a book chapter and a policy paper. The journal article responds to this question: How and in what ways have Pueblo and Indigenous women’s knowledges been impacted, influenced or shaped by colonialization? I contribute to conversations about how colonization has impacted, influenced, and transformed Indigenous women’s identities, knowledges, roles, and ways of living.
My book chapter takes a look at definitions of Indigenous and Pueblo women’s knowledges and teachings from the perspectives of Indigenous and Pueblo women. The book chapter focuses on the modern day issues facing Pueblo women, specifically, how to ensure our survival and our Pueblo ways of life in the face of colonization. The book chapter focuses on Pueblo women’s teachings and knowledges as they are passed down from generation to generation. Those teachings have been key to our survival and key to maintaining our traditions, our language and our Pueblo way of life.
The policy paper discusses my views on the importance for Pueblo nations to adopt policies that protect Pueblo women which will protect and ensure the passage of Pueblo women’s knowledges to future generations towards ensuring that Pueblo people continue to exist and be who we are, Pueblo people. In the policy paper, I also discuss what well-being or health means and how that relates to the importance of adopting policies to protect Pueblo women from sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking and other forms of violence that may be used against Pueblo women in our communities.
A qualitative case study explored the experiences of six Navajo prisoners, ages 24-35, in the Winslow State Prison in Arizona. Open-ended interviews inquired about their K-12 education, family, community, and institutional experiences with discipline. Findings revealed negative experiences with schooling had powerful impacts on participants in contrast to family, community, and other institutions. All participants reported experiences in school contributed to interfacing with the justice system. Second, teachers and principals were identified as powerful forces contributing to participants’ negative school experiences. Third, negative family impacts triggered participants’ dependency on the school for support. Findings from this study, evidence suggests that schooling plays a pivotal role influencing a Navajo man's life chances.
This type of research focusing on Indigenous prison inmate voices is needed to understand the experiences of Navajo male offenders who are within the criminal justice system and to then make policy recommendations to support healing and rehabilitation. I conclude by calling for a reimagining of schooling practices based on restorative justice that can mitigate negative disciplinary and violent schooling experiences and restore trust and success of American Indians in the education system.
Keywords: American Indian schooling, school to prison, federal boarding schools
Due to the lack of quality datasets that lend to quantitative research, our understanding of factors related to American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) postsecondary persistence has primarily been based on qualitative studies The purpose of this study is to understand how the desire to serve a larger community influences current and former Cocopah and Quechan undergraduate students’ college persistence. The study adds to the Native American postsecondary persistence literature base, that up till now, has not quantitatively examined students’ desire to serve a larger community as a persistence factor while intentionally sampling two smaller tribes with tribal enrollments less than four thousand.
This dissertation presents a Native American persistence model and alternative method of sampling small Indigenous nations, establishes construct validity for an instrument measuring the proposed persistence model and provides evidence the proposed model predicts postsecondary persistence and academic performance. The design of the model derives from a review theories and scholarship on Native American persistence. Subsequently, construction of an instrument measuring the model emerged from the theories, literature, expert feedback, and pilot testing. Using data collected from an online survey of a sample of Cocopah and Quechan students (n=117), the study provides evidence of construct validity of the instrument through an exploratory factor analysis. Following the instrument validation, regression analyses indicates that AI/AN postsecondary persistence within both two-year and four-year institutions is positively associated with student desire to give back. The evidence further suggests that researchers, practitioners, and administrators should expand programs that center on nation-building to increase the persistence of Native American students while simultaneously meeting the needs of tribal nations.
Human Papillomavirus, or HPV, is a viral pathogen that most commonly spreads through sexual contact. HPV strains 6 and 11 normally cause genital warts, while HPV strains 16 and 18 commonly cause cervical cancer, which causes cancerous cells to spread in the cervix. Physicians can detect those HPV strains, using a Pap smear, which is a diagnostic test that collects cells from the female cervix.
Johann Gregor Mendel studied patterns of trait inheritance in plants during the nineteenth century. Mendel, an Augustinian monk, conducted experiments on pea plants at St. Thomas’ Abbey in what is now Brno, Czech Republic. Twentieth century scientists used Mendel’s recorded observations to create theories about genetics.
In the 1930s, George Beadle and Boris Ephrussi discovered factors that affect eye colors in developing fruit flies. They did so while working at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. (1) They took optic discs (colored fuchsia in the image) from fruit fly larvae in the third instar stage of development. Had the flies not been manipulated, they would have developed into adults with vermilion eyes. (2) Beadle and Ephrussi transplanted the donor optic discs into the bodies of several types of larvae, including those that would develop with normal colored eyes (brick red), and those that would develop eyes with other shades of red, such as claret, carmine, peach, and ruby (grouped together and colored black in the image). (3a) When implanted into normal hosts that would develop brick red eyes, the transplanted optic disc developed into an eye that also was brick red. (3b) When implanted into abnormal hosts that would develop eyes of some other shade of red, the transplanted optic discs developed into eyes that were vermilion. Beadle and Ephrussi concluded that there was a factor, such as an enzyme or some other protein, produced outside of the optic disc that influenced the color of the eye that developed from the disc.
This illustration shows George Beadle and Edward Tatum's experiments with Neurospora crassa that indicated that single genes produce single enzymes. The pair conducted the experiments at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Enzymes are types of proteins that can catalyze reactions inside cells, reactions that produce a number of things, including nutrients that the cell needs. Neurospora crassa is a species of mold that grows on bread. In the early 1940s, Beadle and Tatum conducted an experiment to discover the abnormal genes in Neurospora mutants, which failed to produce specific nutrients needed to survive. (1) Beadle and Tatum used X-rays to cause mutations in the DNA of Neurospora, and then they grew the mutated Neurospora cells in glassware. (2) They grew several strains, represented in four groups of paired test tubes. For each group, Neurospora was grown in one of two types of growth media. One medium contained all the essential nutrients that the Neurospora needed to survive, which Beadle and Tatum called a complete medium. The second medium was a minimal medium and lacked nutrients that Neurospora needed to survive. If functioning normally and in the right conditions, however, Neurospora can produce these absent nutrients. (3) When Beadle and Tatum grew the mutated mold strains on both the complete and on the minimal media, all of the molds survived on the complete media, but not all of the molds survived on the minimal media (strain highlighted in yellow). (4) For the next step, the researchers added nutrients to the minimal media such that some glassware received an amino acid mixture (represented as colored squares) and other glassware received a vitamin mixture (represented as colored triangles) in an attempt to figure out which kind of nutrients the mutated molds needed. The researchers then took mold from the mutant mold strain that had survived on a complete medium and added that mold to the supplemented minimal media. They found that in some cases the mutated mold grew on media supplemented only with vitamins but not on media supplemented only with amino acids. (5) To discover which vitamins the mutant molds needed, Beadle and Tatum used several tubes with the minimal media, supplementing each one with a different vitamin, and then they attempted to grow the mutant mold in each tube. They found that different mutant strains of the mold grew only on media supplemented with different kinds of vitamins, for instance vitamin B6 for one strain, and vitamin B1 for another. In experiments not pictured, Beadle and Tatum found in step (4) that other strains of mutant mold grew on minimal media supplemented only with amino acids but not on minimal media supplemented only with vitamins. When they repeated step (5) on those strains and with specific kinds of amino acids in the different test tubes, they found that the some mutated mold strains grew on minimal media supplemented solely with one kind of amino acid, and others strains grew only on minimal media supplemented with other kinds of amino acids. For both the vitamins and amino acid cases, Beadle and Tatum concluded that the X-rays had mutated different genes in Neurospora, resulting in different mutant strains of Neurospora cells. In a cell of a given strain, the X-rays had changed the gene normally responsible for producing an enzyme that catalyzed a vitamin or an amino acid. As a result, the Neurospora cell could no longer produce that enzyme, and thus couldn't catalyze a specific nutrient.
The Southern Gastric Brooding Frog (Rheobotrahcus silus) was a frog species that lived in Australia. It was declared extinct in 2002. Once adult males fertilized the eggs of females, the females swallowed their eggs. The stomachs of the females then functioned somewhat like wombs, protecting the eggs while they gestated. Once the eggs developed into juveniles, female frogs performed oral birth and regurgitated their young.