Current Research
My book manuscript, Icy Matters: Race, Indigeneity, and Coloniality in Ice-Geographies, undertakes an analysis of coloniality and racialization in icy locales to demonstrate how ice has been a foundational object for making sense of the world and beyond. Specifically, I analyze ice in three formations: ice as a material entity and terrain of conflict; ice as a cultural and scientific imaginary; and ice as an analytic that produces a temporalized, universal logic of human historicity and futurity. By centering ice, the book investigates the milieu and non-human relations as sites and sources of analysis that are integrally bound up with colonial and racial formations.
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Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act Project
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I am involved in two other projects that inform my current project, my teaching, and my future research. The first is my participation as a researcher for an historical project on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, funded by the Southcentral Foundation. This project is entirely funded, led, and created by a team of Alaska Native people. Since 2016, we have completed more than a dozen interviews with Alaska Native elders who were instrumental in the passage of the Act. As a researcher I assisted in these interviews, and I have accomplished extensive research in relevant archives including papers collected by Mrs. Alice Brown, one of the only women on the board of the Alaska Federation of Natives at the time of ANCSA. |
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Community Research
My third project is in conjunction with my home community. I am a tribally enrolled member of the Native Village of Eyak, and a shareholder in the Chugach Alaska Corporation. I serve on the advisory council for the Eyak Cultural Foundation (ECF), a non-profit organization led by Eyak women. The ECF has made a language learning website for those interested in learning Eyak, found here. The ECF organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings in our ancestral homelands at what is for now known as Cordova, Alaska. As part of these gatherings I co-facilitate workshops on the protocols of ethical plant harvesting and smoking salmon. In partnership with Applied Archaeology International, ECF's current project is a mapping initiative to record Eyak place-names of our traditional territories. Through integrative GIS mapping we connect our place-names to digitally recorded oral stories, traditional ecological knowledges, and archival materials as learning documents for Eyak language learners.
