Publications by Colleges and Departments (MSU - Bozeman)
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Item Composition and aleche : Native American education, scholarship and the pedagogy of John Dewey(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2005) Jenkins, Nathan Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Kirk BranchThis thesis approaches the historical and contemporary education of Native Americans in order to analyze and combat the American academic system's failure to educate Native students. The chapters cover 1) boarding schools aims and student resistance, 2) problems still faced by Native American students, and 3) possible solutions to these problems. Chapters 1 and 2 give an overview of history and research done by educators and scholars. Chapter 3 is a combination of suggestions by educators of Native students and John Dewey. The first sections demonstrate problems and voids in academia, and the final section attempts to show practical and realistic methods for correcting institutional mistakes and/or ignorance which result in high attrition rates. Dewey's pedagogy succinctly breaks down and challenges academic ideology, while at the same time challenging educators with progressive methods. The thesis challenges not only the error of conventional education, but also how education gets defined and placed upon Native students. Also recognized in this thesis, are those areas where an academic self-examination demonstrates difficult, or problematic, areas and situations, where the black and white, or binaries, of education, are not easily noticed, nor navigated by the student or the teacher. In general, the aim of the discussion is to further democratic methods in Native American education by literally bringing those students into consideration, and to look at what we do in academia in light of the past, present, and future, within an unbroken link of time and pedagogy.Item Lolita last star : a theoretically informed narrative of survivance(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2010) Young, Micaela Marie; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Greg Keeler; Susan Kollin (co-chair)Common missteps by non-Native writers lead to literary representations of Native Americans as tragic figures slumping towards inevitable annihilation, as museum Indians and simulations of the real, mystical and noble "savages," (yes, this still occurs in contemporary film and literature), or simply as inactive members of contemporary life. Authors also attempt to unveil and profit from sensitive spiritual and personal secrets, and offer explanations that do not match reality, leading to grave offenses, and the continuation of harmful stereotypes. In this respect, Lolita Last Star intentionally avoids discussions of spiritual and cultural traditions, or the actual personal lives of "real life" people, because these areas are guarded for good reasons, and instead focuses on native presence in contemporary American life, in the surprisingly complex, globalized space of the Rocky Mountain West. In other words, the final product is a narrative of Survivance; a concept first explored academically by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, in his book Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Survivance, I would argue along with many others, may not be as theoretically complex as it first appears. At its most basic level, "Survivance is a practice, not an ideology, dissimulation, or a theory." The concept of Survivance only becomes difficult when we look to the spectrum of responses to conditions that inspire the need to do more than survive. Survivance is coping, but it is also subversion, creation, amusement, ingenuity, reimagining, the provision of new explanations, and recapturing one's own destiny. The characters and their actions in Lolita Last Star respond in illustrations of full human vibrancy that transcend space and time, definitions, borders, accusations of authenticity, oppression, domination, petty moralities, victimry, and they move us all one step closer to self-sovereignty and human dignity. They show that if anything westerners contain cultural universes and are better for it. The only frauds are the people too scared to step out of their narrow focus of what a westerner, an Indian, a firefighter, or a cowboy is. They are never afraid to ask, "Where the hell are we supposed to go from here?"