Faculty Projects

UCLA’s faculty members are noted for pathbreaking scholarship and pacesetting research; their work has distinguished UCLA’s Interdepartmental Program in American Indian Studies as a vital resource for scholars and for the greater American Indian community.  Participating faculty in the program come from several academic schools and departments: Anthropology, Art History, Chicana/o Studies, Dentistry, Education, Literature, Ethnomusicology, History, Law, Linguistics, Nursing, Public Health, Sociology, Theater Arts, and World Arts and Cultures.  Following are brief descriptions of some of the many projects in which our instructors are currently engaged.

Maylei Blackwell is an activist scholar and an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. Her current research and teaching examines how racial and sexual differences shape the challenges and possibilities of transnational organizing in the Americas.  She has worked with the indigenous women’s movement in Mexico for more than a decade and also has begun a new project with indigenous migrant organizers.  Her recent publications include “Weaving in the Spaces: Transnational Indigenous Women’s Organizing and the Politics of Scale,” a chapter in Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (UT Press 2006), and “(Re) Ordenando el discurso de la nación: El Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas en México y la Práctica de la Autonomía,” Mujeres y nacionalismo: De la independencia a la nación del nuevo milenio (UNAM 2004).

Tara Browner is completing an essay collection on Native music entitled Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press. She is also working on a project called Songs from a New Circle of Voices, which is coming out as a volume in the Music in American Life Series (MUSA), and the American Musicological Society. It is made up of transcriptions—in Western notation—of songs sung by Cedartree and Native Thunder from the 2001 UCLA powwow.  Professor Browner plans a trip to Germany in February to attend a German powwow and talk with and record the (German) singers, in order to begin creating a comparative framework between the authentic (Indian) and the imitation (German and other European) styles of singing.

Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg are co-principal investigators on a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Justice (research arm of the US Department of Justice) to conduct a nationwide study of the administration of criminal justice in Indian country.  The study includes qualitative and quantitative surveys as well as site gathering at 62 different research sites. The sites have been chosen based on series of models of the organization/control of criminal justice on reservations. In particular, the models take into account whether state, federal, or tribal governments control policing, criminal courts, and detention on any given reservation.  They will be analyzing all of the surveys as well as compiling case studies based on published sources, with the ultimate aim of proposing improvements in Indian country criminal justice.  They will be examining everything from jurisdictional changes to funding issues and alternatives to incarceration.

Jaye Darby works with Director Hanay Geiogamah, as co-director of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People through Native Theater, Education, and Community Development) to expand Project HOOP to Native communities throughout the US. Currently, she is working to develop a meta-analysis of promising directions that support Native student success and degree attainment in mainstream postsecondary institutions.

What's an Indian Woman to Do?, HOOP Theatricals performance June 2007

Hanay Geiogamah has established HOOP Theatricals, a new division of Project HOOP, the national American Indian theater and performing arts development initiative affiliated with the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.  HOOP Theatricals was launched in late June 2007 with its first live stage production of What’s an Indian Woman to Do? by Ojibwe playwright Mark Anthony Rolo. The one-person contemporary comedy-drama was performed for three weeks at the new Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown Los Angeles and received several favorable reviews.  Cherokee actress DeLanna Studi performed the role of Belle and will be touring with the production in Indian country in October and November.  Sophia Kercher of the LA Weekly called it a “stunning portrayal of the divisions between cultural ties and modernity” and praised Kenneth Martines’ “quick, crisp direction” and Studi’s “sparkling” performance.

Carole Goldberg is completing a book, to be published by Yale University Press, about the Tule River Indian tribe of central California.  Coauthored with anthropologist Gelya Frank, the book is entitled Defying the Odds: One California Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries.  Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, the book examines how the Tule River Indians managed to maintain their legal and cultural autonomy despite persistent efforts by federal and state governments to dominate them.  Among the featured topics are the nineteenth-century case of United States v. Whaley, the Indian Reorganization Act as experienced at Tule River, efforts to reclaim tribal land, and contemporary conflicts with federal and state authorities over tribal gaming.  The book ends with a dialogue between law and anthropology over methods and findings.

Felicia Hodge is the director of the Center for American Indian/Indigenous Research & Education (CAIIRE).  She holds a joint appointment as professor in the School of Nursing and School of Public Health.  Her research focuses on chronic health conditions and health beliefs and behaviors among American Indians and Alaska Natives.  Current projects include the following: (1) cancer symptom barriers (pain, fatigue, function, and depression) among Southwest American Indians, a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute; (2) diabetes fatalism among the Plains tribes, Centers of Disease Control support to publish from an NIH-funded four-year grant testing diabetes intervention; and (3) smoking cessation, wellness beliefs/behaviors among California Indians.

Paul Kroskrity is co-editing a book project entitled Revealing Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Feelings, Practices, Policies that brings together the works of more than a dozen scholars working with several languages.  The focus is on how beliefs and feelings about language— some cultural, others emerging from colonial and hegemonic relations—influence various communities in their attempts to maintain and revitalize their indigenous heritage languages.  The book is scheduled for publication by the University of Arizona Press in fall, 2008.  Another project is a collection of papers on how Native American communities are using storytelling and traditional narratives as a means of maintaining and revitalizing their languages.  The tentative title is Telling Stories in the Face of Danger.  A third project is in the process of obtaining the necessary community approvals to produce linguistic materials that the Arizona Tewa can use in their goal of language renewal and revitalization.

Pamela Munro’s current projects involve producing language lessons and other non-technical grammatical material.  (Linguists who study American Indian languages often write only for other linguists, which means that ordinary people might have trouble understanding!)  The Chickasaw teaching grammar she has been working on for years with native speaker Mrs. Catherine Willmond is scheduled to be published next year.  Professor Munro is continuing work on a first-year college textbook for Tlacolula Valley Zapotec, an endangered Otomanguean language of Oaxaca, Mexico.  A group of UCLA graduate students worked with her in the spring on the first draft of a teaching grammar of Pima, an endangered Uto- Aztecan language spoken in Arizona.  She is also working with members of the Gabrielino/Tongva tribe on developing lessons and a dictionary of Gabrielino/Tongva/Fernandeño, the Uto-Atecan language which was formerly spoken in the Los Angeles basin.

Anthony Seeger, professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology, continues his long-term (35-year) research and community projects with the Suyá, a Gê-speaking indigenous society in Mato Grosso, Brazil.  In his recent visit, in May 2007, he worked with them on a collaborative DVD publication project and discussed their steps toward greater political and economic autonomy in the face of largescale soybean cultivation and growing agricultural settlements near their territory, and agreed to assist with fundraising for some of their projects.

Wendy G. Teeter is co-directing a long-term research project with Desiree Martinez (Gabrieleno/Tongva) on Catalina Island to investigate cultural resources trade and acquisition with the mainland, cultural interactions, and heritage management issues.