Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My research demonstrates the ways Americans’ understandings of who should be educated, how, and by what measures have changed over time and, in many ways, remained the same. I specifically seek to account for the ways education and schooling have been utilized as tools of settler colonial state-building, and to document how public institutions like schools and private religious organizations have colluded in the construction of racial relationships and discriminatory hierarchies. My dissertation, titled “Document-Based and Oral Histories of Diné Experiences in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program, 1945-2000,” explores the history of the Mormon’s transcontinental, transnational religious education program that operated contiguously with the infamous federal Indian boarding school system. My study incorporates documents collected from personal, privately funded, state, and university archives. Furthermore, my dissertation relies on the oral histories of Diné adults who were enrolled in the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program as children and youth. Importantly, my research has involved securing permission from and working through the Navajo Nation’s Human Research Review Board’s sovereign protocol for conducting research. This ethical and necessary approach to conducting research with Indigenous communities is especially unique in that it resists historically colonial approaches to conducting research on Indigenous peoples, and instead advances research design, centers methods, and develops questions with Indigenous communities.
What drives your interest in this research?
As a non-Native white settler who was raised in the heart of Utah’s Mormon Culture Region while the Placement Program was still in existence, the education history I am engaged in studying is one that is deeply and uniquely entangled with my own. As a descendant of white Mormon settler colonizers, I am interested in researching, reckoning with, and understanding the legacies of colonialism in the Intermountain West because they are part of a “shared history” between white settlers like me and Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, while I intentionally left the Mormon church, I have extensive knowledge of the religion’s beliefs, practices, and politics that lends itself well to critical analysis of the organization’s history and educational programming. Finally, with this project, I am driven by a desire to engage in ethical, community-based, and collaboratively developed historical research that meaningfully captures the scale and impact of the Mormon’s Indian Placement Program while locating individual Diné experiences within it.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
First and foremost, I feel incredibly privileged to be considered a humanist scholar as an education researcher. Second, exposure to and the opportunity for transdisciplinary discussion—which is a focal point of the fellowship seminar—has been personally and professionally rewarding. This is not something widely available to graduate students, let alone within the academy so I feel very fortunate to be a participant. Third, I value the collegial community I feel that we’ve built these past eight or nine weeks, and the insights I’ve gleaned from reading and discussing one another’s scholarly work. Furthermore, having the chance to listen to a diverse group of scholars who read closely and know their fields deeply has provided me with avenues for future research I would not have readily considered prior to my involvement in the fellowship seminar.