Research Projects

This book manuscript shows how Hopi language revitalization can become a site of contestation when divergent ideas about knowledge and property collide. I consider how settler and Indigenous actors strive to embed the language into different structures of circulation, arguing that these presume upon and bring into being competing understandings of knowledge, language, and relationality.

I’ve been lucky to spend time with the Hopi Food Cooperative and the First Mesa Clean Up Project over the past few years. During this time, I’ve become interested in the way gardeners and farmers talk about vitality, experience different temporalities, and cultivate modes of gender inhabitance. This project, like my first project, will be subject to approval by the Cultural Preservation Office.

Most tribes engaging in the federal repatriation process established under NAGPRA receive inventories from museums that are idiosyncratic, incomplete, or culturally-inappropriate. How can tribes develop repatriation content management systems that are both efficient and hew to tribal notions of information circulation?

Benjamin Lee Whorf was a mid-century linguist who worked extensively with a Hopi speaker based in New York, Ernest Naquayouma. While Whorf’s ideas have been the subject of much debate by linguists and anthropologists, less is known about his methodologies and relationship with Naquayouma.

Based in Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, this project investigates the politics of multilingualism in this French and English speaking region of the Canadian Maritimes. I focus especially on the qualities speakers associated with different ways of speaking, and how these fall along class and generational lines.