Liza Grandia, associate professor in the Department of Native American Studies and an internationally acclaimed public scholar, was barely drinking age when she stopped the World Bank and an international oil company from building a pipeline through the rural regions of Guatemala. The lesson Grandia learned then — that one is never too young to become engaged in public scholarship — is something that she emphasizes to her students at UC Davis.
In a Western world that suppresses Indigenous culture, members of the Navajo Nation actively engage in artistic cultural revival as a means to keep their history alive and to create vibrant futures. During a fellowship, Shawna Yazzie, a doctoral student in Native American studies has been looking at and learning the ongoing rug weaving practices at a Body of Water in a Sunken Area, also known as Piñon, Arizona, her family’s homeland.
Beth Rose Middleton Manning recalls being elated watching the Eklutna River in Alaska flowing freely after a dam was removed. The UC Davis Department of Native American studies professor had a similar feeling upon learning she received a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for her research on dam removal and land restoration. She is one of 28 scholars, journalists and authors awarded the fellowship, which carries a $200,000 stipend.
In the past several years, California has endured the most extreme fires in its recorded history.
2018’s Camp Fire grew into the state’s deadliest and most destructive fire on record, devastating the towns of Paradise and Concow. Last year the state suffered the Dixie Fire, raging for months through five Northern California counties on its way to becoming the single-largest blaze in state history.
More than $1 million in new awards from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the UC Davis Department of Native American Studies are strengthening Indigenous ancestral languages and contemporary art.
A moving musical work with contributions from UC Davis music and Native American studies studentswillexplore California’s complicated relationship with water, drawing on Native origin stories in which water is an important player. It will be performed in several locations in the UC Davis Arboretum along Putah Creek.
Connections that UC Davis scholars built across campus and continents have led to a $298,000 National Science Foundation award to engage with Inuit fermenters in Greenland and support them in identifying the challenges and opportunities for creating a resurgence in Inuit fermented foods. Their research is part of “Navigating the New Arctic,” one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas.
Three recent doctoral degree recipients in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science have been awarded American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowships.
Beth Rose Middleton, professor and chair of the Department of Native American Studies, is a leading voice on three projects that recently received a combined $1.5 million in funding to advance ongoing Indigenous research connected to water, fire and land.
