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Browsing by Author "Schneider, Lindsey, committee member"

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    Death becomes us: constituting death and imagining wellbeing through global youth environmental activist discourses
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Amedée, Emily, author; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
    In this study, I analyzed death as a rhetorical strategy and emphasized the speaking power of youth environmental activists and their unique contributions to public discourses. I argued that the stories we tell about death constitute particular identities, ways of living/life chances, and ways of imagining the world. I explored the persuasive power of death in and of itself—death as rhetoric—and how rhetoric constitutes death, even as death functions to elide and enable the very discourses that call it into being. I narrowed my focus by consciously "placing" death on the edges of environmental issues and highlighting the ways discourse about the natural world constructs ecological realities and gives shape to environmental ideologies and human/environmental interaction. To enlarge the existing rhetorical criticisms of youth voice, I featured the discourses of three individuals: Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Isra Hirsi. Each orator's intercultural and international contexts ensure that the relationships and experiences each girl has with their environmental context are diverse and span a variety of ecological and intersecting social issues. My study suggests that when youths employ the persuasive power of death, they do one or more of the following: (1) Constitute a space of inbetweenness and a process of becoming; (2) Harness the rhetorical significance of the material, spatial, and temporal aspects of everyday life; (3) Highlight the consequences of placelessness, disconnection, and detachment; (4) Call forth a politics of relation centered in an ethic of responsibility, intersectionality, and shared accountability; and (5) Imagine more just, sustainable, and flourishing futures for all our relations. Considering the rhetoric of this diverse set of young women rhetors, I synthesized the significant findings and key implications of my analyses to suggest a rhetorical theory of eudaimortia, which reveals the persuasive power of death to challenge and reconstitute how to live, how to become, and how to make, move, and imagine bodies, worlds, and time.
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    Federal perceptions and tribal sovereignty: consultation and relations between the Bureau of Land Management and federally recognized tribes
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Lundy, Morgan, author; Hausermann, Heidi, advisor; Henry, Edward, committee member; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
    The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an institution of settler colonialism. Its origins lie in Western expansion and the dispossession of land from Indigenous communities. Today it administers the largest collection of public lands in the country and must maintain relationships through consultation with Tribal governments. Even though these relationships are legally mandated, there is often contention and confusion surrounding them. Despite these issues, there is little research looking at how the BLM understands and carries out Tribal relations. Using semi-structured interviews with BLM employees and decisionmakers, Part I of this research analyzes how individual actors understand and shape these government-to-government relationships. Results indicate that even though BLM decisionmakers are responsible for Tribal relations, archaeologists are the primary employees maintaining them. Part II evaluates how these same actors understand and account for Tribal sovereignty in their work. Findings highlight that Tribal sovereignty is not a static concept and is negotiated in these government-to-government relationships. This thesis does not provide recommendations for improving the BLM's Tribal relations. Instead, it demonstrates how BLM staff members manipulate and move within settler colonial structures. Hopefully, this research provides basic information useful in dismantling and reforming settler colonial institutions that have historically oppressed Native nations and communities.
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    Mobility in the Bakken: rhetorical place-making in contested Native and white rural space
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Miller, Henry D., author; Dickinson, Greg, advisor; Vasby Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
    This thesis engages the intricacies of oil extraction in and around the Bakken region through confronting rhetorical modes by which settler colonialism is practiced and resisted in a modern context. Today, oil boomtowns rhetorically transform a modern-day frontier and reestablish a colonial order that justifies resource extraction and alters spatial relations on the North Dakota landscape. Using in-situ rhetorical criticism, I methodologically weave myself into the texts as both a critic and participant in how space is produced. This thesis consists of an introduction, two main analytical chapters, and a conclusion. In the first analytical chapter, I argue Watford City produces spaces and narratives of whiteness that normalize settler colonialism and situate white bodies as natural occupants of oil boom space. Serving as a metaphor for whiteness, oil fracturing or "fracking" functions as a rhetorical design of both city and museum. In the next analytical chapter, I explore the complexity of overlapping white and Native spaces on the tribal municipalities of New Town and Four Bears Village. To rhetorically comprehend the oil boom spatially on the Fort Berthold Reservation, it is necessary to understand how place is constructed through the production of archived memories and survivance. By situating both Native and white space next one another, this thesis argues that oil boom spaces in North Dakota are being (re)occupied by predominantly white male bodies that hinder the livability of Native bodies in Native spaces. All the while, the Fort Berthold Reservation resists settler colonial practices through everyday acts that decolonize space and place through archived memory and survivance.
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    Nin gii nisaa a'aw waawaashkeshii: engaging animal rights theory with Ojibwe and Cree theories of hunting ethics
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Persinger, Corinne, author; McShane, Katie, advisor; Shockley, Kenneth, advisor; Schneider, Lindsey, committee member
    In this thesis, I call on animal ethicists working in Western traditions to reflect on deeply held assumptions, prejudices, and colonial histories that continue to marginalize not only Indigenous hunting practices, but the very theories that defend their ethical justification. Such reflection is necessary for genuine engagement to take place between Western theories and Indigenous theories of hunting ethics. This thesis can be understood as part of a larger project to clear the way for critical conversation between these different traditions. However, the scope of the thesis is limited to a particular Western theory, that is animal rights theory, and a particular version of Indigenous hunting ethics, based in reciprocity and contextualized by the hunting practices of Ojibwe and Cree cultural groups. I argue that animal rights theorists must engage with Indigenous theories of hunting ethics as a matter of moral and epistemic responsibility. This thesis contains three chapters. In the first chapter, I will motivate the claim that the persistent ignorance to Indigenous ethical theories by Western theorists—and animal rights theorists in particular–is a form of epistemic injustice. I argue that engagement with Indigenous theories by animal rights theorists is a necessary step for overcoming this injustice. In the following chapters, I attempt to motivate the theoretical importance of overcoming the injustice. In the second chapter, I offer an account of animal rights theory that emphasizes possible points of overlap with Indigenous theories. In this account, I argue that animal rights theory requires the addition of relational accounts of animal ethics to be tenable. Relational accounts leave open two substantive theoretical questions that I will take up in chapter three: first, whether relational context matters for our negative obligations; and second, the extent to which animals possess agency and power in their relationships with humans. Ojibwe and Cree hunting ethics, based in a theory of reciprocity, also center relational context for determining our obligations to animals. However, these theories respond to these open questions differently than their Western counterparts. I argue that the difference in how these theories respond to these questions illustrates why they come out so differently in their evaluation of the moral character of hunting. Western and Indigenous ethical theories appeal to quite different conceptual frameworks to assess ethical behavior within hunting relationships. Integral ethical concepts like those of taking life, harm, intentionality, and power can be understood differently when a theory of reciprocity is used to define human-animal relations, instead of the relational theories of their Western counterparts. As a result, the kinds of obligations associated with the act of taking life are different on Indigenous theories. I take these different understandings of ethically significant concepts to be at the heart of the disagreement between animal rights theory and Ojibwe and Cree theories of hunting ethics regarding the moral character of hunting. The ignorance of Western theorists to Indigenous conceptual frameworks allows them to downplay the theoretical significance of this disagreement. These theorists have an ethical and epistemic responsibility to address this ignorance.