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Culturally informed care of indigenous-associated animal remains in museum collections.

I will develop and begin to implement a protocol for the culturally informed care of animal remains within the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History by incorporating Native practices and understandings into how animals are stored across departments. In many Native American cosmologies, animals and humans are viewed as equals or relatives, but this is not reflected in museum collections, which are often under-inventoried and over-filled. With this project I hope to contribute to the crucial, ongoing work of decolonizing museum practices and recentering indigenous perspectives within collections and curatorial spaces.

Although the 1990 Native Graves and Repatriation Act provided legal backing for Native American Nations’ rights to indigenous funerary materials and human remains, animal remains have been largely excluded from the growing efforts within museums to collaborate with indigenous communities in the storage and preservation of their sacred and ceremonial materials. Animal remains from archaeological sites associated with Native Nations’ land or ancestors are often marked as zoological specimens and thus removed from the cultural context from which they originated. I hope to contribute to more recent work on this by developing an achievable protocol within the CU museum.

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Disconnected: Life in a Digital Reality

America has a youth mental health crisis. The rates of adolescent-depression have skyrocketed. For teenage girls, self-harm is up 189%. Suicide, 169%. Most striking? These rises began when iPhones/social media became mainstream. Social media has transformed childhood, yet society still can't comprehend why. We might understand conceptually, but not experientially, how addictive algorithms, infinite scrolling, and 8+ hours of scrolling daily (average) have altered adolescence. Over a 45-minute documentary I’m producing, we’re illuminating a first-person narrative of what a technology-based childhood looks like, and how we can change it. We’ll be premiering in schools across the nation in September.

We’re inspired by the book The Anxious Generation, which chronicles how a phone-based childhood disrupted adolescence. This book propelled the digital advocacy movement forward, and the harrowing data of hospital admissions/anxiety disorders sent shivers around America. However, we aim to differe