In the spirit of creating community spaces of self-determination, Natalia is a member of the Chicanx World Making and Futurities project, a do-it-yourself rasquache multi-media and popular education collective. Additionally, she serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief for Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal.

He is working on a dissertation in collaboration with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, the Indigenous people of the McCloud River (Winnemem Waywaket). Titled Listening to Lendada Nur (Ancient, Wise Salmon), the dissertation is an ethnographic and historical investigation into the Winnemem Wintu’s partnership with wildlife agencies to restore salmon to their ancestral watershed for the first time since the Shasta Dam blocked the cultural and ecological keystone species from returning home 80 years ago.

Tribal members are assisting in the scholarship by identifying research objectives, interpreting archival and ethnographic data and developing the theoretical framework based on concepts from the Winnemem Wintu language.

Bruno is also a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous studies. His research focuses on environmental and climate justice movements in the U.S. northwest, imperialism and militarism, and film methodologies. His dissertation examines the politics of wildfire and prescribed burning in Karuk aboriginal territory in the unsettled colonial present.

As wildfires throughout the U.S. west intensify, Indigenous fire practitioners fight for sovereignty and survivance while navigating between, on one side, a militarized firefighting apparatus premised on the settler state’s entitlement to environmental authority, and on the other side, a broad-based colonial impulse to appropriate and commodify Indigenous knowledge. Through participant observation, collaborative filmmaking, and interviews, Bruno’s dissertation tracks how settler colonial relations of power and property can be reaffirmed or disrupted by the increasing frequency of environmental crises. A committee of Karuk cultural practitioners advises on the work.

A settler raised on occupied Nipmuc land in Massachusetts, Bruno is an award-winning filmmaker with a BFA in film from New York University and an MA in folklore from the University of Oregon. Bruno’s project has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

The legacies of the Allotment Era have produced a highly-fragmented pattern of jurisdiction over both surface land and subsurface minerals in this checkerboard landscape, where alternating tracts of land are complexly administered by federal, tribal, state, and private entities. Jurisdiction not only has profound implications for where, how, and if extraction takes place: it also affects who gets to have a say in the process.

Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in northwestern New Mexico and in Eastern Navajo Agency, Silas’s research analyzes how different jurisdictions parse out components of the region’s ecology for management purposes. Silas attends to both the extra-local and large-scale cumulative effects of extraction that are not contained by the jurisdictions that exist to manage them. Silas’s dissertation traces how relations of sovereignty, territory, and ordinary life are shaped in part through frictions engendered in contests to control energy extraction. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Silas earned a BA in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University and an MA in Geography from the University of Toronto. Silas came their dissertation research through involvement in the climate justice movement.