2021 Scholars

Chloe Brotherton (Linguistics) Pronouns, Labels, and Inclusion: LGBTQ Voices

 I am working with the San Joaquin Pride Center, a local LGBTQ resource center in Stockton, CA, to create informational resources about language, gender, and sexuality. Topics will include pronouns and identity labels. The goal is to have materials the center can distribute to community members who may be exploring their own identity or for those who have a friend or family member they want to learn how to support.

Kazumi Chin (Cultural Studies) Collecting & Presenting Narratives of Artists and Arts Workers Fighting Against Displacement in San Francisco

This project creates a space for Asian American artists concerned with the geography and space of San Francisco to showcase their work and to enter into longform communication about what their art means to them, as well as their process and ideas behind the creation of that art. The primary community partner is Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest Asian Pacific American interdisciplinary arts organization in the country. Founded in 1972 on the ground floor of the San Francisco’s International Hotel, for nearly 50 years, Kearny Street Workshop has served the Asian American community in the Bay Area through arts festivals, writing workshops, fashion shows, and other cultural events serving Asian American artists and community members in the San Francisco Bay Area. I intend to create a podcast that allows folks to more deeply engage with the artist and their artwork, as well as the kinds of discussions that emerge around the work.

Margaret Duvall (English) Participatory Journalism

Margaret is working with Community Engagement Strategist jesikah maria ross at CapRadio this summer on two projects. She will assist in crafting memos evaluating the impact of the ongoing project entitled After the Assault. This two year endeavor has consisted of crafting a series of stories in conversation with sexual assault survivors in Sacramento and building a set of recommendations for more informed trauma-response and improved reporting procedures through law enforcement and the Sexual Assault Response Team. Margaret will work with jesikah on a project to map and connect with communities currently underserved by CapRadio in order to build a foundation for long term participatory journalism.  As a team, she and others will begin the process of reaching out to understand what kinds of stories and news people are interested in hearing about their own communities.  After the summer, people from various communities and neighborhoods will be invited to participate in listening sessions with CapRadio to find shared threads of concern around which journalism can focus.

Amanda Hawkins (English / Creative Writing) Full Spectrum: Queer Religious Histories Writing Workshop with the Sacramento LGBT Community Center

Amanda Hawkins’ creative project seeks to offer a space for LGBTQIA+ people in the Sacramento area and beyond to write into their own religious histories through a series of writing workshops. The Sacramento LGBT Community Center’s multifaceted, longstanding work in the community and regular, ongoing support groups will act as the framework and reference point for these workshops. In this way Hawkins will lay the groundwork for relationally-based research into the needs and desires of the community for other possible community-based storytelling projects in the future.

Jason Hockaday (Native American Studies) Determining Sharing Use and Protocol to Support Indigenous Music Reclamation

This project aims to collaboratively determine a protocol of sharing and use for ancestral recordings housed in archives such as the Library of Congress. These protocols are needed to protect the sacred nature of many of the recordings while upholding the collective interests of the community and building support for future reclamation goals. Specifically, this project aims to create guidelines for accessing recordings where a community does not have an existing structure to consult due to histories of genocide and conquest in which survivors intermarried with surrounding Tribes. There are therefore descendants in various communities today who have a stake in this project. In addition to developing specific protocol for my own community’s and family’s ancestral recordings, this project aims to share methods and designs for collaborative research with California Indian Tribes and Native American and Indigenous Studies more broadly as a framework for addressing colonial histories and building upon Indigenous philosophies for music and language reclamation.

Brooke Kipling (Spanish & Portuguese) Storytelling through Food: Migrant Narratives and Maps from Tijuana’s Food Sites

Centering food as both a life-giving element and a means of relation, this project collaborates with the mutual aid group Comida Calientita in Tijuana to support food-access sites for migrants and to open spaces for migrant storytelling within them. Connecting storytelling to space, Storytelling through Food collaborates with both migrant and local communities to assemble an online virtual map that disseminates information of food-access sites for migrants in Tijuana and shares migrant digital stories told through these very sites. 

Carla Martinez Plascencia (Cultural Studies)Cae en Oídos Sordos: Working With Deaf Latinx Families in the Los Angeles Area for Language Access and Cultural Wellbeing

Working with a Deaf Latinx Organization in the Los Angeles area, this project will provide free American Sign Language (ASL) classes to families with Deaf children. This two part project will allow for the implementation of free ASL classes and a series of workshops that demystify higher education and inform on other basic needs or resources the community may need access to. Working with an established community partner, the goal is to establish an ongoing curriculum and series of workshops/classes to foster language access, cultural wellbeing, and a flourishing Deaf Latinx community.

David Morales (History) Racialized Policing in California’s Gold Rush Era

David will analyze (digitized) Indian Indentures, jail registers and mug books from the Gold Rush era in the Center for Sacramento History’s collection to first identify the kinds of convictions and sentences that Black and Indigenous people received. Using that data, he will then compare those offenses and sentences to White people in the same time period. In addition to the data collection and analysis, the Mellon Public Scholar will work closely with CSH staff to conceptualize future exhibits of materials for the Sacramento History Museum which connect the historical archive to contemporary issues in policing and criminalization in this region.

Lauren Peters (Native American Studies) Sophia’s Return 

Lauren Peters (Agdaagux Tribe, Unangax) My project centers around locating, documenting, and returning home Native American children who were stolen from their homes and died in US Government-sponsored Native American boarding schools. My end plan is to create a best practice for repatriating these lost children.

Bethany Qualls (English) Recovering the Forgotten Women of Metal Type Design

Recognizing women’s often overlooked role in typography and design since the mid-1800s provides more concrete links between them and the broader consumption of information and production of knowledge that continues today. This project works with Letterform Archive to foreground women’s contributions internationally and create a more accurate and inclusive narrative of the industry’s history. We will pull together disparate parts of the Archive’s collection to create streamlined, public access to women’s work in the metal type era (roughly the 1850s to 1950s), information that does not yet have a comprehensive source, via their Online Archive.

Jonathan Radocay (English) “Re-storying” the Cherokee Diaspora in California: A Digital Archive and Storytelling Project

Partnering with the Cherokees of Northern Central Valley, an at-large community organization of Cherokee Nation citizens, Jonathan is creating a community-based digital archive and storytelling project that draws on the personal and family histories of Cherokee people living in the California diaspora. This project engages longstanding community interests in genealogy, education, Native art, and creative writing, and serves as an important 2021 community outreach event during a pandemic that has left many community members isolated from each other. The project culminates in an ongoing digital space for expressing the history of Cherokee diaspora communities–and their many relations among California Indian, Indigenous, and migrant communities–in California. The storytelling project not only helps the Cherokee community tell its own diaspora story but also interrogates difficult questions about Indigenous and migrant diasporas residing on California Indian lands in this region of the Pacific world.

Larissa Saco (Sociology) City of Davis Arts and Cultural Affairs Program: Public Art, Community Engagement, and Digital Storytelling

In partnership with the City of Davis Arts and Cultural Affairs Program, local artist Susan Shelton has created a bronze seal that endeavors to share ongoing histories of the city in a multi-faceted way through a circular, ringed design and themes such as engagement, community, and aspiration. Larissa will support activities that promote community engagement and dialogue around the public art installation, including research on engaged arts practices, digital storytelling, and public programming.

Haliehana Stepetin (Native American Studies) Sharing Subsistence Processes and Recipes in Unangam Tunuu Through Digital Stories

This project includes collaborating with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association (a non-profit serving Unangax̂ communities) to create digital stories for public engagement, documentation, and continuation of qaqamiiĝux̂ [subsistence] processes and recipes in Unangam Tunuu [Unangax̂ language]. At their core, our collaborative digital subsistence stories will illustrate summer processes — such as gathering, hunting, and fishing — and recipes that depict various methods of preparing and preserving foods for winter. As a subsistence practitioner and Unangax̂ language teacher, my kin-responsibilities involve transmitting my own Unangax̂ Knowledge  including recipes and methods for preparing and preserving subsistence foods. This project centers ongoing language resurgence efforts serving learners in and of the Aleutian/Pribilof region. Unangam Tunuu is considered an endangered language given the dwindling number of speakers and the barriers affecting the transmission and application of the language in daily contexts. My project will combine Unangam Tunuu language resurgence with Alaska Native subsistence processes as a way to expand current discourses of food sovereignty and environmental justice to include Arctic lifeways, where climate change is disproportionately experienced by Indigenous Peoples and communities.

Brianna Tafolla Riviere (History) Developing California Native American Walking Tours at Marshall Gold Historic Park and Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park

California State Parks is developing a pilot California Native American Walking Tours for Marshall Gold Discovery Park in Coloma, California and Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park. With Governor Newsom’s apology for California Native American Genocide in California, California State Parks is in the beginning stages of reviewing interpretation at Parks with an Indigenous nexus. This project will be the first of several reviews of other Gold Rush-era parks through current interpretation and education standards. Brianna will assist the Tribal Affairs Program, Interpretation and Education Division, and the Cultural Resources Program and  engage and consult with tribes whose history, culture, and traditions interact with Marshall Gold Discovery Park and Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park.