Aloha to the page of a wanderlusting writer juggling college life and several other hobbies into an eternally-short 24-hour day. I hope to shed light on the Dartmouth experience as I explore the brave new world of Hanover, NH and everything going to college here has to offer. In my free time, you can find me trying to learn a new language or building the perfect Spotify playlist (alternative/indie, anyone?). I hope you enjoy!
Taught by Gordon Henry, an Anishinaabe poet and author, this class taught me to explore Indigenous storytelling within digital contexts. I took this class with only seven other classmates, allowing us to really engage with films, comic books, and television shows in Indigenous languages or produced by Indigenous artists.
Taught by Timothy Pulju, this class taught me how to identify and understand how languages evolve over time and why. I analyzed and reconstructed fictional languages of imaginary nations in order to understand the link between language and culture, and ended up having such an appreciation for the complexity and beauty of language's place in history!
Taught by Lindsay Whaley, this class let me discover a newfound love for ancient apocalyptic literature. We analyzed ancient texts and compared them to modern apocalypses, looking at the zombie apocalypse phenomenon and other apocalypses in pop culture and comparing them to the ancient tradition of writing apocalypses. Additionally, I learned the Greek alphabet and now I can even stumble through ancient Greek passages.
FallNew Orleans, LA
Favorite Class: Native American Literature and the Law
Taught and organized by David Peterson, this class let me get into the shoes of a real linguist as we did fieldwork (virtually!!) with the Zophei language. I learned how to describe a never-before-learned language's phonology (sound system), how to characterize its grammar and words, and ultimately got to present my research to experts in the language family around the world in a workshop at the end of the term!
WinterHanover, NH
Favorite Class: Native American Literature and the Law
Taught by N. Bruce Duthu, this class taught me how Native literature can provide lens by which to evaluate, critique, and ultimately revise Federal Indian Law. During this class, I read works by Native authors like Tommy Orange and Louise Erdrich '76 alongside the opinions of definitive case opinions in American law and explained how literature can be a catalyst for Indigenous sovereignty.
Supervised by N. Bruce Duthu, I spent this off-term performing research after being awarded a Sophomore Research Scholarship to study contemporary Hawaiian cultural and linguistic revitalization. I studied 19th-century newspapers and contemporary Hawaiian texts in order to understand how Hawaiian language revitalization both past and present has advanced and continues to enable a contemporary bodied Hawaiian politic of sovereignty.
Taught by Laura McPherson, this class taught me about how languages create meaning through words. During this class, I learned how to analyze different languages' morphological processes and compare different approaches within the field as to morphological structures.
Taught by N. Bruce Duthu, this class offered me a glimpse into the lived realities of Native people in Indian Country Today. I learned about the economic, social, cultural, and historical roots for the struggles of Indigenous people today within the United States, and was able to write about the contemporary battle for Native Hawaiian visibility and Hawaiian sovereignty.
Taught by Laura McPherson, this class taught me how to engage in language documentation and how, as a linguist, we can put our skills to use to help communities seeking to document and revitalize their languages. I worked on the Satawalese language, spoken on the island of Satawal in the Federated States of Micronesia. Ultimately, my team created two dictionaries - one in English, one in Hawaiian, a website, and several materials that focused on the Satawalese tradition of wayfinding and non-instrumental ocean navigation.
Taught by Charles Eastman fellow Sunaina Kale, this class taught me about the role of sound in delineating, conceiving, and comprehending relations between people and the land in Indigenous musical traditions. Over the course of the class, we discussed Indigenous musicians, listened to music from Native peoples around the world, heard from masterful Indigenous musicians, and ultimately presented a project that creatively analyzed a song of our choice. My project focused on the song "Ask Yourself" by Foster the People, and I wrote a poem that integrated aspects of Indigenous languages and worldviews to answer questions posed by the song.
This term, I formally began the research process for my upcoming honors thesis in the Linguistics department on Hawaiian semantics! While living in Hanover, I also began working as a Senior Fellow with the Admissions department—a position I will be holding for the entirety of my last year at Dartmouth.
A lot of people are curious about how Dartmouth's location affects social life, but something else that I've come to realize is that because of Dartmouth's location, we have some really cool alterations made to our own academic expertise and focus.
Being in the Upper Valley gives Dartmouth a front-row seat to some really cool different academic phenomena. For instance, the work I've been doing and the research I've been conducting in my Experimental Phonetics class over this term is much like the research my professor conducted from Dartmouth on New England English, being informed by his experience. In fact, I've come to realize that the curriculum itself has been advised in some small part by the experiences of the student that research this dialect of the English language with my professor.
Written by our very own Professor Stanford, acting Linguistics chair!
Because Dartmouth is where it is, my professor could study the iconic New England English of Good Will Hunting. And that's for linguistics. The experimental potential for prospective environmental scientists and scientists in general is massive, and I've already had upperclassmen friends tell me about how in their STEM classes, they go outside — because that's where the research is done.
As you can see in the picture that led this post, and which you may or may not know already, I voted in the New Hampshire primary. As one of the first in the nation, this puts Dartmouth in an incredible spot to advise and partake in presidential elections. But did you know that I've already seen or heard about dozens of research projects that use this opportunity to make some sense of political science? Again, Dartmouth is utilizing this geographic blessing we have in lovely Hanover to foster a unique academic environment like no other.
But one of the most intriguing and beautiful aspects of Dartmouth's location in academia that I've found is in the Native American Studies program. For instance, in my Indigistory class, we looked at contemporary methods of Indigenous literature — representation, artistic mediums, and how the 21st century has given Indigenous narratives new life. My professor spent a sizeable amount of classtime looking at ways that the Abenaki tribe has used the media for telling stories, specifically at creation myths, and one of my classmates, as a final project, interviewed the chief of the local Abenaki tribe about his time in the United States military in order to shed more light on Native veterans. The Abenaki are the traditional inhabitants of New Hampshire and the Upper Valley, so being able to actively engage with the Abenaki people in our academic contexts provides a specific method of simultaneous representation and support. In a class a few of my friends took in the fall, traveling to events held by tribes around the Upper Valley helped to show traditional ceremonies and community feasts as additional ways to respect and honor traditional Indigenous ties to the land, which wouldn't be possible without Dartmouth's location. If we're going to be on Native land, we should honor that, and the Native American Studies program does an incredible job of making that happen in specifically academic contexts for the student body to engage with.
And yeah, you could say that I'm being nostalgic again for Hanover...you'd be very much correct. See you all again very soon.
With a solar eclipse sweeping across North America for the first time in nearly seven years on April 8th came a road-trip with hundreds of other Dartmouth students to a zone of totality near campus: St. Johnsbury, Vermont!
After returning from an enriching study abroad program, I'm diving into a bustling spring semester here at Dartmouth. Here are my four courses I'm taking this term!
Dartmouth's liberal arts curriculum pushes students to explore new departments and draw connections between seemingly disparate disciplines. Come explore my Economics, Physics, and Asian, Societies, Cultures, and Languages classes!
