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.
If you read my blog, you know how often I'm trying to take advantage of Dartmouth's beautiful location to try things I've never been able to do before. I live in McLaughlin, the northernmost dormitory on campus, and just a small walk north lies Occom Pond. In the winter the entire pond freezes over, and Dartmouth students? We seize the opportunity to go skating.
The Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) has a house at the north end of Occom where they provide rentals for all sorts of winter gear including skates. Now, I've never gone skating, and neither me nor my friends knew how the process worked, but we simply walked to the DOC house and handy signs guided us to the magical basement where all of the gear was stored. For the cheap price of $7, my friends and I were able to rent skates and, after a significant amount of falling on my part, we finally made it to the ice.
Ice skating is hard for a lot of people. Even people with balance are likely to find some difficulty in the artform that is skating. For me, an individual without any sense of balance, ice skating is probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do in my life. This unhappy fact for me is why you guys now have the opportunity to laugh at the pictures taken by my friend Azariah as he watched me stumble and cling to dear life in the form of a retrofitted trashcan turned skating assistant.
I promise I was trying my best...it just happens that sometimes your best requires a little help
Nowadays, just walking to the Hop for lunch or grabbing a mocchachino from King Arthur Flour (KAF), I see students from all years holding skis, snowboards, skates, hockey sticks, and all variants of winter gear as they go to class or catch buses to the ski lift or elsewhere to tackle winter. It's pretty amazing to see my peers from some of the warmest places in existence get to not only witness winter but fully partake in some of the most exciting and enjoyable activities outside in spite of the cold.
When I went ice skating, the only person in our squad with a familiarity with the cold was Kylee, and even being from Alaska, she hadn't gone ice skating before. So even my friends from cold places are experiencing different flavors of winter here that enable us to forget about the studying and the midterms and the mounting amount of pages to read for my Indigenous Borderlands class.
Don't procrastinate, guys. It's not worth it.
Kaulana can skate. I cannot. She visited me on the sidelines though. :)
Winter term is definitely quieter than other terms. Lines are shorter at the Courtyard Cafe (aka the Hop), which is amazing considering the Hop is legendary and their breakfast burritos (known lovingly as "bobs") are perfect for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The library is extremely popular this term if only because everyone hides in there to study, sneak downstairs for coffee breaks in KAF or Novack Cafe, and then return to a quiet corner to read or do work. And it's warm, so we love that.
I hope you're all doing wonderfully and I can't wait to let you all know about my upcoming adventures in this New England wonderland. Aloha a hui hou.
On Monday, April 8, 2024, a phenomenal total solar eclipse occurred — and we happened to be within the path of totality. As a result, Dartmouth hosted a variety of eclipse-related events on- and off-campus. Find out how I spent the eclipse!
