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.
Over the course of my first fall as a Dartmouth sophomore, I had the opportunity to take Linguistics 35 Field Methods as one of twelve students. During the course, my classmates and I had the opportunity to study the Zophei language, spoken in Myanmar and India. By the time of our taking the class, very little research had ever been done on the language, effectively giving my class the opportunity to perform some firsthand research, the likes of which usually requires actual field experiences.
Because of Dartmouth and the Linguistics department, we had the opportunity to do it all in a virtual environment — talk about new horizonsǃ
When you think of research, it's very easy to think of fancy labs and endless data tables full of numbers and other things that we associate with STEM. But research isn't just for the hard sciences, by any stretchː the social sciences have given me more opportunities to research than I'd ever have expected before my arrival at Dartmouth, and the Linguistics department especially has been so packed with opportunities that it almost seemed like incredible fortune to be able to perform the research under the guidance of a professor as part of a course curriculum. But that's normal at Dartmouthǃ You end up doing research almost accidentally, and in doing so simultaneously gain more than enough experience to brainstorm projects of your own while also meet important faculty members that are more than willing to provide the insight and experience you need to navigate what, exactly, research is.
Here's a snippet of what data collection looked like -- these are just a few words we got during our first day of class!
The class began with us meeting our language consultant — a native speaker of the language who would serve as the source for all of the language data we gathered over the course of the term. We started figuring out the phonological inventory of the language — what kind of sounds did the language have? What was the word for dog or elephant or night in the language? Then we moved on to figuring out how to build small phrases, then bigger phrases, determining how the language's syntax, or grammatical structure worked. By the end of the term, each of the members of the class selected a topic they found most intriguing and created a presentation that we ended up presenting virtually as part of a workshop that Dartmouth hosted, inviting the entire Linguistics department, Linguistics majors, and even some world-experts on the language family we'd been studying in order to share what we'd figured out.
How often does classwork translate not only into real, substantive research covering entirely new academic ground, but also the presentation of research to some of the leading academics in the language family that we'd been studying? At this point in my academic career, Dartmouth has become almost synonymous with collaborative learning and cooperative research. My entire class would meet during class sessions to perform elicitation (also known as asking our expert what certain things mean and asking other more specific questions about the language), but then we'd also perform our own individual elicitation sessions in order to diversify our efforts and gain more data. We'd share all of this data with each other in order to combine our work, and all of us benefited as a result. We were all able to pursue our own independent projects within the class but never at each other's expense — can you imagine a more collaborative (virtual) space?
As I write this post while taking a break writing my final paper for the class, I feel inspired to pursue more linguistics research independently. This class definitely gave me the tools and experience I needed to feel empowered enough to actually go for it and hit the play button on projects I've been thinking about ever since linguistics as a field stole my heart and ran away with it. Again, my experience is just one of many — Dartmouth has a way of showing you how easy research is to be, and at this moment I feel even more confident about leaving post-undergraduate studies on the radar. If I didn't know I liked research before, I know now — and I'm a big fan.
I hope you're all keeping healthy and well, and I can't wait to report back with whatever other rabbit hole I end up falling (probably face-first) into during the rest of my sophomore year. A hui hou — until next timeǃ
