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.
You'd think that being off-campus would mean there wouldn't be as much hands-on experience possible, but my Experimental Phonetics class is quickly showing me how wrong of an idea that would be.
Phonetics is the study of language sounds, and our class is specifically aimed at using scientific instruments to evaluate the acoustic details related to speech. After covering a lot of the details on how all of the parts of our speech-related anatomy makes the magic happen (the amount of sounds that the world's languages have is incredible!), we were assigned our longstanding project: to study a less-commonly studied language of the world through a native speaker of that language. We selected to study the language Waray, a language indigenous to the islands that my mom's family calls home in the Philippines, and our native speaker…you guessed it: my mom.
Over the term, my friends and I will be collecting language data from my mom over Zoom meetings, and our hope is that we'll discover something unique and special that has never been noticed before by applying the techniques we learned in class to a real example of linguistic research. My other classmates are all studying languages of their own, and the linguist nerd in me is extremely excited to see what they figure out.
We wrote out super detailed International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions for the specific sounds of some words in the Waray language!
If we were on campus right now, we'd probably be looking at ways that we could use the the specialized equipment on campus with the Linguistics department to get to an even deeper level of detail, but even without that blessed geographic privilege, my friends and I are finding ways to make it work thanks to both wonderful curriculum and Professor Stanford's leadership. You're telling me I get to listen (and even learn) my mom's native language and get a grade for it? Only at Dartmouth.
In the class, we also use a timewarped format — meaning that we all watch a lecture on our own time sometime during the day we'd have had class if we were on campus. To make sure we watch the lecture (not that we don't ever not do everything that our professors want or anything…), my professor will do these cold-calls — he'll ask us a question randomly during the middle of the video lecture, and we pause the video, answer the question on a discussion board, and resume — it sounds like a bit weird writing this, but I promise I find it honestly a pretty good way to point to parts of the lecture to take notice of (and make sure I watch every single second of every lecture, which is for my benefit).
The virtual format is really working for a lot of my classes, mostly because my professors made the call to make them "asynchronous" and thus allow me to work at my own pace, mostly on my own schedule. There are a few checkpoints, but otherwise it's sort of the best of both worlds — structure and flexibility at the same time!
From the time of my writing this post, decision day is just a few weeks away. By the time the Class of 2024 makes its debut, I hope we're on campus, but at least you know that the Dartmouth professors are taking care of us. And if their classes are this good over Zoom, can you imagine how good their classes are in person?
I can't wait to share more details about my other classes as the term progresses, and I hope your families are healthy and safe. Mahalo for reading, and as always, best wishes and I'll see you next time!
It's easy to forget how easy it is to access walking trails during the hustle of a Dartmouth term. As graduation nears, I am reminded of how special it is to step off campus and enjoy quiet moments in nature.
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!
