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It was difficult to go through graduate school not having had anybody I knew go through graduate
school. I'm from a very small town outside of Anchorage, Alaska. The President's Post-Doc
Program is for increasing not only the visibility but the actual presence of people from non-traditional
backgrounds or diverse communities that have been underrepresented in academia. So in my
case that would be from Native American background. My primary research interests are in urban
native Alaska music making. Music and Dance, because in native culture music and dance
are inseparable. With academic studies there tend to be privileging of traditional forms
that these things that were one long long ago and ancient and a lot of the rhetoric
around Native American studies is that we're vanishing still. We're continuing to vanish.
So this deficit model is a lot what my research tries to correct. We have teachable moments
in these classes to broaden the understanding not only who counts but also what kinds of
practices count. To me its a an issue of presence and absence; we need more presence, more classes,
more people teaching and learning about these histories because they're central to the American
experience. Its an incredible time to work on that interdisciplinarity and to find out
what other people are doing and the potential to work across disciplinary boundaries is
another thing that I think the post-doc really does well. It really broadened my opportunities,
kind of the conditions of possibility to get my work out there and so it was instrumental
in landing a job at Davis. I think just the fact that there are programs like the President's
Post-Doc that supports humanities post-docs is incredibly important in diversifying what
we understand research to be and see what that has to tell us about the state of the
world, the state of politics, the state of cultures in transition.