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The Heart of the University: Student Clubs and the American Colonization of the Pacific
No full textStudents have travelled across the Pacific Ocean to study at the University of Montana for over a century, and the contributions of these students deserve to be studied. This thesis explores the educational and community building roles that the historic International Club and Filipino Club, as well as the contemporary Pacific Islanders Club fulfilled. Students from the Philippines and Hawaiʻi provide clear examples of the potential for college campuses to be gathering places for broader community. This thesis is also a study of the global phenomenon of colonialism as seen from Filipino and Native Hawaiian students who travelled to Missoula from countries that were forcefully annexed by the United States. They were able to found student clubs as platforms to share their own perspectives on world events. Filipino students who studied in Missoula during the American colonization of the Philippines became advocates for their home country. They were active in the International Club, and were elected to be its officers. These early Filipino students performed in plays, orchestral concerts, radio shows, and participated in other student group events; these public performances were held on and off campus for the benefit of students and local Montanans. Almost a century later, members of the Pacific Islanders Club would also advocate for Hawaiʻi through performance, with a focus on cultural preservation of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Hula. The Pacific Islanders Club also took students on short study trips to Hawaiʻi to enhance its educational mission. All of these student clubs encouraged students and community members to participate in cultural traditions from the Pacific, and accomplished much through their advocacy
Assessing the Impact of Hazardous Fuels Treatments on Parcel Characteristics and Environmental Justice
No full textThe escalating wildfire crisis in the western U.S. necessitates equitable adaptation efforts, with the U.S. Forest Service\u27s Wildfire Crisis Strategy (WCS) relying heavily on Hazardous Fuels Reduction (HFR) treatments to protect high-risk landscapes (Johnson et al., 2023; Finney et al., 2011). While the biophysical effectiveness of HFR in reducing fire severity is proven, the distributional equity of these federal investments remains ambiguous. When federal agencies allocate public resources for protection, Environmental Justice mandates require that all communities receive fair treatment in the distribution of benefits, not just those with political influence or economic advantage (Exec. Order No. 12898, 1994; Exec. Order No. 14096, 2023; Bullard & Johnson, 2000). Assessing whether HFR investments achieve distributional equity remains challenging because standard assessments utilize coarse, aggregated social data that fails to capture disproportionate wildfire protection gaps in rural, underserved communities (Adams & Charnley, 2018). This study addresses this critical methodological and policy gap by asking: How are the benefits of HFR activities spatially distributed in the Kootenai Wildfire Crisis Strategy Priority Landscape? A novel parcel-level approach synthesizes advanced fire behavior modeling with detailed property attributes (market value, land use, and structural characteristics) to comprehensively quantify and map treatment benefits and their spatial variability (Scott et al., 2013). An exponential distance decay function operationalizes how these benefits attenuate with distance from treatment sites (Getis, 2009; Chen, 2015), while Local Indicators of Spatial Autocorrelation detect benefit concentration zones (Anselin, 1995). By moving beyond coarse Census aggregations to analyze 21,604 individual properties, this research provides essential, place-based insights for integrating distributional equity considerations into wildfire planning. Results reveal that treatment benefits concentrate spatially near treatment sites (Moran\u27s I = 0.419) but distribute equitably across property-based socioeconomic characteristics (η² = 0.002), with low-value and high-value parcels receiving statistically equivalent protection. Most importantly, this work creates a visible foundation for evaluating whether public wildfire risk reduction investments fulfill their promise of serving all communities equitably
American Farm Stories
No full textThis environmental writing project is composed of three interrelated stories emerging from the confluence of my life, my grandfather’s life, and farming. Topics addressed include relationships with fathers and grandfathers, notions of inheritance, the selection of agricultural technologies, agricultural development in 1950s India, U.S. postwar foreign aid initiatives, and immigration to the U.S.
It took me far longer than it should have to recognize my grandparents’ overall story as an inescapably agricultural one. As I grew more curious about a family story that now seemed to pose more questions than answers, I began to work from the loosest and most subjective of hypotheses — if I had in self-conscious contrivance gone back to the land, perhaps my grandparents, two generations and some sixty years earlier, in trading village life for urban centers first in India and then in the US, were the ones who had left the land to begin with
