Colonialism's historical violence has legacies yet to be sufficiently acknowledged. The force of genocide is leveled against culture, language, knowledge, and even memory. Unacknowledged violence buries itself in the deepest parts of our souls resulting in a spiritual consumption...

My initial project focused on the way market squid embryo morphology can possibly be effected by ocean salinity levels during development. This was to be accomplished by testing two sets of embryos with three replicates each. These two sets would comprise a salinity level that matched the ocean conditions of Sitka sound, and a comparative salinity which would represent the low salinity levels of the inner passages of Southeast Alaska. Once the embryos hatched they would be transferred into tanks especially designed to safely contain soft tissue organisms. After several weeks of paralarval development, the squid would then be euthanized in accordance with regulations and their statoliths would be removed and analyzed for and morphological differences. As it currently stands my project has achieved a working prototype of the circulatory current aquarium that I had originally proposed in the beginning. This aquarium system exists on larger scales, however I was able to draft, develop and test my own small scale version. This scaled down aquarium allows for larval stage vertebrates and invertebrates on a focused level that’s optimized for smaller labs.

My goal was to create an interactive app of Tlingit place names in the Juneau area in order to use it as a tool for education and resource management. The secondary objective was to write an academic paper about the project and to present at the Alaska Native Studies Conference in Fairbanks.

The goal of this project was to identify the most common killer whale ecotype in the Juneau area. Over 400 photographs of killer whales taken from the years 2012-2015 were collected from Juneau photographers and marine naturalists on various whale watching boats. The photos were analyzed and the killer whales were identified as either resident, transient, or offshore based on morphological characteristics. Additionally, the individual whales were compared to published killer whale identification catalogs and identified when possible.

Laboratory studies have been very important in understanding the physiology of commercially important crustaceans although removing crabs from their natural habitat can remove the crab from natural biological cues such as photoperiod, tidal cycles, and habitat. By assaying for circulating ecdysteroids in hemolymph of Dungeness crab, we can better understand how artificial settings are affecting the physiology of these crustaceans, in turn how they determine the outcome of laboratory studies by monitoring these differences between environments. The main goal of this project will be to determine whether there is a clear and present difference in ecdysteroid concentration between Tanner crab that have been exposed to lunar cycles; meaning they have tidal, temperature, depth and photoperiod influences, compared to lab setting Tanner crab, which will not have these external influences acting upon them.

My URECA project has centered around creating a poetry collection inspired by finding heritage and cultural community through life on the road around Northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. My original objective was to highlight the shared hopes and fears of my own family and the people I meet while on the road. I aimed to pay close attention to resisting ethnographic elements within this project so that my research and writing may resist coloniality while imparting intersubjective reciprocity via the sharing of stories and experiences through a consanguineous journey.