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- Creator:
- Lueders, Laurel E.
- Description:
- Purpose: The intent of this thesis is to propose a collaborative landscape level management strategy for the Saline Valley Salt Tram (SVST). This unique aerial tramway was placed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1974 and was the first tramway to traverse an entire mountain range. With the passing of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, this historically significant site was placed within three separate federal land managing agencies jurisdictions: Death Valley National Park (DVNP), Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Ridgecrest Field Office, and BLM Bishop Field Office. Due to this, this structure has been managed with three distinct perspectives. The goal of this study is to utilize the SVST as an example for promoting holistic landscape level preservation for cultural resources that traverse borders. Methods: A review of available literature, past and present management plans, applicable legislation, and archival material was conducted in order to create a framework for conceptualizing the current state of the Saline Valley Salt Tram. In addition, the western slope of the project area was examined as a case study for comprehensive landscape management. A pedestrian survey was conducted and two other phases of historic manipulation of the landscape were discovered: a cluster of charcoal reduction sites that predate the SVST, and the modern interactions via a cherry-stemmed four-wheel drive road that acts as an access road into the Inyo Mountain Wilderness. Each of these three human interactions with the landscape were recorded and compiled onto Geospatial Inform System (GIS) Map. Findings: Discussions with employees of DVNP, BLM Ridgecrest Field Office, and BLM Bishop Field Office highlighted both similarities and differences in each agency’s belief regarding management of a NRHP site that sits within a designated wilderness. By focusing on the western slope for the case study, a pattern in natural and human disturbances was noted amongst SVST structures. Conclusions: The management dilemma surrounding the SVST stems directly from the restructuring of borders that placed the SVST across three agencies dominion and wilderness designations that were placed on land that has an extensive history of human manipulation. Acknowledging these factors, alongside reshaping how the public defines wilderness, are the first steps in unifying management. Recently, the California Desert Protection and Recreation Act of 2019 has passed which redefines borders between the National Park Service and BLM while designating large swathes of wilderness across southern California. Therefore, establishing the possibility of potential for fragmentation of a cultural resource.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Cultural Resources Management
- Creator:
- Guarino, Andrea
- Description:
- On December 30, 2004, my father murdered my mother. The wound left by my mother’s absence has never fully healed. This work is my attempt to describe what it felt like to lose everything in one day, to try and find my place in a new family, and to move forward in my relationship with my father. I have poured my soul onto these pages, and my hope is that all who read this memoir know they are not alone.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Farnham, April L.
- Description:
- The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways in which working-class Kānaka Hawai’i (Hawaiian) immigrants in the nineteenth century repurposed and repackaged precontact Hawai’i strategies of accommodation and resistance in their migration towards North America and particularly within California. The arrival of European naturalists, American missionaries, and foreign merchants in the Hawaiian Islands is frequently attributed for triggering this diaspora. However, little has been written about why Hawaiian immigrants themselves chose to migrate eastward across the Pacific or their reasons for permanent settlement in California. Like the ali’i on the Islands, Hawaiian commoners in the diaspora exercised agency in their accommodation and resistance to Pacific imperialism and colonialism as well. Blending labor history, religious history, and anthropology, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical approach that utilizes Hawaiian-language newspapers, American missionary letters, and oral histories from California’s indigenous peoples. I argue that precontact strategies were critical to preserving and holding onto an ethnic Hawaiian identity in encounters with merchants, missionaries, and indigenous peoples in California throughout the 1800s.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- History
- Creator:
- Surber, Lisa L.
- Description:
- Research on animal movement patterns and factors that influence these patterns is vital to conservation of endangered species. The California Red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) is a threatened species native to California. Their rapid decline has been largely attributed to habitat loss and introduction of invasive species, including the American Bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus). The aim of this research was to compare the nocturnal habitat use and seasonal movement patterns of R. draytonii and L. catesbeianus. I conducted a radio telemetry study in Sonoma County, California and mapped the locations of 13 L. catesbeianus and 51 R. draytonii from May 2017 to June 2018. Using a mixed model, I evaluated the effects of species, sex, size and rainfall on frog movement rate and compared habitat use relative to a water source. Within this model species, size and sex were found to have significant effects on movement rate. Rainfall was not found to have a significant effect on movement rate for either species. When comparing nocturnal habitat movement, I found that in the summer months species occupy different places relative to water sources in a creek environment; R. draytonii position themselves higher and further away from the nearest open water than L. catesbeianus. My work suggests that there are significant differences between the seasonal movement patterns and nocturnal habitat use of native R. draytonii and invasive L. catesbeianus. These differences may be helpful to conservation practices facilitating the survival of threatened R. draytonii.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Biology
- Creator:
- Cassells, Breanne
- Description:
- Throughout Toni Morrison’s novels, characters struggle to reclaim their own humanity in the face of domination and trauma. While countless scholars have remarked upon the themes of oppression and language, and several others upon the symbolism of nature in her works, the symbiotic relationship between the three has remained largely unremarked upon. This project explores the similarities between white supremacy, misogyny, and the plundering of the natural world—which I refer to as types of biosubjugation—in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. Utilizing Simon Estok’s theory of ecophobia, this project examines how the interactions between characters and the natural world are influenced by linguistic, physical, and ecological trauma. In The Bluest Eye, internalized oppression causes female characters to judge and exclude other females for their perceived dirtiness, understood in floral and/or animalistic terms. In Sula, female sexuality is conflated with and expressed through natural landscapes. In Beloved, trauma is literalized through natural elements, such as the tree on Sethe’s back and the shrubs in which Denver hides. An exploration of Morrison’s use of language clarifies her invocations of nature, which in turn elucidates her depiction of the alienating nature of oppression. These systems of intersectional oppression cause the characters to react in ecophobic ways in order to assert their own humanity, but these exclusionary tactics amputate the communal connections which are necessary to heal from communal trauma, and thus the cycle continues.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Clark, Nicolette
- Description:
- Violence is a fundamental truth in the works of Cormac McCarthy. More than just violence for the sake of violence, McCarthy employs violence in a way that is productive within his works: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. This study examines the productive nature behind violence, which I argue, manifests through language. Beginning with Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s judge appropriates language through the manipulation of referents re-shaping truth, informing all violence throughout the novel. No Country For Old Men brings us to the language of the law and how it caters to the objectivity of the law, using it as a guiding principle, without the scope of morality. Through the characters of Chigurh and Flannery O’Connor’s The Misfit, we are asked to judge the validity of the state’s versus the vigilante’s truth, which are ultimately synonymous. Leaving us with Sheriff Bell, who relinquishes his position as sheriff because he is unwilling to be an accessory to a morally corrupt system. Then, in The Road, the ultimate violence occurs through the disintegration of language, resulting from the indifference of man. With the perspective as perceiver of violence throughout this range of McCarthy’s works, we are in the position to judge this violence and consider its productivity. Its productivity lies in the fact that great violence must occur for redemption to manifest—as in The Road, the preciousness and life of language is not discernible until it faces its own mortality.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Constantino, Michael
- Description:
- Purpose of the Study: This thesis explores human evolution from a holistic, transpersonal, and psychospiritual perspective in attempt to answer a central question: What is necessary to restoring humanity’s relationship to nature amid our current ecological crisis? Humanity’s loss of interdependence with nature is examined within a context of trauma and an indigenous equivalent of soul loss at the individual, collective, planetary, and cosmic levels. Methods: This study utilizes peer-reviewed literature and triangulation from Jungian, indigenous, and transpersonal psychologies, which, as theoretical disciplines, offer insights that illustrate the importance of engagement with the sacred via the soul. An interdisciplinary approach is also used – drawing from the integral philosophy of Jean Gebser (1966/1986); the historical and cultural critique of Morris Berman (1981/1989); the mystery tradition of alchemy; somatic-based trauma literature; and contrasting views of traditional and contemporary science. Research methods of triangulation, reflexivity, phenomenology, and radical empiricism are used as means of measuring validity. Findings: Humanity’s lack of response to the ecological crisis may be the result of unrecognized individual and collective trauma, signified by a deepening separation from nature, loss of feeling, and symptoms of dissociation. These can be defined as traumatic conditions. When examined from an integral and psychospiritual perspective their interdependence and unconscious and transpersonal nature can be uncovered. Conclusions: This study sheds light on three areas: (1) the importance of psychospiritual and holistic considerations in human evolution, (2) a reexamination into the causes and remedies of our current ecological crisis, and (3) a reevaluation of the relevance of the psychospiritual interface, the interplay between psychological and spiritual phenomena and their involvement in the evolutionary process. The transpersonal and psychospiritual fields are often marginalized as unscientific but may be more relevant to true scientific inquiry than previously thought.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Farris, Al’Lisha
- Description:
- Throughout my life, growing up as an African American, I desired to gain answers to where my ancestors came from. The purpose of this self-study is to explore the role ancestry and the collective unconscious may have played in answering my question of ancestry. I explore the appearance of themes and imagery in dreams and artwork, paired with depth processing methods in order to determine if the unconscious has worked to bring an intuitive connection between myself and my ancestral origins, as revealed through my ancestry test results. This work is a representation of my journey of ancestral revelation and the role of the collective unconscious in self-discovery and reconnection with my soul. My findings reveal a connection between the archetypal symbols of the serpent, the golden orb, the Sankofa and my ancestral connection to Ghana.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Ganiy, Helen
- Description:
- My thesis begins by interrogating the ways in which two texts by Harriet Beecher Stowe--Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its follow-up, Dred--construct Black supernatural ability as racially innate and divinely specific. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s notion of “Black spiritual superiority” invigorated racial tensions of the time and encouraged white reader’s hyperbolic notions of Blackness. The undisputed architect of the Magical Negro trope, Stowe’s creation forces the enslaved into a position to prove themselves superhuman; that is, the trope burdens their humanity with inhumane assumptions. To contemporize my discussion of Stowe’s work, I assert that her character, Uncle Tom, was the largest and most significant influence on the production of the Magical Negro, which has become highly visible in film and literature of the past half century. Additionally, the trope positions Black individuals as divided into two categories: ordinary criminals or supernatural creatures. Both of these assumptions deny Black humanity in the same way that black exceptionalism denies the existence of a human spectrum in the Black community. This polarization of types works to story the black experience into extreme poles, forcing perceptions of Blackness to recede back into “Uncle Tom-isms”, relegated into the space of characters, stereotypes and relics. Shifting from this historical perspective into a speculative lens, I argue that Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon disavow the Magical Negro by engaging with Black Supernaturalism - a term that denotes a literary phenomenon which seeks to rework dominant notions of Black religious participation and traditional African Voodoo. My work excavates Black Supernaturalism through the anthropological and fictional works of Zora Neale Hurston, whose work formed the foundation upon which Morrison, and other Black authors, built their work. Further, Black Supernaturalism certifies and upholds communal traditions that certify magical storytelling, ghosts and impossible feats as palpably sourced in the scars of slavery borne by the black community.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Ghavamian, Yasmeen
- Description:
- All zoos grapple with challenges of keeping captive animals engaged in natural behaviors, especially for bears which prove to be among the more challenging species to keep stimulated. In captivity, a common indicator of poor welfare is the presence of stereotypic behaviors. In this study, we test whether providing increasingly complex feeding enrichment decreases the duration of stereotypic behavior and increases enrichment interaction for three adult female sun bears (Helarctos malayanus) at Oakland Zoo in California. We compared the effects of two different feeding enrichment devices- presented to the bears at three complexity levels- on sun bear stereotypic behavior. After three weeks of baseline data collection when no complex enrichment was present, we introduced the complex enrichment three times a week per level over six weeks. In addition, we measured each bear’s interaction with the enrichment devices to examine the effect of complexity on enrichment use. Providing increasingly complex enrichment decreased the duration of stereotypic behavior when compared to the baseline phase. Across the six weeks, the duration of stereotypic behavior was significantly less on the complex enrichment days compared to the days when complex enrichment was absent. Increasing enrichment complexity had variable effects on enrichment use. Our results indicate that providing complex enrichment decreased the duration of stereotypic behaviors, however, the effects of complex enrichment did not carry over on the days when the enrichment was no longer present. These results suggest that providing increasingly complex enrichment may have a positive influence on the behavior of captive bears.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Biology
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