Brittani R. Orona

Education:

B.A., History, California Polytechnic University, Humboldt; M.A., Public History, California State University, Sacramento; Ph.D., Native American Studies with designated emphasis in Human Rights, University of California, Davis

Dissertation:

This is our home, this is our land: Visualizing Decolonization on the Klamath River Basin

Thesis Advisor:

Beth Rose Middleton-Manning, Professor of Native American Studies, University of California, Davis

Research Topic:

In 2002, a massive fish kill led to a concentrated environmental justice movement to remove four dams on the Klamath River Basin that negatively impacted the health and sustainability of the river system. The project addresses how federal and state environmental policy on the Klamath River Basin relies on narrow definitions of genocide, time, and settler-colonial concepts of ownership to continue land dispossession of Indigenous people in California. In response, Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk artists and activists work beyond the scope of environmental policy to assert place-based epistemology through trans-Indigenous relationships against the state, centering decolonization through dam removal, ongoing environmental injustice, and human rights abuses.

Mentor:

Amy Lonetree, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz

Current Position:

President's and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz

See Profile of Brittani R. Orona