Graduation Term

Spring 2026

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Department of English

Committee Chair

Angela Haas

Committee Member

Ela Przybyło

Committee Member

Elise Verzosa Hurley

Abstract

The Wyandot(te) have undergone language dormancy due to settler colonial impacts of warfare, refugee relocation, forced removals, and U.S. assimilation projects. One of the most pressing priorities among our people today is reawakening our ancestral language, Waⁿdat. The common follow-up question is: how? Through the conduit of Waⁿdat language reclamation, this project grapples with the above question in collaboration with the Wyandot(te) community, and in adherence to the tribal sovereignty of the Wyandotte Nation. The project engages with diasporic perspectives, community-based pedagogy design, and tribally specific research protocols and policies. The living collective knowledgebase with which I engage in this project and elsewhere requires constant consent, relational accountability, reciprocity, and respect from my role in generating a public document. The heart of this research illuminates the Waⁿdat language as a cultural-epistemological vehicle of our people, who are the rightful living stewards of our heritage knowledge. To accomplish this, I embark upon community-based research that aims to break Wyandot(te)s out of salvage ethnographic depictions of who we are and reclaim knowledge for the benefit of the Wyandot(te) diaspora as well as multitribal communities engaged in heritage knowledge reclamation.

Access Type

Dissertation-Open Access

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