Led by Linguistics faculty member Scott AnderBois, the ALDP is a community-centered language documentation project in collaboration with speakers of A'ingae (an indigenous language of Ecuadorian Amazonia). The ALDP team aims to create a database of annotated audio, video, and digital animations and use that database to address scientific questions about the grammar of A'ingae and to produce resources to meet community language needs including pedagogical materials for K-12 schools.

Co-edited by Crystal M. Fleming, Veronica Y. Womack, and NAISI-affiliated Brown University faculty member Jeffrey Proulx, Beyond White Mindfulness: Critical Perspectives on Racism, Well-being, and Liberation (Routledge Press) brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on mind-body interventions, group-based identities, and social justice. Marshaling both empirical data and theoretical approaches, the book examines a broad range of questions related to mindfulness, meditation, and diverse communities.

While there is growing public interest in mind-body health, holistic wellness, and contemplative practice, critical research on these topics featuring minority perspectives and experiences is relatively rare. This book draws on cutting edge insights from psychology, sociology, gender, and critical race theory to fill this void. Major themes include: culture, identity, and awareness; intersectional approaches to the study of mindfulness and minority stress; cultural competence in developing and teaching mindfulness-based health interventions; and the complex relationships between mindfulness, inequality, and social justice. The first book of its kind to bring together scholarly and personal reflections on mindfulness for diverse populations, Beyond White Mindfulness offers social science students and practitioners in this area a new perspective on mindfulness and suggestions for future scholarship.

Associate Professor of History and STS Director Lukas Rieppel has collaborated with Dr. Craig Howe (Oglala Lakota) on a historical mapping project entitled In and Out of Place: Resource Extractions from Treaty Lands. Using a decolonizing, collaborative, and Lakotan-centered approach, Rieppel and Howe mapped scientific and military expeditions that entered the 1868 Treaty Territory in the Black Hills region from the mid-19th century to the turn of the 20th century.

Rieppel also recently co-authored a publication with Dr. Howe from the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies that came out of the above project.

Religious Studies professor Mark Cladis recently published two articles pertaining to Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko:

1) “Leslie Silko: Nuclear Landscapes, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling,” Ecokritike 1 (2024): 35-58

2) “The World in Ruins: Wordsworth, Du Bois, and Silko,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2022) 105 (4): 440–467 https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.105.4.0440

The first article is largely written in the mode of listening: of attending to Silko and the stories she weaves from her life and her Indigenous traditions. In the act of listening, questions are posed: What is the connection between having the stories and having sources of life and resilience, especially in times of oppression and despair? The power of Indigenous storytelling is explored as sources of healing, resistance, and transformation. There is also a focus on nuclear storied landscape, first as found in Silko’s novel Ceremony and then in Almanac of the Dead. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the role of curative storytelling and the more-than-human in assisting humans survive and even flourish as we seek to make a just home in the face of such catastrophes as climate change and nuclearism. 

As part of a team of principal investigators, Professor of Environment and Society Amanda Lynch seeks to answer the following: How will converging geophysical and socioeconomic pressures shape Arctic development between now and 2050? 

CPAD (Navigating Convergent Pressures on Arctic Development), a multi-institution consortium, will address this question through a pan-Arctic, multi-scaled analysis of geophysical climate change, economic potentials, and evolving structures of management and sovereignty. Their central objective is to identify robust and grounded loci where development pressures are most likely to converge in the future, and to assess the long-term implications of their development for Arctic communities, environments, industries, and international policy.

Dr. Lynch is also working on a forthcoming collaboration with Sakha research Vera Soloveya entitled Tracing Toxicity: Building an Evidentiary Database of Envriotechnical Disasters in Russian Indigneous Lands. Lynch and NAIS interim Faculty Director Bathsheba Demuth previously hosted Solovyeva in Fall 2023 as part of the Dean's Visiting Scholar program.

Led by Professor of History Linford Fisher, Stolen Relations (formerly the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas) is a community-centered database project funded by Brown University and the National Endowment for the Humanities that seeks to illuminate and understand the role the enslavement of Indigenous peoples played in settler colonialism over time. 

As part of her ongoing research on the environmental history of the Yukon River, Professor of History and Environmental Studies Bathsheba Demuth spends part of each summer teaching on the river itself. The course emerged from an observation Demuth heard from multiple partners in Alaska Native communities along the river: that young people planning careers in environmental issues rarely have the opportunity to see what life in fly-in, Indigenous villages is like, which has real consequences for tribal governance and how resources are managed in the state. Now, in partnership with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Demuth takes groups of students—some Native Alaskan, some born in Alaska, some from the Lower 48—on a 150 mile trip along the Yukon from Eagle to Circle, Alaska. Along the way, they meet with Indigenous leaders, Elders, and longtime river residents; visit historical sites; read about the past and present of the Yukon, and learn from the river as they travel its waters.  And while it involves less paddling and talk around a campfire, Demuth teaches a semester-long CNAIS course focused on sovereignty, law, and environmental change along the Yukon here at Brown (HIST1820C: Sovereignty and Ecology).

2025 CNAIS concentrator Kawehii Keli’i's capstone project proposed a statewide initiative requiring physicians to complete training modules on sustainable and effective healthcare in Hawai’i, including how to integrate cultural knowledge/practices with Western medicine. The proposed steps are based on research on Kānaka Maoli health disparities and insights from Kānaka Maoli and allied physicians in Hawaiʻi. By promoting cultural awareness and integration, this initiative aims to improve physician-patient relationships, fostering greater trust and ultimately improving healthcare outcomes for Kānaka Maoli.
 

2025 CNAIS concentrator Ma’iingan Wolf Garvin's capstone project was an illustrated children's storybook based on the Hoocąk (Ho-Chunk language) fable “The Woman and the Walnut Tree.” The storybook has 15 illustrations across 20 pages, with text in Hoocąk and an English translation at the end, and will serve as a language-learning resource for Ma’iingan’s tribe.
 

2025 CNAIS concentrator Isabelle Meza's capstone project explored the significance and history of Star Quilts within her family and the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux communities. Through discussions with family and community members, she investigated quilting and craft as ways to pass down community-based knowledge and connections despite one’s physical proximity to their communities. Isabelle’s research culminated in making her own Star Quilt alongside her family and proposing a workshop for college students to learn and create a quilt together. 

 

2025 CNAIS concentrator Nkéke Harris’s capstone project critically reexamined Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative through a Narragansett lens, challenging the dominant colonial narrative embedded in the captivity genre. By deconstructing Rowlandson’s account—a foundational text often taught as historical truth—their project exposed how such narratives were weaponized to justify the violence, displacement, and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Nkéke’s work interrogated how these early texts functioned as propaganda, shaping settler identity while dehumanizing Native communities, and draws connections to the continued use of narrative as a tool of oppression against Indigenous peoples globally today, offering a decolonial re-framing rooted in Indigenous sovereignty and truth-telling.

2025 CNAIS concentrator Malia Honda’s capstone project was a written proposal that seeks to create more accessible information regarding cultural access to Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM) in Hawai’i. This proposal includes suggestions for activities and resources to increase outreach, cultural education, and funding for Kānaka Maoli cultural practitioners to better access PMNM.