History professor Rosalyn LaPier has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation. The fellowship provides funding to support faculty in acquiring additional training outside their discipline to advance their research into new areas.
LaPier, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, is an environmental historian and ethnobotanist whose teaching and research focuses on environmental issues within Indigenous communities. Their project "Saokiotapi Wayfinding" will explore star navigation and the historic landscape management practices of Indigenous women on the northern Great Plains. During the three year fellowship they will study astrophysics, linguistics, Indigenous ethnoastronomy, and Blackfeet ethnohistory.
"The Great Plains are often called a 'sea of grass.' It is an apt description. Indigenous peoples experienced the vastness of the prairie “seas” in similar ways to oceanic peoples. One likeness was how Indigenous peoples of both places utilized the night sky as a tool to navigate across their respective seas. Unfortunately, Blackfeet or Saokiotapi (“prairie peoples”) star-navigation practices have gone dormant, due to the dominance of settler-colonial logics, but they are not entirely lost," she wrote.
They said the project aims to "reimagine star-navigation and Indigenous women’s confidence that the earth and heavens, the land and the sky, are deeply interconnected."