Office Location: Ketchum 351
Pronouns: she / her / hers
Education
M.A., University of Kansas - Indigenous Studies, 2017
B.A., University of Minnesota, Morris - Environmental Studies and American Indian Studies, 2015
Research Interests
ethnobotany; Indigenous environmental studies; racial ecologies; ethnography; Anishinaabeg studies
Natasha Myhal is Sault Ste. Marie Anishinaabe and Ukrainian and grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. She is a PhD candidate in the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder with an emphasis on Native American and Indigenous Studies.
Her research explores the intersection of Indigenous ethnobotanical perspectives, environmental change, and ongoing colonial practices in the Great Lakes. Her work employs an Indigenous political-ecology approach to examine the relationships between Indigenous peoples and ecological worlds.
Her dissertation, tentatively titled Sites of Emergence Through Nmé: The Little River Odawa Climate Understandings in Michigan uses ethnographic community-based research to understand the dynamic relationship between the Odawa and nmé (sturgeon) through time and how more-than-humans (the nmé) inform a deep knowledge for the Odawa. Her research traces the disappearance and reemergence of sturgeon as correlating with Odawa forms of gender and health. Sites of Emergence demonstrates more-than-humans as a site of articulation that engages with multiple forms of power enacted through colonialism, ecology, and treaties.
