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Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission Archive
On June 29, 2012, five Wabanaki Chiefs and Maine’s Governor Paul LePage signed a mandate commencing the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Under the leadership of five appointed commissioners, the TRC was charged with examining Maine’s child welfare practices affecting Wabanaki people; the focus of the Commission was on "truth, healing, and change." Over the course of three years, the TRC collected statements from nearly 150 individuals and focus groups. The TRC published a final report on June 14, 2015, detailing key findings and recommendations for further action.
At the conclusion of its work, the TRC transferred its extensive archives to the Bowdoin College Library’s George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. The collection includes video, audio, and written statements, and other personal documents contributed by participants, founding documents, the final report, and administrative and research records. This website provides online access to all the unrestricted statements that are part of the collection. Researchers interested in consulting other components of the collection described in the online inventory may do so by visiting the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives. For more information, email scaref@bowdoin.edu or call 207.725.3288.
Please read Wabanaki REACH's statement of support issued upon the release of the archives.
He Mauka Teitei, Ko Aoraki, The Loftiest of Mountains: The Names of Aotearoa’s Highest Peak and Beyond
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Joseph B. Lancia
Access: Open access
- My thesis discusses the cultural, political, and social dynamics of mountains with separate Indigenous and Western names and identities. Centering on Aoraki/Mount Cook—the highest peak in Aotearoa New Zealand—I integrate personal experiences as ethnographic data through narratives, mainly of my time hiking while studying abroad in New Zealand and during the two recent summers I spent exploring Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Through its name, Aoraki/Mt. Cook maintains Indigenous Māori and Western perspectives: Aoraki being a Māori atua (god) and Captain James Cook being a significant colonial figure in the Pacific. The slash upholds both identities while ensuring that they exist together. These dynamics are explored in depth and extended to mountains in places including Colorado, Alaska, and Australia. While discussing Rocky I rely heavily on Oliver Toll’s Arapaho Names & Trails (2003) which contains a substantial collection of Arapaho knowledge of the area and I give strong attention to Nesótaieux (Longs Peak and Mount Meeker). Additionally, I look at Mount Blue Sky, Denali, and Uluru/Ayers Rock to discuss mountains that have had formal name changes and how legacies are maintained through toponyms. With discussing varying identities and perceptions of each example and the knowledge held in names I encourage readers to do research into local Indigenous knowledges to further their and others’ understandings of places. I emphasize the concepts of historical silences, the revealing of knowledge, and the importance of language to articulate that Indigenous knowledge might be difficult to find but is never truly lost.
Fall forward, spring back: Drivers of synchrony in the sea star crawl-bounce gait transition
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Brady R Nichols
Access: Open access
- The Froude number is the ratio of kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy used during locomotion and is often used to analyze gait transitions. Here, I compare and contrast the human walk-run gait transition, which occurs at a consistent Froude number of 1 because there exists a mechanical speed limit to walking, and the sea star crawl-bounce gait transition, which occurs around Froude numbers of 1*10^-3. In this thesis I investigate why sea stars exhibit two gaits despite lacking brains and moving at Froude numbers far below other known gait transitions, hypothesizing (1) that the crawl-bounce transition may be mechanical and thus still depends on the Froude number, and (2) that the crawl-bounce transition is best modeled gradually compared to the instantaneous human walk-run transition. Thirty sea stars were filmed and the resulting kinematic data is used here to inform thinking about the crawl-bounce transition. I first discuss damped driven harmonic motion of a single oscillator, but eventually turn to using coupled oscillators and deriving that a coupling constant between metronomes on a moving base is the Froude number, which is therefore relevant for the crawl-bounce transition. I lastly discuss a purely mathematical analogue of the crawl-bounce transition as a Hopf bifurcation in horizontal speed and vertical velocity phase space, which leads to a rough model with results qualitatively similar to observed kinematic data from films, and indicates that a gradual transition is in fact a good fit for the crawl-bounce transition.
Functional redundancy of a non-native foundation species (eelgrass, Zostera japonica) across intertidal stress gradients
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: S. Maria Garcia
Access: Open access
- Non-native species foundation species can alter ecosystems in both positive and negative ways. The creation of habitat can be beneficial to native species when they provide a limiting resource or in a stressful environment. Yet this creation of habitat can also be detrimental by replacing native species and/or facilitating the presence of more non-native species. In Willapa Bay, WA, a non-native foundation species, Zostera japonica, co-exists with the native foundation species Zostera marina. Zostera japonica persists at the higher intertidal in monocultures, the two species overlap in the mid intertidal, and Z. marina persists in monocultures in the low intertidal. Epifaunal invertebrates, the organisms that live on eelgrass blades, connect eelgrass to higher trophic levels. Through a series of transplants and removals, I used this zonation pattern to ask if the two species can fulfill a similar functional role in respect to epifaunal invertebrates (functional redundancy), and if this was due to the identity of the foundation species or a response to the stress gradient of the intertidal. My results suggest that the epifaunal invertebrate community is responding more to the physiological stress gradient, and the functional redundancy of the two species depends on the location they are found. Z. japonica is expanding the range of vegetated habitat into to the physiologically stressful high zone, which supports a different community. This experiment highlights that the impacts of non- native species are highly localized and that abiotic and biotic factors are important to trophic interactions.
Synthesis of N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes of Coinage Metals and Their Application in the Activation of Hydrogen
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Maryam Akramova
Access: Open access
- The main cause of the ongoing global climate crisis is the emission of greenhouse gases, and current climate reports emphasize the need to transition to low-emission renewable energy sources. Urgently needed are methods for storing renewable energy, such as synthetic fuels like hydrogen (H2) gas; however, a challenge to the widespread implementation of hydrogen fuel is its low volumetric energy density. This thesis describes an effort to synthesize a catalyst that takes advantage of hard-soft acid-base (HSAB) mismatches to activate H2 and facilitate its reaction with CO2 to form hydrocarbon fuels, thereby providing a sustainable means of storing renewable energy in high-density carbon-neutral fuels. The catalyst design features an exceptionally bulky N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligand known as IPr** (3-Bis[2,6-bis[bis(4-tert-butylphenyl)methyl]-4-methylphenyl]-1H-imidazol-3-ium chloride), a coinage metal acting as a soft acid, and a hard base such as an alkoxide ion. Herein is reported a modified synthetic route of IPr**, along with its metalation with silver, and preliminary results of the addition of an alkoxide base. The ligand and its complex with silver are structurally characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Further work is needed to complete the characterization of IPr**-supported HSAB mismatch complexes and investigate their potential to activate H2.
The French Official Mistress: Fashioning Female Political Power in the Ancien Régime
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Samantha Brown
Access: Open access
- This thesis focuses on the French official mistress as a position of unofficial female political power under the French monarchy from the 16th to the 18th century. Centering on three case studies – Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour – this thesis argues that the role of the official mistress extended beyond sexual companion to advisor, negotiator, diplomat, artistic patron, and cultural trendsetter. By taking a deep look at the epistolary and artistic record of these three official mistresses from across France’s modern history, the extent of their autonomy and political maneuvering becomes clear in the tactics they used to project and solidify their power. Diane de Poitiers, Madame de Maintenon, and Madame de Pompadour all existed in unique contexts of the French court and constructed their own methods of fulfilling the role of the official mistress, revealing both changes in the monarchy and their impacts upon it. Notably, the ways in which they projected identity through self-fashioning resulted in a reflection of this image back onto the monarch, expanding the extent of their impact on the monarchy. In striving to understand the political reality of women in France under Salic law and today, the position of maîtresse-en-titre is a crucial framework to recognize the significance of female power structures at court and in the monarchy, and the degree to which women were able to shape these structures themselves.
DS-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization with Dynamic and Static Topologies
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Dominick Sanchez
Access: Open access
- Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is often used for optimization problems due to its speed and relative simplicity. Unfortunately, like many optimization algorithms, PSO may potentially converge too early on local optima. Using multiple neighborhoods alleviates this problem to a certain extent, although premature convergence is still a concern. Using dynamic topologies, as opposed to static neighborhoods, can encourage exploration of the search space at the cost of exploitation. We propose a new version of PSO, Dynamic-Static PSO (DS-PSO) that assigns multiple neighborhoods to each particle. By using both dynamic and static topologies, DS-PSO encourages exploration, while also exploiting existing knowledge about the search space. While DS-PSO does not outperform other PSO variants on all benchmark functions we tested, its performance on several functions is substantially better than other variants.
Architecture of Bowdoin College
Date: 1988-01-01
Creator: Patricia McGraw
Access: Open access
- Typesetting: The Anthoensen Press. Includes bibliographical references (p. [206]-[214]) and index.
Catalogue of the Bowdoin Collection of Paintings, Bowdoin College
Date: 1870-01-01
Access: Open access
- "Note" signed: J.B.S
Joseph Nicoletti: Paintings and Drawings
Date: 1977-01-01
Access: Open access
- Catalog of the exhibition held Jan. 21-Feb. 27, 1977.