Indigenous perspectives for strengthening social responses to global environmental changes: A response to the social work grand challenge on environmental change

ABSTRACT

The “Grand Challenges for Social Work,” is a call to action for innovative responses to society’s most pressing social problems. In this article, we respond to the “Grand Challenge” of Creating Social Responses to a Changing Environment from our perspective as Indigenous scholars. Over the last several decades, diminishing natural resources, pollution, over-consumption, and the exploitation of the natural environment have led to climate change events that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples. We present how environmental changes impact Indigenous peoples and suggest culturally relevant responses for working with Indigenous communities. We propose a decolonizing cyclical, iterative process grounded in Indigenous Ways of Knowing.     

An Estimation Method of the Pair Potential Function for Gibbs Point Processes on Spheres

An estimation method for pairwise interaction potential of a stationary Gibbs point process is introduced by considering the case of observations located on a sphere. It is based both on Fourier decomposition of the potential and on minimum contrast estimation. It is defined when many independent realizations of the process are available. Consistency and asymptotic normality are proved for the resulting estimators. The method enables derivation of the choice of the potential function by embedded hypotheses testing. The method is applied to independent observations of root locations on internodes around stem of maize roots. The internodes are described as circles and we focus on the interaction function associated with the potential. Since a model with too many components seems to fail, we choose a sequential procedure based on embedded hypotheses testing to build a simpler model.     

Impact of Disability and Other Physical Health Issues on Academic Outcomes Among American Indian and Alaskan Native College Students: An Exploratory Analysis

This study investigated whether self-identified disabilities among American Indian and Alaskan Native college students impact academic performance and persistence to graduation and explored the differences in health and academic grades between American Indian and Alaskan Native students and students of other racial and ethnic identities using the National College Health Assessment. Findings indicate that American Indian or Alaskan Native students have significantly lower grades than White and Asian students, and American Indian and Alaskan Native women report the highest incidence of health problems of any demographic group. Exploratory results point to future research to determine the full impact of disabilities and poor health on academic success.