In the field of Forensic Anthropology, one of the major goals is to help identify remains of those where an autopsy is not possible. Creating a biological profile that includes ancestry, stature, sex, and age is how anthropologists are able to obtain the necessary information for identification. Ancestry is of special concern because there is still much research to be done in order to improve methods of population affinity/estimate ancestry. Particularly, there is a lack of research on the relationship between cranial and dental metrics and how the patterns of variation can inform human evolution, growth, and development. Having more information on this topic would improve the effectiveness of the population affinity/ancestry estimation portion of the biological profile needed for the identification of human remains in a medico-legal context. This research has two goals; the first is to evaluate how cranial metrics and dental metrics are inter-correlated, The second goal is to identify patterns in different ancestry populations within the US. These goals will be achieved by collecting data from the remains of donated cadavers of known demographics at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility at Texas State University. Through the statistical analysis, different metrics are expected to be inter-correlated and to reveal patterns of human variation.

Palimpsest describes the way that the past bleeds into the present. Puerto Rico, a country composed of tri-racial ancestry, has historically suffered the transgenerational trauma of colonization and indigenous erasure. This research centers the Taino narrative in comparison to the accounts of Christopher Columbus and other Conquistadors responsible for the mass genocide of the Tainos. Through literature analysis, cultural stories, and mtDNA data, this research spotlights the present importance of Taino influence on Puerto Rico. While some would argue that the Tainos are an extinct group, this cultivation of research decolonizes the narrative and allows Boricua voices to tell their own stories.

From the moment of initial colonial contact in the 16th century, the settler-colonial relationship between Spanish settlers and Indigenous communities in the Americas has been fraught. A term colonial Spain used to describe the product of these hybridizations between racialized groups in Latin America such as Indigenous peoples and Spaniards, (alongside the English, the French, the Portuguese and the slaves from Africa) was mestizaje, a category of traditional hybridization. Over the centuries, the manner in which individuals have employed mestizaje produces more problems than it solves, one of them being this strained relationship present in the 20th century between Indigenous and Latino communities. My project is an exploration of the historically fraught relationship between Latinidad and Indigeneity, focusing on the tensions present in the 20th century between Native Americans and Latinos. The historical implications of this settler-colonial relationship are present in Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn, which came out in the 1960s, but still attests to the present-day oppression and subjugation engendered by the system of state violence against Indigenous people by Latinos, who although are also oppressed, are higher in terms of racial hierarchy and therefore benefit from this ceaseless oppression of Indigenous people. With the intention to delve deeper into this critique of the relationship between Latinos and Indigenous people present in Momaday’s novel, I bring into conversation a contemporary Native text, Tommy Orange’s 2018 There There, to see how scholars in distinct disciplines of Latinx and Indigenous literary studies understand this relationship.