Faculty feature: Ataya Cesspooch
Ataya Cesspooch is the 2024/5 Annie Clark Tanner Teaching and Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities. She is an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes and a descendant of the northern Ute Tribe from the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in northeastern Utah. Prior to starting her PhD in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at Berkeley, Ataya worked for the Ute Tribe and later, the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an environmental protection specialist.
In addition to her research in partnership with the Ute Tribe, she is teaching the writing seminar for current EH students, EHUM 6105 Indigenous Land, Life, and Power. Below are Ataya's answers to our written questions about her research at Berkeley and plans at the U during her fellowship.
- Welcome to the U, Ataya! Would you talk about your research at Berkeley? How does that relate to EHUM 6105, the seminar you're teaching this semester?
Thank you! My research is in partnership with the Ute Tribe, which I am a descendant of, and examines how our engagement with oil and gas has shaped who we are as Ute people, our expressions of sovereignty, and our relationship to land. The Tribe has been leasing lands for oil and gas development since the 1950’s. Revenue from leasing has lifted the Tribe out of poverty, bolstered Tribal sovereignty, and enabled the Tribe to maintain control over Tribal lands. Yet it is not without complications. My work seeks to complicate narratives that situate Indigenous peoples as inherently opposed to resource extraction and instead explore how Ute people make sense of our reliance on fossil fuels within Ute epistemologies.
The course engages many of the themes I’m currently thinking through under the umbrella of Indigenous relations to Land. We are reading through contemporary and foundational pieces in Indigenous studies across multiple genres of writing such as poetry, creative nonfiction, and the novel to explore how Indigenous scholars engage the Land in their writing. Indigenous frameworks recognize Land as a life-force with animacy and agency; the course explores how this shift changes our understanding of “the environment,” and encourages the practice of writing with Land.
- Could you tell us about your work on Ute language revitalization?
I am getting a Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization as part of my degree at Berkeley. This has allowed me to take courses in Indigenous language revitalization and devote time to learning the Ute language. I was a part of an online Ute language class organized by the Ute Land Trust from 2020-2022, which met three times per week and brought together a dedicated group of language speakers and language learners. Through the class I formed a relationship with an elder language speaker and have been developing a project drawing on Leanne Hinton’s master-apprentice model to learn the language through immersive daily practices. This work is vital to my community because the majority of fluent speakers are over the age of 75 and language transmission to younger generations has been limited.
- Before you began your PhD program, you worked for the Ute Tribe and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an environmental protection specialist. Could you about the contrast and/or connections between working for the Ute Tribe and BIA and being a scholar in the academy?
When I worked for Tribe, I analyzed and mitigated the environmental impacts of proposed oil and gas infrastructure on the Reservation. It was important work and it was rewarding to be able to serve my community in that capacity. Yet, the scope was limited to primarily biophysical impacts and the analysis was primarily through a western lens as it was in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act. In my academic work I am able to examine the social and cultural impacts of oil and gas development on my community and ground my analysis in our own ways of knowing, which is powerful, and I think very needed. My positions with both the Tribe and BIA involved upholding federal environmental policies which often came in tension with the sovereignty of the Ute Nation. My work in the academy enables me to align myself more directly with the values of my people and to critique the larger systems of settler colonialism that impact Ute life. While my current work doesn’t have the same level of practical application that my previous positions did, it is my hope that the deeper work I am doing will impact future generations.
- One of your colleagues at Berkeley, Gardiner Brown, is an EH alum! While your areas of research appear different, are there themes that connect?
It has been great to get to know Gardiner! He also works with my advisor, Michael Mascarenhas, and we are both in Micheal’s critical environmental justice lab. Students in the lab are study very different topics, but the thread that binds us is a dedication to environmental justice that subverts the state processes of racialization and settler colonialism. I know Gardiner’s work engages disability theory and I have also found this lens to be helpful in understanding how we as Ute people relate to lands that have been severely impacted by extractive industries. In working more closely with students in EH, I can see how Gardiner’s training through this program has enabled him to braid humanist and social science methods and coming from a strictly social science background I find his insights in lab really innovative.
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Save the date for Ataya's Work in Progress talk on April 8, 2025 at 12p.