It is our pleasure to announce the 2023/24 Henry Roe Cloud fellow, Allison Ramirez Madia. The Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship honors the legacy of Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk), a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Nebraska and graduate of Yale College, 1910. Since 2010, the Roe Cloud Fellowship has helped to develop American Indian Studies at Yale by facilitating the completion of the doctorate by scholars working on pressing issues related to the American Indian experience.
Madia is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation, Transforming the Tohono: Water Management, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and American Colonialism, is a collection of essays discussing how American methods of water management have transformed the Tohono (Desert, Tohono O’odham territory) into an urban and agricultural oasis and the legacy of this history. Her dissertation turns to water theoretically and methodologically to understand the sociological transformation of settler colonialism in Arizona’s borderlands and its impact on the environment and the sovereignty of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Allison has earned undergraduate degrees from Pima Community College and the University of Arizona and holds an M.A. in Sociology from UCLA. She is a founding Tohono O’odham Nation Institutional Review Board (TON IRB) member and vice-chairperson of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Indigenous People and Naive Nations Section. She is a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation from the Wa:k community.