Cassidy Schoenfelder
Research Areas
Cassidy Schoenfelder (she/her) is a geographer, art historian, artist, and citizen of the Oglala band of the Lakota Sioux tribe. After growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota, she received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana and later her master’s degree in the history of art and architecture from the University of Oregon. Influenced greatly by art and visual culture, these previous studies influence how she approaches her geography doctoral research at the University of Arizona. Specifically, her work focuses on the social and geographical relationship between Native nations and the U.S.-based national parks. Using Glacier Bay Homeland (National Park and Preserve) and the local Huna Tlingit community as an in-depth case study, she seeks to understand how co-management agreements are actualized, conveyed, and understood through imagery. Furthermore she asks what power visuals/representation may have when they are considered a critical part of co-management agreements. For example, public lands like national parks attempt to remove and eliminate any and all signs of human impact in order to preserve the wilderness contained in the park’s boundaries. Through co-management, the Huna Tlingit and the U.S. National Park Service have worked together to complicate and disrupt the concept of a peopleless landscape with clan infrastructure, Native place-names, and by implementing totem poles in the backcountry. These Native-centered visual representations are necessary for further sustaining how their Tlingit’s people, land, and futures are conveyed and can inspire other Native communities to pursue co-stewardship agreements as well.
Outside of her dissertation research, she is the co-editor of the "you are here: journal of creative geography," is the primary instructor for courses like Environmental Studies, Critical Research Methodologies, and Places in the Media, and is positioned as a research assistant investigating the cultural sector's relationship with climate change.