Bitterroot: life in the mountains on fire

Cervical cancer disparities in stage at presentation for disaggregated Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders

Interactions between abiotic filters, landscape structure and species traits as determinants of dairy farmland plant diversity

Hmong Americans face high cancer mortality rates even in comparison to their Asian American counterparts, and report low utilization of cancer screenings. To date, no study has been conducted on the cultural barriers this population faces in undergoing cancer screenings. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to examine the existing knowledge regarding the barriers to cancer screening for Hmong Americans. Potential barriers were identified from this examination to include: health access factors (type of health insurance, ethnicity of provider, low English proficiency, and years spent in the U.S.); cultural factors (belief in the spiritual etiology of diseases, patriarchal values, modesty, and mistrust of the western medical system); and cancer literacy factors (cancer and prevention illiteracy). Based on this review, potential cultural and ethnic group-specific prevention strategies and cancer health policies are discussed to address these barriers and enhance screening behavior among the Hmong.

The incidence of liver cancer in Hmong Americans is 5 times higher than that of non-Hispanic whites, and there is a low hepatitis B screening rate (24%) among Hmong adults compared with other Asian American populations. The purpose of this study was to examine the Hmong's perceptions on social-cultural determinants, traditional health beliefs, and health care system barriers that influenced community-based hepatitis B screening interventions. A qualitative method was used, integrating a collective case study research design. In-depth interviews were used to collect data from 20 Hmong adults from the greater Sacramento area. A pattern matching analytic technique was used to analyze the data. The main core elements of Culture Care Theory were used to capture the key themes presented by the participants. Protecting a family's reputation; fear of doctors, medical procedures, and test results; lack of trust in medical doctors and medical care services; and using Hmong herbal medicines and practicing spiritual healing were identified as social-cultural and traditional health belief barriers to obtaining HBV screening. Health care costs, perceived discrimination, lack of transportation, linguistic discordance, and poor quality of care were identified as barriers to accessing high-quality health care services and obtaining hepatitis B screening. Providers, health policy makers, researchers, and community-based organizations will need to work together to develop intervention strategies to address the social-cultural factors, traditional health beliefs, and health care challenges that influence obtaining hepatitis B screening in the Hmong community. Cancer 2018;124:1576-82. © 2018 American Cancer Society.

Reviewed by: The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature by Deborah A. Green Yaron Z. Eliav The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature Deborah A. Green. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 286 pp. The current trend in historical scholarship to include the five senses as worthy research categories, ones that may shed light on the human experience of far away civilizations, has not passed over Judaic Studies. During the last century, interest has gradually shifted from political and military events on one hand, and textually based investigations on the other, to the social and cultural dimensions of people’s life; the lower strata as well as peripheral social groups, together with the full spectrum of human emotions, mundane daily activities, and the interactions of people with the physical landscape that engulfed them, all have proved worthy of inspection and capable of enriching our understanding of the ancient world. Then came the senses, first with a series of studies unpacking the processes involved in viewing, and more recently studies about smelling (one can only extrapolate that the future may bring about works on hearing and listening habits, and perhaps even touching and tasting). Deborah Green strides into these still uncharted territories with elegance and confidence. Her book exhibits wide learning in rabbinics, especially midrash, and biblical studies, as well as sharp eye for those details minute yet significant, which creep up in our sources and tend to be overlooked by those who study them. She sets out to tell us the story of fragrance as it is depicted and perceived by the rabbis. The book consists of five chapters and a short concluding statement. In her first, introductory chapter, Green surveys the theoretical and methodological issues involved in her research. She correctly points out the contribution of psychology to this area of study since much of the impact of smell registers in the intangible realms of human experience, in the mind and in the imagination. Good and bad odors are very much a matter of psyche; consider, for example the horrible, disgusting stench encountered by visitors to the Jerusalem Temple precinct—the blood, the meat rotting in the Mediterranean heat with no refrigerators, the flies—a reality well portrayed by Green (69). But Jews inhaled such smells with the greatest joy, as it symbolized for them the open communication lines with their God, who accepted their animal offerings. They called the place the Mountain of God’s perfume (har ha-moriah). [End Page 185] Green’s assertion, on the other hand, that scholarly work on scent developed with the rise of women and feminism in the academy (13) seems puzzling (perhaps requiring psychology as well), especially in Judaic Studies where the early inquiries into the intricate world of perfumes and smelling date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, a time when, as far as our records show, there was not even one woman in this discipline in the academy. Samuel Krauss devoted an entire section in his magisterial book— Talmudische Archäologie—to kosmetik (vol. 1, 233–52), dissecting “feminist” topics such as ointments, perfumes, and the ideal of beauty (Schönheitsideal). Krauss’s book is not used even once in Green’s work (other than a general reference in ch. 1n36), one of very few glaring lacunas. The next four chapters are divided thematically. Chapter 2 deals with the physical environment, discussing the entities that made perfumes available to people (merchants, markets), the various places that consumed them (such as bathhouses with their wide expenditure of oil, used as both soap and ointment), and some tools that were used in the consumption of these products. The next chapter studies scent in biblical language. It goes back in time to the biblical world, that is, the Iron Age, a chronological leap of some 750 years that may irritate some historically oriented readers, especially since the rich Jewish literature of the Second Temple is completely ignored (other than a short reference to the Book of Enoch on 119), but which Green justifies due to the ontological fusion of the rabbis with the imagery and terminology of the...

Reviewed by: Straight A's: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words ed. by Christine R. Yano and Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka Reuben B. Deleon (bio) Straight A's: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words, edited by Christine R. Yano and Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka. Duke University Press, 2018. Xiv + 231 pp. $25.95. Paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0024-2. This text, a collaboration between Christine R. Yano, Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka, and the Asian American Collective, explores the narratives of high-achieving Asian Americans at Harvard University, an institution currently embroiled in an energetic and contentious fight over affirmative action and racist events on campus. This book serves as a means to champion voices of those who have "played the game" and now are learning to survive what many would consider an "ideal" educational experience. The stories in the book engage with, and to a larger extent disrupt, dominant college experiences. The majority of the book is comprised of interview transcripts, musings, and other texts of Asian American undergraduates on several themes: family/class, race, sexuality, gender, intimacy, mental health, organizations, and extracurricular activities. Each theme is explored in a chapter with a combination of analysis and excerpts of student narratives, interviews, and writing. Presenting the narratives in raw form creates an intimate and close feel for the reader, which was the editors' intention. In the introduction, both the editors and members of the collective advocate that this is not a book meant to take down the "model minority myth" or serve as a longitudinal ethnography on the Asian American experience. Rather, it is meant to take a nuanced look into a handful of unique lives within this particular sociopolitical and historical context. Using this in-depth approach allows readers to wrestle with what the editors call "Harvard Stories" (21). Chapter 1 explores common familial experiences: the constant fight between Western and Asian cultures, the politics of naming, familial roles, religiosity, and filial piety. Chapter 2 delves into race through stories related to finding common allies on campus, the self-denial and reclamation of Asian Americanness, and its intersections with politics, the body, and their peers. Commonly seen throughout the text is a fight for finding the "right" kind of Asian to be. Chapter 3 complicates this by arguing how intersectional identities are often in contention with one another. For some students, representation was a source [End Page 519] of pride and frustration. In one case, a student discusses a terrifying account of how difficult it was to convince the university of the credibility of a threat to Asian Americans on campus from an internet stalker. Chapter 4, a chapter on intimacy, centered around both the necessity and resistance towards interracial dating. Students also explained how rampant fetishization both through race and gender have altered how they navigate relationships with their partners. Chapter 5 focuses on mental health and how cultural norms, gender, and family dynamics muddle a student's ability to track down the causes of their feelings. Family is used as a medium for understanding coping mechanisms for students, intertwining it with stories of migration, sacrifice, and resilience. Other narratives also centered on the disconnection students felt with their elders regarding their future goals and struggles with eating disorders. Chapter 6 ruminates on ethnic student associations and their utility, purpose, and effect on one's sense of belonging. In conjunction with previous chapters, interviews and narratives wrestle with the residual effects of racializing student experiences. Opinions regarding organizations spread across the spectrum, with some regarding them as a suitable medium for finding their voice, and others feeling them to be a way to divide the Asian American community. In short, students found clubs to be a microcosm of understanding class, gender, and institutional prestige. Chapter 7 broadens student experiences beyond ethnic organizations and looks at other extracurricular activities. Specifically, the editors interrogate the intense activity-driven atmosphere on Harvard's campus. In the introduction to the chapter, one of the overarching themes of the book is reiterated: "Straight A lives often mean type A involvement" (171). Embedded in this statement is a strained relationship between students and mitigating familial expectations, Eurocentricity, and anti...

This article considers how young Black women living in gang-affected neighbourhoods in an urban area in England, UK navigate their safety in public and private spaces, and how these spaces overlap and intersect. Drawing on a project with 18 participants aged 14–19, the research seeks to understand how the participants inhabit, navigate and strategize for their safety through their narratives of life and survival in an unsafe neighbourhood. Findings indicate that they experience sexual harassment in public spaces and gang-associated sexual and physical violence as common, accepted aspects of their everyday realities, from as young as 12. The narratives suggest that participants navigate complex friendship groups to protect each other and their families through tight codes of trust, secrecy, privacy and conflict-management strategies. This article seeks to bring attention to how young women utilize their agency to illuminate the coping strategies they draw on to navigate their physical environments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for interventions.

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

In biogeomorphic landscapes, plant traits can steer landscape development through plant‐mediated feedback interactions. Interspecific differences in clonal expansion strategy can therefore lead to the emergence of different landscape organisations. Yet, whether landscape‐forming plants adopt different clonal expansion strategies depending on their physical environment remains to be tested. Here, we use a field survey and a complementary mesocosm approach to investigate whether sediment deposition affects the clonal expansion strategy employed by dune‐building marram grass individuals. Our results reveal a consistent shift in expansion pattern from more clumped, Brownian‐like, movement in sediment‐poor conditions, to patchier, Lévy‐like, movement under high sediment supply rates. Additional model simulations illustrate that the sediment‐dependent shift in movement strategies induces a shift in optimisation of the cost–benefit relation between landscape engineering (i.e. dune formation) and expansion. Plasticity in expansion strategy may therefore allow landscape‐forming plants to optimise their engineering ability depending on their physical landscape.

This paper attempts to shed light on the image of Napoleon’s French forces that invaded and briefly conquered Slovene lands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as depicted in Slovene folklore. In some legends, we can recognize an echo of the historical reality of the time of French invasions and their rule. These portray the hardships of this foreign occupation, the exploitation of the population by the French and their cruelty and conflicts with them, yet some show a more favourable relationship or even depict humorous accounts (especially in relation with linguistic misunderstandings) with the French, while some aspects of their rule are completely ignored by folklore. In some cases, the French are narrated into stories that explain certain features of the physical environment of the community, and in some legends they are depicted as coming from the world beyond and are attributed supernatural traits. In some folklore examples, the interchangeability of different historical invaders is attested. We can generalize that the French are seen as “the Others” in Slovene folklore and have, as such, acquired different roles in folklore to serve diverse needs of the community in the sense of strengthening its own identity, rationalizing its physical landscape, and taking part in the beliefs about the supernatural and the world beyond.

University campus is the place to live and work of college students and teachers. It is important to build a green environment. The article focuses on north campus of GTIIT, the characteristics of region climate environment are introduced, the overall campus layout, physical wind environment, optical environment, acoustic environment and campus landscape are analyzed.

Best known as the hero of Little Round Top at Gettysburg and the commanding officer of the troops who accepted the Confederates' surrender at Appomattox, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828-1914) has become one of the most famous and most studied figures of Civil War history. After the war, he went on to serve as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College. The first collection of his postwar letters, this book offers important insights for understanding Chamberlain's later years and his place in chronicling the war. The letters included here reveal Chamberlain's perspective on military events at Gettysburg, Five Forks, and Appomattox, and on the planning of ceremonies to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg. As Jeremiah E. Goulka points out in his introduction, the letters also shed light on Chamberlain's views on politics, race relations, and education, and they expose some of the personal difficulties he faced late in life. On a broader scale, Chamberlain's correspondence contributes to a better understanding of the influence of Civil War veterans on American life and the impact of the war on veterans themselves. It also says much about state and national politics (including the politics of pensions), family roles and relationships, and ideas of masculinity in Victorian America.

A reflection of life - my tale of microdiversity, equity and inclusion in cell biology (and beyond).

Whitewashing the Movies addresses the popular practice of excluding Asian actors from playing Asian characters in film. Media activists and critics have denounced contemporary decisions to cast White actors to play Asians and Asian Americans in movies such as Ghost in the Shell and Aloha . The purpose of this book is to apply the concept of “whitewashing” in stories that privilege White identities at the expense of Asian/American stories and characters. To understand whitewashing across various contexts, the book analyzes films produced in Hollywood, Asian American independent production, and US-China co-productions. Through the analysis, the book examines the ways in which whitewashing matters in the project of Whiteness and White racial hegemony. The book contributes to contemporary understanding of mediated representations of race by theorizing whitewashing, contributing to studies of Whiteness in media studies, and producing a counter-imagination of Asian/American representation in Asian-centered stories.

This thesis examines the history, transformation, and contemporary significance of Portland's Chinatown through an oral history framework, emphasizing the voices of Chinese American artists. Beginning with a comprehensive historical overview from the mid-nineteenth-century Gold Rush migrations and railroad labor to twentieth-century exclusion, dispossession under urban renewal, and the late-twentieth-century dispersal into suburbs, the thesis traces how structural racism and policy shaped both the physical landscape and communal life of Oregon's Chinese diaspora. Through in-depth interviews with local artists, this research aims to illuminate how individual experiences of identity, belonging, and creative expression navigate the tensions between heritage and adaptation. Drawing on three semi-structured interviews, the study explores generational shifts in language, cultural practice, and spatial attachment. It reveals that second-generation Chinese Americans often feel peripheral to the historic enclave yet sustain cultural memory through family traditions, community associations, and artistic practice. The thesis thus highlights how art serves as both a conduit for personal narratives and a medium for resisting erasure. Artists articulate this liminal experience of diaspora: grounded in ancestral legacy yet compelled to excel in new social contexts. Comparative analysis also situates Portland's experience alongside larger Chinatowns, showing its early prominence and subsequent decline into a predominantly symbolic district. The study further examines how contemporary institutions like the Portland Chinatown Museum, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and emergent ethnoburbs seek to preserve heritage and foster cross-cultural dialogue amid ongoing challenges of gentrification and suburbanization. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the vitality of Chinese American life in Oregon resides less in static geographic boundaries than in dynamic, transgenerational practices of storytelling, artistry, and community building. By centering oral testimonies, it not only recovers overlooked histories but also charts possibilities for sustainable cultural resilience in the region's evolving urban landscape.