Victor Chimaway Lopez

This dissertation project bridges the burgeoning fields of Native studies and environmental humanities through collaborative and transdisciplinary Indigenous research methodologies. Particular attention is brought to bringing archival documents into relation with methods of reading land and water as memory, archive, or the absence of such, bringing new perspectives to nineteenth-century ecological and social change in Chumash homelands and waters. By historicizing three social-cultural-ecological-geological nexuses this dissertation argues for a Chumash method of intellectual inquiry, focusing specifically on: Cattle economies, Indigenous ecological practice, and resistance of colonial ecologies of domestication; Sea otter hunting, Indigenous maritime mobilities, post-apocalyptic and post-extinction resiliencies; dams and canals, Settler patterns of sedimentation, exacerbated cycles of erosion and drought, and Indigenous critiques of the anthropocene.