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Vanessa Racehorse

Colorado Law School

Vanessa Racehorse published an article titled, Tribal Health Self-Determination: The Role of Tribal Health Systems in Actualizing the Highest Attainable Standard of Health for American Indians and Alaska Natives (2025, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 183).

This article examines Tribal self determination within the systems that serve American Indian and Alaska Native communities by analyzing persistent health disparities, the historical and legal framework governing health care in Indian Country, and the federal laws and policies that have disrupted traditional lifeways and contributed to unequal health outcomes. It highlights the role of key legislation, particularly the Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, in expanding Tribal control over programs and services, demonstrating how tribally managed health systems can play a crucial role in closing the health gap. The article also situates Native communities in the United States within a global dialogue on the right to health, drawing parallels with Indigenous Peoples in other settler colonial states, and explores international legal frameworks, Indigenous rights, and social determinants of health, including those unique to Indigenous communities. Ultimately, it argues that successful Tribal health systems not only advance health equity for their own communities but also offer valuable lessons to the global community on delivering quality care and achieving the highest attainable standard of health.

Vanessa Racehorse also has two forthcoming publications, outlined below:

• Chaco Roads: Connecting Cultural Resources Protection with Environmental Justice, 97 Colorado Law Review (forthcoming 2026).
• Rematriation and Restoration of Ancestral Homelands, in Land Back: Restoring Native Control of Land in the United States (forthcoming 2026) (book chapter).

Jen Shannon

Anthropology

Jen Shannon has published a book recently titled, . (2025, University Press of Colorado.)

Posterity is Now is a practical, values-centered handbook on how to do museum anthropology, collections stewardship, and collaborative research in genuine partnership with Indigenous communities. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching and practice, Jen Shannon weaves together theory, such as understanding objects as kin, with pragmatic guidance on designing, managing, and budgeting collaborative projects. Centered on flexibility, relationship building, and following Indigenous communities' lead, the book advocates for fundamental reorientation of museum purpose from merely preserving objects to supporting cultural continuity, and offers collaborative museum anthropology as model for anthropology, public scholarship, and social science research more broadly.

Sarah Kurnick

Anthropology

Sarah Kurnick has a article titled, Postclassic Maya Manipulation of Dimensions: Miniature Stelae at Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico.Ìý (2025, Latin American Antiquity) and co-authored report titled, Bundled Time: An Intra-Site Sac-Be at Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico (2025, Latin American Antiquity)

Individuals have long manipulated the dimensions of architecture, vessels, and monuments. Although scaled-up objects are often conspicuous parts of communities, this article instead considers scaled-down objects, specifically Postclassic Maya small, uncarved stelae. After presenting previously documented examples of these monuments from the Maya lowlands, the article introduces two recently recorded examples from Punta Laguna in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula: each is associated with the final deposition of hundreds of fragments of broken and unreconstructable anthropomorphic incense burners. Although the exact functions and meanings of these stelae remain elusive, understanding them as miniatures—as abstracted and compressed scaled-down versions of referents—aids in efforts to reenvision the Postclassic period and to uncouple notions of scale and complexity. More specifically, understanding small, uncarved Postclassic stelae as miniatures reframes their creation as a purposeful choice, rather than as an act of necessity; suggests they are a legitimate rather than anomalous type of monument; and encourages scholars to eschew conventional considerations of what these stelae lack—size, writing, and carved figural representations—and focus instead on what they retain: the medium of stone, their basic shape and upright nature, and their placement in nondomestic contexts and association with nondomestic artifacts.

Kurnick co-authored this article which challenges such a Western, Romantic understanding of Maya ruins. Drawing on ruination studies and the material turn, it argues instead that Maya ruins are affective, consequential, and shape human actions. To do so, the article briefly considers the utility of assemblage theory and Indigenous ontologies to archaeological interpretations of ruins. It then takes as a case study an intrasite sak-be at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, México, and interprets it as a kuxansum—an Indigenous Maya concept of a living rope of blood that, even when seemingly severed, continues to connect spaces, human and other-than-human entities, and various temporalities. This interpretation encourages scholars to question whether broken or seemingly abandoned ruins such as roads must always be interpreted as functionally obsolete or whether new meanings are often made from the old.

Andrew Cowell

Linguistics