October 26, 2023 - Madeline Blong
Pōsōh,
My name is Madeline Half-Sky Blong, and I am an enrolled member of the Menominee Nation. My experience as a college student has been unique, and deeply rooted in my need for community, my love for mathematics, and my inability to experience or participate in one without the accompaniment of the other. I began my undergraduate career with more than five changes of my major, oscillating between my interests in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), as well as different variations of humanities, specifically American Indian Studies. Now, as I enter my third year of school I have come to understand the need for balance in my educational career. I know that I love math, but I lose focus easily when all I am studying is x, y, and z. I also know that I love American Indian Studies, but my brain becomes exhausted analyzing all of the ways my people have been oppressed over the decades. However, my favorite semesters have been when I have taken a combination of the of courses from both the departments of Mathematics and American Indian Studies. There seems to be a correlation between how well I do mentally when having a balanced course load versus when I am choosing one form of academia over the other. I have found that separating my identity from my education is often more harmful than helpful. Everyday I walk into math, and I am not only Maddie a student, but I am also Maddie a person, grand daughter of Joyce and Bill Corn, and an active member of any community I am a part of. For those reasons I know that whatever I do as a researcher or for a career, I will always have a blend of Identity and some form of science behind my questions and my work.
Ethnomathematics
When I joined the McNair program I knew I needed to find a singular research question. However, I had an extremely difficult time understanding how to achieve such a thing. Math has always been extremely separated from community in education, and has only been recognized as numbers and used to help science. As I began to do more research on math and its foundations, I quickly came to understand that math is deeply ingrained in communities all around the world. Every community has formed their own systems of equations, whether it's written, oral, or simply visual, every community in every corner of the world uses math in their daily lives. There is a term for this intersection of culture and mathematics, it is called ethnomathematics, and it does the very thing I have described, it finds the foundations of math around the world and allows us to better understand the communities it is coming from. When I begin my research and formulate my question, I will be thinking about how my research will impact community and where the math I am using comes from.
Conclusion
I have not decided where my research will lead me, or what exactly my question is, but I can tell you that when I publish anything it will always begin with pōsōh and end with, wāewāenan.
Definitions: Pōsōh: hello | Wāewāenan: thank you
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