This thesis examines off-reservation boarding schools and national archives as particular colonial formations. Employing experience as a methodology, it recounts research undertaken relative to a boarding school journal, using it as a conduit through which to comprehend the relationship between these institutions and settler colonialism. While integrating the journal in its argument, this thesis also refuses disclosure of the contents of the journal, instead centralizing the idea that boarding schools and archives exist as intimately related colonial institutions. Boarding schools have come to shape understandings of Native peoples within the US imaginary at the same time that archives continue to maintain that formation across time and space by providing "evidence" and/or "proof" of the boarding school as an "authentic" Native experience. These institutions function to sustain a relationship between contemporary understandings of Native sovereignty and self-determination struggles and knowledge production, examining how these institutions are always already bound up within the logics of settler colonialism. As a consequence, these institutions actively inform contemporary social discourse and political possibilities for Native peoples, confining them within the terms of US settler colonial jurisdiction. It examines colonial epistemologies' impact on the comprehensibility of Indigenous peoples' struggles in order to imagine alternative epistemologies in methodology and knowledge production that may work in service to those struggles

Animals must set behavioural priority in a context-dependent manner and switch from one behaviour to another at the appropriate moment^1-3. Here we probe the molecular and neuronal mechanisms that orchestrate the transition from feeding to courtship in Drosophila melanogaster. We find that feeding is prioritized over courtship in starved males, and the consumption of protein-rich food rapidly reverses this order within a few minutes. At the molecular level, a gut-derived, nutrient-specific neuropeptide hormone-Diuretic hormone 31 (Dh31)-propels a switch from feeding to courtship. We further address the underlying kinetics with calcium imaging experiments. Amino acids from food acutely activate Dh31⁺ enteroendocrine cells in the gut, increasing Dh31 levels in the circulation. In addition, three-photon functional imaging of intact flies shows that optogenetic stimulation of Dh31⁺ enteroendocrine cells rapidly excites a subset of brain neurons that express Dh31 receptor (Dh31R). Gut-derived Dh31 excites the brain neurons through the circulatory system within a few minutes, in line with the speed of the feeding-courtship behavioural switch. At the circuit level, there are two distinct populations of Dh31R⁺ neurons in the brain, with one population inhibiting feeding through allatostatin-C and the other promoting courtship through corazonin. Together, our findings illustrate a mechanism by which the consumption of protein-rich food triggers the release of a gut hormone, which in turn prioritizes courtship over feeding through two parallel pathways.