well-connected one-percent chick goes to work for Intel Security long enough to get health care for babies then quits. At the same time, competitive University grad-with-honors working class girl does protests and environmentalism, can't have children with no health care, ends up hanging out with lots and lots of other thirty year olds in the same boat, with debt. Just another day in America.
But what did they major in? Did the well connected person major in CS while the honors grad major in underwater basket weaving? We are in a free market system that is not perfect at evaluating talent but things like degree help provide signals to employers.
----- B--- (Hupa) received a BA from Stanford and wrote her 2017 Berkeley PhD dissertation Wailaki Grammar on a Dene language spoken along the Eel River in northern California. Now an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University, her research focuses on Dene languages, and on historical-comparative linguistics for language revitalization within the Wailaki and Hupa communities. While at Stanford and Berkeley she also worked with speakers of Karuk, Yucatec Maya, and Sereer. B---- is a coauthor of "Xo’ch Na:nahsde’tl’-te: Survivance, resilience and unbroken traditions in northwest California" (2019, with Cutcha Risling Baldy, in Ka'm-t'em: A Journey Toward Healing), and has contributed to the Hupa Online Dictionary and Texts project (at UC Davis). She is also a traditional basket weaver and singer from the Xontah Nikya:aw in Hoopa Valley, and a member of the board of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.
