From the Top of the Mesa: Child Health, Resilience, and the Landscapes That Shape the Lives of Jicarilla Apache Families

Abstract

This thesis examines how child health, adversity, and resilience are understood and lived within the Jicarilla Apache Nation in Dulce, New Mexico, through community-engaged ethnographic fieldwork. This project also critically evaluates the limitations of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as a standardized model of risk. While ACE frameworks quantify exposure to adversity, they often detach experience from the historical, structural, and relational conditions that produce it. Drawing on bio-ethnography, this thesis integrates anthropological methods with developmental science to show how stress becomes biologically embedded through ongoing interactions between environment, caregiving, and history. At the same time, it highlights how resilience emerges through everyday practices of care, including kinship networks, storytelling, land-based relationships, and community-designed systems of support. Rather than treating adversity as a fixed predictor of health outcomes, this work aims to reframe child health as a dynamic developmental process shaped by both constraints and possibilities. With this combined research, this thesis concludes by proposing a community-centered home visiting module for JAFHVP that moves beyond deficit-based models towards a relational, culturally-grounded, and biologically-informed approach to healing.