Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez is of Zaza Kurdish and English settler descent and was raised in the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. Her pronouns are "she/her." As a woman of mixed ethnicity, she endeavors to act in alliance with Indigenous decolonization efforts and enactments of sovereignty in her research and everyday life. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Anthropology with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
Between 2020-2021, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Winnipeg, where she was a research team member on the project, "She Walks with Me: Supporting Urban Indigenous Expectant Mothers Through Culturally Based Doulas." Since fall 2020, she has also worked as a TA for Columbia University's Massive Online Open Course, "Indigenous Peoples' Rights." Her Master's thesis focused on the question of justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and was based on fieldwork in Nova Scotia and Manitoba. Her current dissertation research draws on ethnographic fieldwork and engages scholarship by Indigenous feminists and sociocultural and medical anthropologists to examine Indigenous peoples' birthing experiences in Manitoba. Despite the increasing public visibility of the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, it is less widely acknowledged that violence is often also located in the realms of pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood. This is largely attributable to coercive, nonconsensual and racist treatment by medical professionals, the mandatory evacuations of Indigenous birthing people from northern reserves to urban hospitals to give birth, and the alarming rates of Indigenous newborn and child apprehensions by the province's Child and Family Services (CFS). Her project investigates how the reclamation of birth by Indigenous doulas and midwives intervenes in these cycles of removal and loss. Grounded in the concept of Indigenous women and birthing people as water carriers, her project looks to the Red River to explore the links between birthing care, water protection, and addressing gendered, racialized and colonial violence. She is especially interested in documenting how understanding birth as embedded in a wider set of relationships works to revitalize Indigenous ontologies that emphasize the protection of women, birthing people and bodies of water as givers and sustainers of life.
Caroline has presented her work at conferences hosted by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Visual Anthropology, the University of Manitoba Anthropology Students' Association, and the Newberry Consortium for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, among others. She has published in the NAIS Journal, Open Rivers Journal, Frontiers in Women's Health, the International Journal for Equity in Health, and contributed to the anthology Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.