Jennifer Nez Denetdale
As the first-ever Diné/Navajo to earn a PhD in history, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is a strong advocate for Native peoples and strives to foster academic excellence in the next generation of students interested in Native Studies. Denetdale is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and teaches courses in Native American Studies. She specializes in Navajo history and culture; Native American women, gender, and feminisms; and Indigenous nations, colonialism, and decolonization. She is the author of Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita (2007) and The Long Walk: The Forced Exile of the Navajo (2007).
Jolene Rickard
Jolene Rickard is a visual historian, artist, and curator interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. Powerful personal testimonies, art in global contexts, and visual culture studies inform her research and curatorial practice. Her art and scholarship critique a colonial discourse that seeks to marginalize Indigenous art and culture. Her art reflects her commitment to Tuscarora sovereignty. She is the Director for the American Indian Program at Cornell University and an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies and Art Departments. Rickard served as a curator for the opening exhibits at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2004.
Audra Simpson
Audra Simpson is associate professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association, and the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society. She is co-editor (with Andrea Smith) of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems, and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.
Kim TallBear
Kim TallBear, author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013), is associate professor of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She studies the racial politics of “gene talk” in science and popular culture. A former environmental planner, she has become interested in the similarities between Western constructions of “nature” and “sexuality” as they are defined and sanctioned historically by those in power. TallBear is interested in how sex and nature can be understood differently in indigenous worldviews. She draws on indigenous, feminist, and queer theory in her teaching and research that focus on undermining the nature/culture split in Western society and its role in colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmental degradation. She is a tribal citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, U.S.A. and is also descended from the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. (Photo: Jun Kamata, 2014)
Gerald Vizenor
Gerald Vizenor is professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a citizen of The White Earth Nation, and has published more than thirty books, including Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance, Native Storiers, Father Meme, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57, Shrouds of White Earth, and The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution. His most recent publication is Blue Ravens, a historical novel about Native American Indians who served in the First World War in France. “Treaty Shirts: October 2034, A Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation,” a novel about the pursuit of liberty, is scheduled for published in May 2016. Vizenor received an American Book Award for Griever: An American Monkey King in China, and for Chair of Tears, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, and the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas.