AIS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor
• Chairman
• Associate Professor and Department Chair

Esme G. Murdock is Chair and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University. Her research interests include environmental justice, Indigenous and Afro-descended environmental ethics, settler colonial theory, and decolonization as land/resource rematriation. Murdock comes to this work as a descendant of enslaved Africans and European settlers in North America. Her current work explores the devastating impacts of colonization and slavery on both Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples and environments on Turtle Island. She anchors her understanding of settler colonialism, in particular, in the experiences and theorization of Native and Black communities especially toward securing decolonial futures. She often writes back to mainstream environmental discourse that attempts to "read out" colonization as the context of environmental degradation and destruction, particularly in the settler colonies of the United States and Canada. Her work centers conceptions of land and relating to land found within both Indigenous and African American/Afro-descended environmental philosophies. Murdock has work published in Environmental Values, Global Ethics, Hypatia, Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Ethics, Policy & Environment, World Philosophies, and Critical Philosophy of Race. Murdock's first book manuscript is a project of public ecological (re)memory anchored in the understanding that land has memory. Her methods include both Indigenous memory/re-memory work and Black feminist witnessing. She is, thus, writing a land history of the South Carolina Sea Coast that engages in the diverse and often erased ecological histories, ecological heritages, ethnobotanical knowledges, and complex relations of Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples within the colonial complex of multiple European powers.

Job Titles:

• Lecturer

Kenneth Dyer-Redner is a lecturer in the American Indian Studies Department at San Diego State University. He is a member of the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of Fallon, Nevada. Prior to joining SDSU, he taught at the University of Montana in the Native American Studies Department. He received his M.S. in American Indian Studies from Arizona State University in 2017. For his Master's Thesis project he rode his bicycle approximately 1,000 miles to ten different reservations around Northern Nevada. His thesis project explored themes of land, colonization/decolonization, identity, and the power of stories. As an undergraduate he attended the University of Nevada, Reno where he received his B.A. in English in 2009.

Job Titles:

• Lecturer

Linda Rose Locklear (Lumbee), Faculty Emeritus at both Palomar College and San Diego State University, received a B.A. from SDSU in Sociology with a minor in Anthropology. She received an M.S. at SDSU in Counseling Psychology and an MA in Sociology from University of California San Diego. She is a consultant and lecturer on contemporary Indian issues for schools and organizations. She has done Ph.D. work in sociology at UCSD and completed a program in Tribal Law at UCLA. Her research interests are ethnographic\documentary film with a focus on American Indians, Tribal Advocacy, and American Indian Identity. Although retired, she continues to teach on an occasional basis. She continues to work with the Cham'teela, Luiseño language which she has done for over twenty years. She is involved with high school and college American Indian Students getting their language requirement met with their tribal language.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor, NASA Faculty Adviser

Olivia M. Chilcote (Luiseño/Payómkawichum, San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians) received her Ph.D. and M.A. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and her B.A. in the Department of Ethnic & Women's Studies at Cal Poly Pomona. She is currently an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University. Her research and teaching focus on the areas of interdisciplinary American Indian Studies, California Indian Studies, federal Indian policy, American Indian identity, and Indigenous feminisms. In 2021, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education nationally recognized Professor Chilcote as an "Emerging Scholar" for her community-based research and promise to make impactful changes to the professoriate. Professor Chilcote is the author of Unrecognized in California: Federal Acknowledgment and the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians (University of Washington Press, 2024). Unrecognized in California examines the distinct crisis of tribal federal recognition in California, the state with the most non-federally recognized tribes in the country. Grounded in the experience of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians, Unrecognized in California effectively demonstrates how unrecognized tribes assert their inherent legal powers to maintain community identity and rights to self-determination. Professor Chilcote's current manuscript project, Cháam Qéchyam: Reclaiming the San Luis Rey Village in California History, utilizes Indigenous feminist paradigms to alter accepted understandings of Luiseño/Payómkawichum people through community engaged and place-based reclamation processes. Her writing can also be found in California History, the Smithsonian's Handbook of the North American Indians, Boletín: Journal of the California Missions Studies Association, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and News From Native California. Professor Chilcote's research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Critical Mission Studies (UC Office of the President), the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences (Duke University), the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues (UC Berkeley), the Institute of Governmental Studies (UC Berkeley), the UC Humanities Institute, and Pukúu Cultural Community Services (Fernandeño Tataviam Tribe). Professor Chilcote serves on the UC President's Native American Advisory Council, the CSU San Marcos President's Native Advisory Council, the California Scholars and Educators Advisory Committee for the California state Native American Studies Model Curriculum, and the California Department of Education's Tribal Regalia Task Force. She is also a founding member of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association. At San Diego State University, Professor Chilcote has received Excellence in Service and Most Influential Faculty Mentor Awards. She co-founded the Native American and Indigenous Faculty and Staff Association and has served as Faculty Adviser to the Native American Student Alliance since 2018. Professor Chilcote grew up in the center of her tribe's traditional territory in the North County of San Diego and is active in tribal politics and other community efforts. She is a first generation student and the first person in her tribe to receive a Ph.D.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor
• Professor

Oscar Muñoz, a first-generation immigrant from Costa Rica, grew up in Southern California. He received his master's in public history, with a research-focus on Native public history, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. For ten years he served as the cultural archives specialist for the Cultural Resources Department of the Pechanga Band of Payómkawichum Indians, where he assisted in the development and preservation of their archival holdings and of material items of cultural, historical and artistic significance to the Pechanga People. Professor Muñoz's research and upcoming manuscript, titled "Haní'-cha Fiesta-yk: ‘Let's go to the fiesta,'" focuses on Southern California Native fiestas. Although Native fiestas appear in various narratives concerning Southern California Native history, there is to date no manuscript solely dedicated to analyzing the significance and impact of these events to Southern California Native and regional history. The manuscript aims to trace Native events of tradition, later deemed fiestas by Spaniards, from traditional Native narratives of creation and their Spanish pre-invasion origin, and follow fiesta activity throughout the Mission, Californio, and Euro-American Periods. Significantly, this manuscript will introduce a new analysis of Native fiestas, which have traditionally been understudied by academia, in order to present a new historical lens through which to consider and to promote Southern California Native and regional history.