MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation
Angela Parker (2009-2010) is an enrolled member of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (Mandan, Hidatsa) and also participates at her father's reservation, Rocky Boy (Cree). She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Her research interests focused on Northern Plains tribes and the lived experience of the federal-tribal relationship during the Reservation Era (1880s-1934). Her dissertation project examines the years from the Indian Reorganization Act to the early 1960s on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, when the Fort Berthold community lost the central portion of their land base due to a massive dam built by the US Corps of Engineers.
Job Titles:
- Human Resources / Housler
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon
Brian Klopotek (2002-03) is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon, where he has just led a successful effort to establish a new minor in Native American Studies. He earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. His first book, Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities, was published in 2011 by Duke University Press. Initially led to this topic by his own heritage as a nonfederal Choctaw with Louisiana roots, the book examines the ways Louisiana Indians have responded to and been affected by federal recognition policy, the politics of indigeneity, and racial thinking. Much of his work explores the ways indigenous status and racial status interacts with each other as separate but related vectors shaping Native American experiences. To that end, his current book project, Indian on Both Sides, compares constructions of race and indigeneity in the United States and Mexico, places where being indigenous means different things, and places where understandings of what it means to be Indian (and what it means to be Mexican) continue to evolve. He has just completed a co-edited volume with Brenda Child called Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education, to be published in 2013 with SAR Press. The book contains original essays exploring educational histories throughout the Americas and the Pacific, moving toward more hemispheric and global conversations about the variety of indigenous experiences. He has published other essays in contributed volumes and the AICRJ on Indian masculinity on film, Indians and Hurricane Katrina, indigenous methodologies, and black-Indian relations.
Camie Augustus (2010-2011) has a PhD in history from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her dissertation is a comparative history of the intersection between law and the identity of mixed-ancestry Natives in Canada, the U.S., and Australia. Focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she examines the ways in which law attempted to define and redefine Aboriginal people of mixed ancestry through a process of racial categorization. She actively works in Aboriginal land claims in Canada and also has a special interest in Aboriginal education and curriculum development. Although Canada is her geographic specialty, she has also studied indigenous issues in the U.S., Latin America, and Australia - a scope which ties in with her emphasis on international and comparative histories. She currently teaches in First Nations Studies at Vancouver Island University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico
Cathleen Cahill (2003-04)is Associate Professor of History at The University of New Mexico. Professor Cahill joined the UNM in 2004 as a historian of the U.S. and U.S. West. Her areas of interest include the intersection of race,labor, gender and place in the U.S. West as well as the role of the federal government in that region. Her teaching and research interests include US/US West, Native American and Indigenous, Environmental, Race, Women and Gender and Social History in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at Minnesota State University
Chelsea Mead (2012-2013) is an assistant professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato. Having grown up in Michigan, Chelsea Mead is excited to be returning to the Midwest and joining the MNSU community. She received a M.A. in History (2008) and a BS with honors in Anthropology, History and American Indian Studies from Central Michigan University (2003). During her time in Michigan, she began learning and studying Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language). She continued working with the language during her doctoral work at Arizona State University. While at ASU, Professor Mead worked on multiple grant funded projects with the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona and helped found the American Indian Graduate Student Organization on ASU's campus. She continued her training in Anthropology and History by working with scholars in American Indian Education, Applied Linguistics, and Native American History.
In 2012, Professor Mead received the Pre-Doctorate Fellowship in American Indian Studies at Michigan State University. While at MSU, she taught a course on American Indian Culture for the Anthropology Department and wrote her dissertation, which examines the intersection between higher educational institutions and indigenous language revitalization, specifically, Ojibwe language efforts. Relational understandings of these programs and their creation and evolution form the basis of her current research. She also participated in a weekly Anishinaabemowin language circle with community elders.
Cristina Stanciu (2008-2009; Ph.D. 2011, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches courses in US multi-ethnic and indigenous literatures. She is the co-editor of Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works (Syracuse UP, 2015, with Kristina Ackley). Her work has appeared in American Indian Quarterly, MELUS, Studies in American Indian Literatures, College English, Wicazo Sa Review, Intertexts, Film & History, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Beinecke Illuminated, and edited collections. Her current research has been supported recently by fellowships at the Newberry Library, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and an AAUW post-doctoral fellowship.
Job Titles:
- Community Outreach Liaison / Center for Language Teaching Advancement
Eva Jewell was the 2017-2018 AIIS Pre-doctoral Fellow. She is Anishinaabekwe from Deshkan Ziibiing (Chippewas of the Thames First Nation) with paternal Haudenosaunee lineage from Oneida Nation of the Thames. She is the Research Director at Yellowhead Institute, a First Nations-led policy think tank, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at X University (formerly Ryerson University) in Toronto.
Dr. Jewell was awarded a Governor General's Gold Medal award for outstanding dissertation at Royal Roads University, the writing for which she completed during her pre-doctoral fellowship at Michigan State University. She received her MA in Indigenous Governance at University of Victoria, and a BA in Indigenous Liberal Studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her research interests include the reclamation of Anishinaabe governance and femme roles within that resurgence, Indigenous interventions into reconciliation discourse in Canada, and Anishinaabe perspectives of gender, work and care.
Beginning in fall 2016, Gabriela Raquel Ríos will assume a new position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. Presently, Dr. Ríos (2011-2012) is a part-time instructor at South Seattle College, where she teaches developmental first year writing courses. She holds a PhD in English, with an emphasis in Cultural Rhetorics from Texas A&M University. Her research brings Indigenous Studies into conversation with Rhetoric and Composition Studies. Broadly, her work is concerned with interrogating the material processes through which knowledge, culture, and rhetoric are constituted. In her teaching, she is invested in respecting and recognizing the multiple literacies and modalities available to students as they compose for diverse audiences, sites, and contexts. In 2014, Dr. Ríos was awarded the Excellence in Social Justice award from the University of Central Florida for her work with farm worker activists in the Orlando area. She is currently the President of the Farm Worker Ministry-Northwest, where she continues her work on farm worker activism.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Residential College in the Arts and Humanities / Torrez / American Indian and Indigenous Studies Faculty
Jill Doerfler (2006-2007) joined the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth in the fall of 2008, was tenured in 2013, and became Department Head in 2014. She earned a B.A. in History from the University of Minnesota-Morris and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. During 2007-2008, she was the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. Her primary area of scholarly interest is American Indian, specifically Anishinaabe, identity with a political focus on citizenship. Growing up on the White Earth reservation, Doerfler was all too familiar with the divisions that the use of blood quantum as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship (1961) caused. After a political crisis during the 1990s, there was a growing concern about the vast numbers of Anishinaabeg being excluded under the blood quantum requirement; families were literally divided with some possessing the blood quantum required for citizenship and others lacking it. Her research is premised on a commitment to bridging scholarly efforts with the practical needs of American Indian peoples, communities, and nations. Her research draws upon both historical documents and literature to delineate Anishinaabe conceptions of identity in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is especially interested in the ways in which Anishinaabeg resisted pseudo-scientific measures of blood (race/blood quantum) as a means to define identity. One of her newer areas of research dovetails with community service and focuses on the process of constitutional reform. Doerfler has been working with the White Earth Nation since 2007 on constitutional reform efforts. She has found working with the White Earth Nation to be rewarding and it has solidified a commitment to partnerships between scholars and Native nations.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Department of Anthropology / Norder / American Indian and Indigenous Studies Faculty
Kathryn Sweet was the Pre-doctoral Fellow in 2013-2014. She defended her dissertation - titled "The Unwelcomed Traveler: England's Black Death and Hopi's Smallpox" - in 2014, under the direction of Dr. Donald Fixico. Sweet also holds an MA in Native American Studies from University of California, Davis (2008).
Job Titles:
- Chairman in Literary Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies
Job Titles:
- FELLOW - SOCIAL SCIENCE and HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL, CANADA
Erin Sutherland was the 2016-2017 Pre-doctoral Fellow in American Indian Studies. She is an independent curator and PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Originally from northern Alberta, Treaty 8 territory, Erin received her undergraduate degrees in the Departments of Psychology and Native Studies from the University of Alberta. Her research interests include Indigenous and Métis curatorial methodologies, Métis histories, Indigenous performance art and the role of contemporary art in the project of Indigenous sovereignty. For her recent PhD project, Erin curated a performance series titled Talkin' Back to Johnny Mac, which engaged with the 200th birthday celebrations of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald. The connected dissertation explores the role of the Métis curator and the methodologies and epistemologies engaged in by Métis curators, including herself. Other curatorial projects include Los Muertos No Hablan: The Dead Don't Speak with Wanda Luna, and Memory Keepers: Methodologies of Memory, Mapping and Gender with Dr. Carla Taunton at Urban Shaman Gallery.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology
Dr. Morgan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and an affiliated faculty member of the American Indian Studies Program at Michigan State University. She is the author of "The Bearer of This Letter": Language Ideologies, Literacy Practices, and the Fort Belknap Indian Community(Nebraska, 2009). Her book examines how literacy functioned as both a cultural practice and cultural symbol for the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre communities of Fort Belknap reservation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work emerged from her experience as the curriculum coordinator for a collaborative Nakoda language project at Fort Belknap College, Montana. Ethnohistorical research conducted in the course of this project led her to also investigate tribal members' participation in the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s and early 1940s throughout Montana. She is currently working on a new project stemming from this New Deal research regarding the periodical, Indians At Work, which was published by the Office of Indian Affairs between 1933 and 1945. Dr. Morgan has also maintained an active research project concerning Ojibwe language maintenance and revitalization programs at the university level, specifically the Ojibwe language program at MSU with which she works in developing language immersive events. Her varied projects are linked by an interest in how Native communities perceive the relationship between Indigenous languages and English, the impact of dominant language ideologies on the transmission of Indigenous languages, and how communities (both historical and contemporary) have employed these ideologies in language and cultural revitalization efforts.
In 2009, she served as the interim director of the American Indian Studies Program at MSU; during the 2010-2011 academic year, she served as the interim director of the CIC-American Indian Studies Graduate Consortium. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar during the 2011-12 academic year and spent one semester teaching at the University of Zadar, Croatia.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan
Robert Innes(2005-2006)is Associate Professor of Native Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He is a Plains Cree member of Cowessess First Nation who completed his Phd dissertation, titled "The Importance of Kinship Ties to Members of Cowessess First Nation, at the University of Arizona in the American Indian Studies Program. In January 2007, he was appointed to the position of Assistant Professor in the Department. Prior to his appointment Robert was the Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the American Indian Studies Program at Michigan State University. He completed his M.A. at the University of Saskatchewan in Native Studies - the title of his thesis was "The Socio-Political Influence of the Second World War Saskatchewan Aboriginal Veterans, 1945-1960" -, his B.A. at the University of Toronto with a major in History and a double minor in Aboriginal Studies and English and the Transitional Year Programme at the University of Toronto.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor / Department of English
Sophie Huss (she/her) is a third-year PhD student of settler descent in the Geocognition Research Lab in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Michigan State University. Her current dissertation work involves building capacity for ethical engagement with and between diverse stakeholders and rightsholders in resource extractive spaces using community-empowering approaches. She received her Bachelor of Science in Geology with a minor in anthropology from the University of Toledo in 2020. Sophie currently serves as a Community Science Fellow for the American Geophysical Union's Thriving Earth Exchange, and the Communications Coordinator for MSU's Indigenous Graduate Student Collective. She also enjoys volunteering with the Ziibiwing Center and Buckeye Trail Association. As a professional and whole person, Sophie always tries to center values of loving-kindness, reciprocity, individual and collective well-being, and transparency in all she does.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director for Undergraduate Diversity / College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Job Titles:
- Director of American Indian
Wendy Makoons Geniusz (2004-2005) is director of American Indian studies and assistant professor of foreign languages at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. She teaches courses in traditional American Indian cultures and the Ojibwe language. She is the author os Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings (Syracuse University Press) and editor of Chi-mewinzha: Ojibwe Stories from Leech Lake (University of Minnesota Press) and Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings (University of Minnesota Press).
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Studies