Joseph M. Pierce is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Inaugural Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke UP, 2025), co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, among other venues. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Personal website: www.josephmpierce.com

Kevin J. White is an Indigenous scholar (Mohawk from Akwesasne, with family from Tonawanda Band of Seneca) whose work focuses primarily on Haudenosaunee Creation and culture. The process and act of storytelling rouses his curiosity in not only decolonizing stories collected and archived but understanding the inherent generational knowledge and wisdom in those collections of stories. His work has championed Tuscarora ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt’s work on Iroquois Cosmologies in published works such as “Rousing a Curiosity in Hewitt’s Iroquois Cosmologies.” The tension between orality and textuality exists as large questions for White; though he is guided by and consults regularly with community members and scholars alike—as witnessed in his co-authored article “La Salle and Seneca Creation 1678.” As a Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) scholar, his work, research, and curiosity are guided by community, cultural values, and a Haudenosaunee lens of analysis—often arguing that much of the epistemological frameworks were dismissed, particularly in the salvage ethnography period—when a majority of culture work was done historically.  

White is currently working on his first book, Revisiting Hewitt’s Iroquois Cosmology Part I, in which he is working to adjust and lightly edit the original texts published in 1903—but largely unavailable outside of academic institutions. Hewitt’s work in Part I were the baseline for comparison to the other thirty-five versions in White’s dissertation thesis. White hopes to repatriate the epistemological knowledge contained in the three language versions to Grand River and other Haudenosaunee communities. 

White is working with the Six Nations Grand River community in the Deskaheh Project and Waugh Story Collection—two community-based projects. White and Dr. Susan Hill, Director of the Centre for Indigenous Studies, were awarded a Jackman Humanities Institute Scholars-in-Residence award to work with five undergraduate students and the Six Nations Grand River community Deskaheh project transcribing letters involving Deskaheh’s attempts to address and seek membership for the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee in the League of Nations; and its direct path to the passage of United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007. 

Bio from University of Toronto website

Sam Aros-Mitchell is an enrolled member of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians. As an art-maker, dancer, and scholar, his work spans the disciplines of performance, sound/light/scenic design, choreography, and embodied writing. Since 2017, he has worked with Rosy Simas Danse as a performer, teacher, and community engagement organizer. Aros-Mitchell’s abstract, “José Limón, The Unsung and Yoeme Syncretism” was recently accepted for publication in a book that celebrates Yaqui choreographer José Limón, titled “Transcending Amerincaness”. In 2019, Aros-Mitchell founded Aros and Son Publishing, dedicated to publishing the work of Native writers. Aros-Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in Drama and Theater from the joint doctoral program at UC San Diego/UC Irvine, an MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego, and a BFA in Dance from UC Santa Barbara. Aros-Mitchell is a 2023 McKnight Dance Fellow. (Macalester College)

Stephanie Nohelani Teves is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa where she teaches courses on Indigenous feminisms and queer theory. Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Drama Review and the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 2017. Teves is author of Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance (2018) and co-editor of Native Studies Keywords (2015). Most recently Teves is editor of The Mahele of Our Bodies: Nā Moʻolelo Kūpuna Māhū/LGBTQ, an oral history project with Hawaiian elders. She lives with her ʻohana in Honouliuli, Oʻahu.

Teresa Mateus, MSW, is an Indigenous Andean storyteller and ceremonialist born in Bacatá (Bogotá) in Muisca (Muysca) Territory of the Colombian Andes. She is an initiated Q’ero Paqo (Peruvian Andes) in the Apaza family lineage of Indigenous medicine. She received her Master’s in Clinical Social Work from NYU (07′) and spent twenty years as a traumatologist and trauma healer. Teresa is currently a Ph.D. student (3rd yr.) in Ecology, Spirituality and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies with a research focus on diasporic and migratory relationships to ancestral homelands and multispecies kinship carried in the ceremonies and stories across territories, unbordering Indigenous relationships to community, culture, ritual and ancestral memory. She is currently working on a chapbook and parallel multidisciplinary arts project storying in collaboration with Mama Coca (the coca) leaf, narrating past, present, and futurisms from the Andean territories into the Andean diaspora.