NAISA Council
The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association is governed by a constitution and bylaws. The first election of association officers took place in the spring of 2009. Current officers and Councilors are listed below, followed by former officers and Councilors. The Council meets twice a year face-to-face and meets virtually on a monthly basis for the other ten months of the year.
2024-2025 OFFICERS
President
Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Emory University
Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. In July 2021 she joined Emory University as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History, after spending 12 years at UNC-Chapel Hill and 4 years at Harvard University. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in 2018. The book is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present, written for a general audience. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010). It won several awards, including Best First Book of 2010 in Native American and Indigenous Studies.
She has written over twenty book chapters or articles, on topics including American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and has published essays for popular audiences in places like the New York Times, Oxford American, and Daily Yonder. She has won fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, and others.
Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013-2018), Somewhere South (PBS, 2020), Road to Race Day (Crackle, 2020), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (HBO, 2014), In the Light of Reverence (PBS, 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her current projects include essays on the shared history of Black and Indigenous Americans and a media experience on humor and racial stereotypes with the Smithsonian Institution. (Emory University website)
President-Elect
Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante (Mapuche), UT Austin
Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a person and scholar who belongs to the Mapuche People. He grew up in Tralcao, a rural village in the River Region of Valdivia in southern Chile. He studied Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Universidad Austral de Chile (1980-1985), obtained his MA at the University of Oregon (1995-1997), and earned his PhD in Hispanic Studies at Cornell (1997-2001). He taught at Harvard University between 2001 and 2009. Since 2009, he teaches Latin American and indigenous literatures, media and cultures at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (CHM), which is a collective of indigenous, Mapuche researchers based in Temuco, southern Chile. Through the CHM, he has co-edited the collections of essays on colonial violence, entitled Awükan ka kütrankan zugu Wajmapu meu: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu (Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2015); and also Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün. Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Ediciones de Historia Mapuche, 2012), the first book of this Mapuche collective, and which brings together fourteen Mapuche authors who examine many dimensions of Mapuche history, relying upon the concept of colonialism as the axis of debate and reflection on historical, political, cultural and territorial issues. Previously, in 2007, Professor Cárcamo-Huechante published his own book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio), and co-edited a volume of essays entitled El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina (with Alvaro Fernández-Bravo and Alejandra Laera, Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007). He has published articles in prestigious academic journals. He is also a member of the editorial boards of refereed journals in the United States and in Latin America, such as: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, Chasqui, and Taller de Letras. Between 2019 and 2022, he served as a member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In August 2012, Professor Cárcamo-Huechante won the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the University of Texas System Board of Regents’s highest teaching honor; and, during the 2013-2014 academic year, he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Professor Cárcamo-Huechante has just completed his second book, titled Indigenous Interferences: Acoustic Colonialism and Mapuche Response, which is now under contract with Duke University Press. (UT Austin)
Past-President
Vicente M. Diaz (Pohnpeian/Filipino from Guam), UCLA
Vicente Diaz, PhD, is an interdisciplinary historian and ethnographer, with BA and MA degrees in Political Science from the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, and a PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He taught Pacific History and Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam from 1991 to 2001, after which he joined the (now) Dept of American Culture at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. In 2012, he moved to American Indian Studies departments, first at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then in 2016, at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where he currently chairs the department.
Dr. Diaz is of a generation of Islanders who transformed Pacific Islands studies from its Orientalist roots in Area Studies to one centered on Indigenous political, cultural, and intellectual determinations. This generation of Pacific Islander scholars customized interdisciplinary inquiry (anti-disciplinary, when needed) by analyzing the forms and contents of cultural and historical studies with those of Pacific Indigeneity. In Dr. Diaz’s case, he produced academic and public history books, articles, and other media on topics ranging from Indigenous Christianity, political and military histories of Guam, Indigenous sports and masculinity, and politics and poetics of cultural revitalization, notably around traditional outrigger canoe culture and long distance oceanic voyaging, of which he is also a cultural practitioner. The throughline across these topics is the indispensability of Indigeneity – the historical and political claims and conditions of aboriginal belonging, kinship, and reciprocal relationality to place and its other-than-human relatives, best expressed and understood through the Indigenous vernaculars that have proper standing. Here, Indigeneity is both an ontological as well as analytic category.
Moving to Turtle Island did not mean abandoning the Native Pacific, far from it. Rather, it blessed Dr. Diaz with additional materiality to help further expand (and contract, when Indigenous specificity is elided) the institutional and intellectual fields of work and play, centering, for example, Indigeneity’s imperative in emergent forms of critical ethnic studies and transnational American studies, while also customizing critical theory and method in and through the study and application of Indigenous form, content, scope, scale, and modality. Doing Native Pacific Studies in American Indian Studies departments in the U.S. Midwest in particular has allowed Dr. Diaz and his colleagues to imagine and develop forms of global and comparative Native Studies, help grow NAISA, and bridge commitments and accountabilities to local, tribal determinations by juxtaposing their study with analogous Indigenous resurgence from elsewhere.
Dr. Diaz has prior service to NAISA, sitting as an elected Council member from 2010-2013, the highlight of which for him, was co-chairing the committee that researched, developed, and launched the organization’s flagship journal, NAIS. He later served as an editorial board member.
Treasurer
Michael Taylor, Brigham Young University
Michael P. Taylor is associate professor of English, co-director of American Indian Studies, and affiliate of Global Women’s Studies and American Studies at Brigham Young University. He is co-author of Returning Home: Dine Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School. His scholarship has appeared in such journals as Native American and Indigenous Studies, PMLA, and Modernism/modernity. His research engages Indigenous archives to expand Indigenous literary histories and to (re)connect communities with their archival materials to support community-specific acts of Indigenous resurgence.
Secretary
Farina King (Diné), University of Oklahoma
Bilagáanaa niliigo’ dóó Kinyaa’áanii yásh’chíín. Bilagáanaa dabicheii dóó Tsinaajinii dabinálí. Ákót’éego diné asdzáá nilí. Dr. Farina King is Bilagáanaa (white American of English and Northwestern European descent), born for Kinyaa’áanii (the Towering House Clan) of the Diné (Navajo). Her mother is white American from Michigan, and her father is Navajo from the Rehoboth, New Mexico checkerboard region of Diné Bikéyah (Navajo land). Her maternal grandfather was white American, and her paternal grandfather was Tsinaajinii (Black-streaked Woods People Clan) of the Diné. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation. King was born in Tó Naneesdizí (Tuba City) and lived in the Navajo Nation as a small child, until her family moved to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area where her father worked for the Indian Health Service.
King is the Horizon Chair in Native American Ecology and Culture and Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma (OU), homelands of the Hasinais, or Caddo Nation, and Kirikirʔi:s, or Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. Between 2023 and 2024, she is serving as the interim department chair of Native American Studies at OU. Previously, between 2016 and 2022, she was an associate professor of History at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, in the homelands of the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees. She was also an affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department and the Director of the NSU Center for Indigenous Community Engagement. She is a past president of the Southwest Oral History Association (2021-2022).
Her primary area of research is colonial and post-colonial Indigenous studies, mainly Indigenous experiences in colonizing forms of education, such as at federal American Indian boarding schools. Her research traces the changes in Diné educational experiences through the twentieth century, using a hybrid approach of the Diné Sacred Four Directions. She has facilitated oral histories with Diné boarding school survivors, involving former students of the Intermountain Indian School, Crownpoint Indian Boarding School, Tuba City Boarding School, Leupp Boarding School, and Kayenta Boarding School.
She is the author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century; co-author with Michael P. Taylor and James R. Swensen of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School; and author of Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century. She is one of the series editors for the Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures of the University Press of Kansas, and she co-hosts the Native Circles podcast with Sarah Newcomb, Davina Two Bears, and Eva Bighorse.
COUNCIL MEMBERS
Liza Black (Cherokee Nation), Indiana University
2022-2025
Liza Black examines the intersections of representation and violence. As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, she developed a lifelong interest in studying Native identity and struggle and detailing the history of Native people’s encounters with violence from citizens and the state. She employs the disciplines of history, Native American studies, film studies, and gender studies to creatively combine traditional archives, oral history, storytelling, and tribal histories. Her work has appeared in more than 20 academic and non-academic outlets. Her work has appeared in academic and non-academic forums, including NPR podcasts, the PBS video series Origins, and international news outlets such as El País.
Her first book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, was published in 2020. She serves on council for both the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and the Western History Association. She is the Series Editor for New Directions in Native American Studies at University of Oklahoma Press. She is co-editing a forum in the American Historical Review on Native people and the carceral state and a special issue on Indigenous feminist methodologies for the journal, Native American and Indigenous Studies.
She has received fellowships from Harvard University, UCLA, the Ford Foundation, and Cherokee Nation. Her current project, How to Get Away with Murder, provides six case microhistories, arguing that the current crisis is a historic reflection of settler colonial relations with Indigenous people. How to Get Away with Murder will be published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025. She is a 2024-25 Racial Justice Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and Associate Professor at Indiana University.
Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa), University of Minnesota
2022-2025
Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa), PhD, is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and was born-and-raised in Chamberlain, South Dakota, next to relative Mni Sose (the Missouri River). His nation is the Octet Sakowin Oyate (the Great Sioux Nation or the Nation of the Seven Council Fires). Dr. Estes holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, and Bachelorʻs and Masterʻs degrees in history from the University of South Dakota and has joined the faculty in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota to begin Fall of 2022. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Dr. Estes was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He was an American Democracy Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University in 2017–2018.
Dr. Estes is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019). He served as coeditor with Jaskiran Dhillon for the compilation Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and coauthor with Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and David Correia of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press, 2021). In 2014, Estes cofounded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization, and he is cohost of The Red Nation podcast. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, High Country News, and other publications, and is also part of the collective for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics. His advocacy and research focus on Indigenous resistance, anti-colonialism, abolition, decolonization, and anti-capitalism.
Gail Gallagher (Cree), University of Alberta Native Studies Alumni
2024-2027
Gail Gallagher, (Blue Heaven Thunder Bird Woman) is a First Nations Cree iskwêw
from Frog Lake First Nation, Alberta, who has made her home in the Nation’s capital Ottawa, Canada for over a decade.
Gail completed her Masters’ degree with the Native Studies Faculty, University of Alberta in March 2020. Her thesis focused on the sexual exploitation and marginalization of Indigenous women and ways that Indigenous activism works to reduce this. Gail is currently applying for Ph.D. programs in Native Studies.
Gail is a member of the Expert Steering Team (EST), Ottawa Alliance to End Homelessness for over three years. The EST team is dedicated to bringing our strengths, skills, and experience to the homelessness sector to help prevent, reduce and end homelessness. As an Indigenous person personally impacted by homelessness in her family, Gail wants to make meaningful change to address Indigenous homelessness in Canada.
Currently, Gail is employed as a Social Policy Researcher with the Canadian federal government, at Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), Corporate Secretariat, Indigenous Employee Secretariat.
Gail is an activist and advocate for Indigenous issues, and in the past, has founded various Indigenous groups in her volunteer time. Gail is the Chair and founder of the Ottawa Indigenous Peoples Network (IPN), which was established in 2008 which provides an opportunity for monthly professional networking and relevant business presentations.
Gail believes in the value of establishing networks of support, knowledge and awareness that ultimately strengthens and builds capacity within Indigenous communities.
Sam Aros-Mitchell (Texas Band of Yaqui Indians)
2024-2027
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)
Christopher Pexa (Spirit Lake Nation), Harvard University
2023-2026
Christopher Pexa is an Associate Professor of English. His research interests include: Očhéti Šakówiŋ Language and Literature, Native American and Indigenous Literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Global Anglophone Indigenous Literatures, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature, and Critical Indigenous Theory. (Harvard University)
Katrina M. Phillips (Red Cliff Ojibwe), Macalester College
2023-2026
Katrina M. Phillips, PhD, was born and raised in northern Wisconsin as a proud citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. She holds a BA in History and a PhD in History from the University of Minnesota. She spent two years as a Consortium for Faculty Diversity fellow at Macalester College before joining the faculty, where she’s currently an associate professor of Native history and the history of the American West.
Her first book, Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History (UNC Press, 2021), won the Theatre Library Association Book Awards 2021 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live performance. Her writing has been published in the Washington Post’s “Made By History” section, and she’s appeared on 1A on NPR, Native America Calling, “Morning Edition,” and MPR News. She works as a historical and cultural consultant, and she’s also the author of several children’s books, including Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Traditions and Celebrations) (2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award Middle Grade Honor Book), The Disastrous Wrangel Island Expedition, and Indigenous Peoples: Super SHEroes of History (Women Who Made a Difference). Her current research focuses on activism, environmentalism, and tourism on and around the Red Cliff Reservation.
Former Officers
Kevin Bruyneel, Treasurer, 2021-2024
Sheryl Lightfoot, President, 2022-2023
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Secretary, 2022-2023
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, President-elect, 2021-2022
Marisa Duarte, Secretary, 2019-2022
Brendan Hokowhitu, President, 2021-2022
Susan Hill, President, 2020-2021
Shannon Speed, President, 2019-2020
Tsianina Lomawaima, Treasurer, 2018-2021
Aroha Harris, President, 2018-2019
Brenda Child, President, 2017-2018
Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, Secretary, 2017-2019
Jace Weaver, President, 2016-2018
Cedric Woods, Treasurer, 2016-2018
Mark Rifkin, President, 2014-2015
David Chang, Secretary, 2012-2016
Chadwick Allen, President, 2013-2014
Tsianina Lomawaima, President, 2012-2013
Kathryn Shanley, President, 2011-2012
Jean O’Brien, President, 2010-2011
Robert Warrior, President, 2009-2010
Maggie Walter, Secretary, 2009-2012
Brendan Hokowhitu, Treasurer, 2009-2012
Bruce Duthu, Treasurer, 2012-2015
Former Council Members
Leilani Basham (Kānaka Maoli), 2021-2024
Karyn Recollet (Cree), 2021-2024
Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan (Choctaw), 2021-2022
Leonie Pihama (Māori), 2019-2022
Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante (Mapuche), 2019-2022
Jill Doerfler (White Earth Anishinaabe), 2018-2021
Beth Piatote (Nez Perce), 2018-2021
Troy Storfjell (Sámi), 2017-2020
Chris “Caskey” Russell (Tlingit), 2017-2020
Christine “Tina” Taitano Delisle, 2016-2019
Jean Dennison, 2016-2019
Shannon Speed, 2015-2018
Renae Watchman, 2015-2018
Susan Hill, 2014-2017
Jolan Hsieh, 2014-2017
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, 2013-2016
Leilani Basham, 2013-2016
Aileen Moreton Robinson, 2012-2015
LeAnne Howe, 2012-2015
Daniel Heath Justice, 2011-2014
Jose Antonio Lucero, 2011-2014
Kimberly Tallbear, 2010-2013
Vince Diaz, 2010-2013
Kehaulani Kauanui, 2009-2012
Noenoe Silva, 2009-2012
Alice TePunga Somerville, 2009-2011
Chris Anderson, 2009-2011
Lisa Brooks, 2009-2010
Rob Innes, 2009-2010