NAIS Journal Announces New Co-Editor Team
February 21, 2023 – NAISA Council and journal co-editors Kelly McDonough and Tsianina Lomawaima are very pleased to announce that the editorial offices of the journal of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), the official publication of NAISA, will be transitioning in May 2023 to the University of Victoria in Canada, under the very capable direction of the new co-editors Gina Starblanket and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. All correspondence with and submissions to the journal should continue to be addressed to journal@naisa.org. All four editors began working together in January 2023 to ensure a smooth transition in the work of the journal.
Starblanket and Stark are excited to take on the role of co-editors and to establish an editorial team and institutional home for NAIS at UVic. By bringing the journal to UVic, they hope to carry it forward as an intellectually and ethically rigorous forum for local and global Indigenous scholarship, building on UVic’s longstanding commitment to Indigenous research and extensive relationships with communities across North America and the Pacific.
Starblanket and Stark have a well-established history of working alongside one another on substantive research collaborations, a strong collaborative authoring and granting record, and significant experience co-facilitating a range of academic and community-based partnerships and engagements, both in formal and de facto research networks. Their working relationship is guided by a shared professional and political commitment to the advancement of critical scholarship that is grounded in the aspirations of Indigenous people and communities.
Their approach reflects the ongoing need for analyses across disciplines that explore and critically engage with the diversity of Indigenous communities and movements, and/or that deconstruct the colonial, heteronormative, and capitalist contexts in which they exist. Their practice also recognizes the crucial importance of encouraging and mobilizing knowledge generated across different locations, positionalities and subjectivities. They are committed to foregrounding Indigenous theories and empirical work that decentre colonialism and that center Indigenous knowledge, pedagogy, and methods.
Gina Starblanket (Cree and Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4 territory) is an associate professor in Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria and is the former Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Decolonization at the University of Calgary. Gina is Cree and Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4. Her research takes up Indigenous-settler political relations in Canada, the politics of treaty implementation, prairie Indigenous philosophy, gender, and Indigenous feminism. She is the author of important interventions theorizing relational responsibilities to the land, co-author of the award-winning book, Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial (ARP Press, 2020), and co-editor of the 5th edition of Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is also the editor of 3rd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminisms. (Fernwood Press, forthcoming 2023).
Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) is an associate professor in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria and is the director of the Centre for Indigenous Research and Community-Led Engagement (CIRCLE). She has a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include Indigenous law and governance, Treaty rights and Indigenous politics in the United States and Canada. Focused on both Anishinaabe and US/CA law, her recent work explores the criminalization of Indigenous sovereignty, conditions of consent, and gendered violence. She is the co-editor of Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation with Aimée Craft and Hōkūlani K. Aikau (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories with Jill Doerfler and Niigaanwewidam Sinclair (University of Manitoba Press, 2013) and is the co-author of the 3rd and 4th editions of American Indian Politics and the American Political System with David E. Wilkins (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). She has published articles in journals such as Theory and Event, American Indian Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Michigan State University Law Review. Stark is the co-PI, with Dayna Scott (York), of a SSHRC Partnership Grant project titled “Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism: Material Approaches to Restoring Indigenous Jurisdiction,” a 6-year, $2.4M award to enable collective work to restore Indigenous Jurisdiction with partner institutions, critical scholars, Indigenous communities and land defenders. She is also the PI of a SSHRC Insight grant project titled “Anishinaabe Inaakonigewin” which expands on her existing work with Anishinaabe communities engaged in the revitalization of Anishinaabe law and governance, with a focus on land, water, treaty rights, and child welfare.